Photo by Sol Tucker/Nats.Talk

The Washington Nationals were set to have their happiest flight home since 2019 with a win on Wednesday. Instead, they touched down at Dulles Airport at 2:02 AM and woke up to the fact that Wednesday night wasn’t an horrific nightmare — it actually happened.

For the Nats, Wednesday, was a baseball catastrophe that has only happened once before in the last 20 years, and a total of 3,090 games — and the Nats made it twice in 3,091 games. The Nats blew an 8-run lead after the 7th inning of a game. Now they have to hope starter Zack Littell and his Nats’ teammates can do what John Lannan and his teammates did on July 21, 2012, and win after the Nats blew a 9-0 lead and lost on July 20, 2012.

What manager Blake Butera learned is that no lead is really safe until after the win is recorded. There was a clue that the Giants weren’t waving the white flag on Wednesday because they didn’t remove any of their star players from their starting lineup when they were losing 9-1. But maybe Butera needed to remove some of his relievers quicker as the meltdown was starting to form at the surface. Never give another team too much hope.

As they say in sports, today is a new day, so what did Butera do in his pregame presser? Oh, he tried to say that this was a 1-game blip. He tried to sell it that Mitchell Parker was really just bad in that 1-game. Come on Blake, we have the stat book. We’ve been watching Parker’s five blown saves since May 9th, in a span of 10 appearances, and 70 percent of those games were BAD! Don’t BS us.

The Seattle Mariners have Bryce Miller on the mound tonight, and he returned from an injury a month ago and has made just four starts this season. He was terrible last year, and maybe having a fresh arm has helped him so far this year as he has had some good starts. Houston got him for two runs in his previous start en route to an Astros win. Miller is a finesse pitcher who doesn’t get many strikeouts and relies on his defense to make plays.

With yesterday’s day-off, here is Butera’s bullpen chart:

The FanGraphs WAR chart is accumulating data. The numbers are getting very large as the season is headed towards the halfway point on June 24. The OAA defense stat is now giving us a picture of what the Nats have — and don’t have.

Seattle Mariners vs. Washington Nationals

Stadium: Nationals Park, Washington, D.C.
1st Pitch: 6:45 PM EDT
TV: Nationals.TV
Radio: 106.7 The Fan radio and via the MLB app. On Sirius/XM, tune to Channel 176 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.