On a night when Rendon was a late scratch due to a sore shoulder from his HBP yesterday, his current team played his old team. The Nationals are in the middle of post-Harper/Rendon/Soto rebuild, so this should be an easy win, right? RIGHT?!
Jose Suarez vs. Patrick Corbin seemed like a pitching matchup between two inconsistent pitchers who can be very good at times, so there was no telling which way this one would go. The first inning gave some instant hope when Luis Rengifo drove in Trout and Renfroe with a line drive single. 2-0 Angels.
The Nats got one run back in the second inning on a CJ Abrams RBI single, but in the 3rd Renfroe launched a homer to center to extend his homer streak to 3 straight games and extend the lead to 3-1.
Urshela followed that up a few batters later with an RBI double down the left field line to bring in Rengifo and give us a 4-1 lead.
Things were looking great, but the wheels began to fall off in the top of the 4th. Rengifo picked up a ground ball that would’ve scored a run, but then had a bad throw past the first baseman allowing the runners to both move into scoring position.
And score they did on a Jeimer Candelario 2 RBI single. Suddenly we were tied at 4.
The 5th inning saw Tucker Davidson come into a tie game, but his 3 innings resulted in 4 hits and two runs on softly hit singles and run-scoring ground-outs. Scoreless innings from Herget and Moore kept things close at 6-4, but the Angels were hitless and scoreless for 4 innings of Washington’s bullpen, culminating in Mike Trout striking out to end the game. Even though the Angels had 9 of the 10 hardest-hit balls in the game they went down 6-4, making that 2 straight losses. Bummer! Shohei pitching tomorrow, so hopefully, the losing streak stops at 2.
