Photo by Intrepid/Nats.Talk

All teams have historic meltdowns on their books. The Washington Nationals might have had an all-timer today as they gave up 10 runs against only 3 outs recorded in the final two innings to lose 11-10 in San Francisco. When the Giants walked-off on a grand slam, there were zero outs in the 9th inning.

Rewind to when the score was 9-1 in the seventh inning, Nats’ TV play-by-play voice, Dan Kolko, declared the game a “laugher.” Well, who’s laughing now? They are never laughers until you are celebrating a win after the final out. A lesson in baseball and life is to never count your chickens until they’re hatched.

So how will the Nats handle this crushing loss? That’s the real lesson for this young team is how they handle the loss. There is a team day-off tomorrow, and the team has the Seattle Mariners in for the weekend. But this also goes back to the roster and whether this is the right team needed at this point in time. Back on May 18, we wondered if President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, would tweak his roster.

As we said a month ago, some baseball executives feel that ❝If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.❞  For those who are wondering if the Washington Nationals would make any roster moves to improve, they haven’t done much of that. The good news is the Nats won the series in San Francisco — they just didn’t sweep the series today. The other good news is that the Nats offense put up 10 runs. The bad news is that the Nats’ bullpen gave up 10 runs on top of the one run that starter, Foster Griffin, gave up in his 6.0 excellent innings of work.

A month ago, Toboni appeared on the radio and discussed that the team at the time had blown some very winnable games.  ❝We could be 4-or-5 games above .500 right now,❞ said Toboni in that interview. Now that is probably 8-or-9 games they should be over .500.

Here’s the thing, some change can be positive. It signals to the rest of the team that you care enough to make improvements. Even with the offense humming, there are some position players who are not contributing enough. And it’s clear where the weak links are in the bullpen.

This was a similar loss to the 11-10 game on July 20, 2012 when the Nats were winning 9-0 and lost that game by the same final score. The next day the Nats had a doubleheader and lost the first game 4-0, and there felt like panic. But the next game, the team brought up starter John Lannan and he righted the ship. The team never really looked back on the way to winning the NL East. That embarrassing loss in 2012 was just a footnote in a 98-win regular season for the Nationals, a record for the franchise.

That 2012 team was a young Nats squad also, with a few veterans like Jayson Werth and Adam LaRoche. So how will this 2026 team handle the adversity?

That was well said by Butera. Maybe he learned a lesson that no lead is ever really big enough. You never want to give the other team an opening. And the Giants were given hope. Again, it’s how you deal with it, and we will see if they are indeed “ready to go on Friday.”