The Washington Nationals had to go 11 innings to win this game by a final score of 8-5. Jorbit Vivas was the offensive hero — but he was also the problem as he had an untimely error that cost the Nats two unearned runs earlier in the game. If not for that, the Nats win 3-1 without the need for extra innings.

In this game, Vivas had four hits with an RBI and a run scored. There were other big hits with the early 2-run homer from Daylen Lile, and the 2-run hustle double by Jose Tena in the 11th inning.

In that 11th inning, the Nationals scored four runs. They had bases loaded with no outs when Jacob Young was looking at a 2-2 count on a swing, and he immediately signaled that the catcher interfered with his swing. The Nats challenged and won. That scored the first of the four runs in that inning. Tena knocked in two, and Dylan Crews was robbed by a Cardinals outfielder who made a diving catch in the gap. Has anyone hit into more bad luck than Crews?

Defense was a problem for the Nats with four errors in this game — but defense was also great by Crews who caught a ball at the wall, and a huge extra innings play when he threw a runner out at second base.

With this win, the Nats clinch this series, and notch win No. 73. That also means the Nats won’t lose 90 or more games. And this is over an 11.2 percent improvement from last year’s 66 wins with seven games to go in the season.

The four errors and the ghost runner in extra innings meant that the Nats bullpen in their 5.0 innings of work only gave up one earned run. But, the Nats were collared with two blown saves that brought them to 41 on the season which is a continuation of the Nats unwanted record.

This once again showed that not all blown saves are the type that says the bullpen was awful — at least on this night. If anything, the bullpen was really good. Even Butera talked about a ball hitting a base, the defensive woes, and just some bad luck.

This game was started by Andrew Alvarez who threw 6.0 scoreless innings on 92 pitches. His final line looked great with only giving up five hits, 1 walk, and eight strikeouts. He pushed his ERA down to 3.17. That ranks Alvarez 26th best for ERA in all of baseball (min. 100 IP).

The winning pitcher was Riley Cornelio, and Will Dion got the save and stranded the bases loaded in the 11th inning. Dion only had to throw two pitches. Credit to Yovanny Cruz out of the bullpen for not allowing a run to score with the game on the line. Jack Sinclair covered 1 1/3 innings in regulation and held the 3-2 lead. Erik Tolman ran into the bad luck pitching to contact and got the first blown save.

There was an issue that we observed during the game that James Wood didn’t run a Hard-90 on a grounder that was booted by the second baseman and he rushed a bad throw. If Wood was running hard, he would have been safe. Butera said that part of the reason he pulled Wood from the game was due to that issue. Wood has oftentimes not run a Hard-90 and earlier this week was thrown out at home when he assumed the shortstop was going to throw to another base in that Angels series.

Tomorrow afternoon, the Nats wrap up this 3-game series and will go for a sweep. After the game, the team flies to Detroit for a 3-game series.

Photo by Sol Tucker for Nats.Talk