Washington Nationals news & notes: Nats come back again, beat Reds, 5-4; MacKenzie Gore struggles again + more:

Notes and quotes on the Nationals’ second straight win over the Reds…

GORE AGAIN:

“I’m capable of doing much better than what I just put together in the first half,” MacKenzie Gore said, as quoted by MASN’s Bobby Blanco of his 19-start first-half, which he finished with a 4.01 ERA, a 3.08 FIP, 37 walks (3.38 BB/9), 116 Ks (10.58 K/9), and a .268/.341/.387 line against in 98 2⁄3 IP.

“His stuff is electric,” Nationals’ manager Davey Martinez said when he too was asked about Gore’s pre-All-Star Game outings.

“He’s still learning. We’ve got to get him to understand, that hey, four pitches or less to each at-bat and he’s going to be just fine.

“He’s got to figure out a way how to get that put-away pitch. He gets deep in counts with guys and then he puts them away, but we’ve got to get him to get it done early.”

It didn’t happen in start No. 20. Gore threw 48 pitches to seven Cincinnati Reds’ hitter in the opening frame of last night’s game, giving up two walks to first two batters he faced, an RBI single, one-out walk, and a sac fly, which out Washington behind early, again, and though in the end, they completed their 26th comeback of the season, the Nationals had to do it with the bullpen in from the third inning on.

Gore added 19 pitches in the second, for 67 total, with a two-out walk, RBI double, and then finally a groundout which ended the inning.

Martinez decided that was enough.

“Today was just — today he was very rotational,” Martinez said, explaining “rotational” was a way of saying “flying open”, “and we noticed it really early. He had 68 pitches in two innings.

“I wasn’t going to send him back out there.”

He even considered going to get Gore in the first.

“I can tell you right now, he don’t get that [last] hitter out, he was out,” Martinez said after a 5-4 win over the Reds.

”We had a long inning hitting-wise, we let him try to get back out there. We thought if he finishes in 10-15 pitches, we’ll see how it goes, but it was just too long.”

That didn’t keep Gore from arguing with his manager when they discussed it in the Nats’ dugout.

“I can tell you something about MacKenzie — he — I don’t know if you saw us in the dugout,” Martinez said, “but he wanted to stay in the game. And I love that about him, but I got to be smart about it.”

The next step is to evaluate what’s going wrong, and fix it, Gore’s gone from a 3.47 ERA on the year on July 4th, to a 4.20 ERA after last night’s game. Martinez and Gore both said the club knows what’s wrong.

“He was very rotational,” Martinez reiterated at another point in his post game presser.

“A lot of arm-side misses. So we’ll get him back squared away. I mean, like I said before, he’s a future All-Star, so we’re going to work with him, we’re going to get him right. I know he’s a little frustrated right now. He’s going to beat himself up. He’s going to talk to you and say all the things, but we’ll get him right.”

“We’re going to figure this out,” Gore said in his own post game scrum. “We know what the problem is. I’m going to stop talking about it, and I’m going to figure out a way, whenever I pitch again, I’m going to figure out a way to be better.”

Gore summed things up succinctly, “I was bad.”

Photo by Jess Rapfogel/Getty Images

“I didn’t have that strike pitch to get back in counts, and I think that kind of has been the problem the last six starts,” he said.

“It’s getting where I’m 2-0, 3-0, instead of 1-1 and 1-2, and it’s been ugly. I’m not getting hit, I’m just walking a lot of people.

“So we got to figure out how to clean that up, and we’re going to, but yeah, this one’s a frustrating one after these few before this, so…”

COMEBACK NO. 26:

It was 2-0 a half-inning into the second of three with the Reds in D.C., but the Nationals got two in the bottom of the first, on a two-run home run by Harold Ramírez (No. 2), before the visitors added a run in the third and another in the fourth, then the home team scored their third run on an RBI single by CJ Abrams in the fourth, as he hustled to first to beat out a soft ground ball to the first baseman (Jeimer Candelario) on which Reds’ pitcher Nick Lodolo did not get to the bag in time, 4-3.

An RBI double by Lane Thomas tied it up at 4-4 in the seventh, then Jacob Young hit a first-pitch cutter in on the hands from reliever Justin Wilson to left field for the go-ahead hit, 5-4.

“We knew Wilson was going to try to throw the ball up,” Martinez said of the scouting report going into the at-bat by Young.

“We told all of our hitters, ‘Hey, we got to stay on top of the baseball. Don’t try to do too much.’

Young was ready for the cutter he got up and in.

“Perfect swing,” Martinez said. “He had a really good swing. Stayed on top, hit a nice, low line drive one-hopper, it was beautiful.”

Once Gore was down, Jordan Weems (1 ER/1 IP), Robert Garcia (0 ER/1 IP), Dylan Floro (0 ER/2 IP), Derek Law (0 ER/2 IP), and Kyle Finnegan (0 ER/1 IP/S) took the mound and kept things close before the offense came through.

“The boys are going to play hard for 27 outs, they’re not going to give up,” Martinez said.

“We stayed pretty close in the game, and I think that they really felt that they had a chance to win this game, so the bullpen was nails. They came in really good. They gave us what we needed. Finnegan shuts the door down. The way the whole game played out — I can go back to CJ hustling out a single there to get a run right there. That was awesome. If we can play with that intensity every day, good things are going to happen.

“Big hit by Jacob obviously, but the way the boys handled themselves today was great.”