The Washington Nationals had a exciting Thursday. In game one of their doubleheader against the St. Louis Cardinals they really struggled to score runs as the lost the game 4-1. In the night game they came out swinging the bats big time and took leads of 7-0 and 8-3 before falling behind 9-8 in the 10th inning. They rallied to win the game 10-9 in 10 innings. The split brought the Nationals to 25-36.
Game one saw John Lannan turn in a quality start. Lannan went six strong innings and gave up only two runs. However, he did walk four batters and failed to strike out a single batter. The loss drops Lannan to 4-6 on the year. Game two saw Tim Redding get tons of run support, it wasn’t enough however. Redding went 5.2 innings and gave up six runs before getting pulled in the middle of the sixth inning. Leading by two in the 9th inning the Nationals brought on Jon Rauch to close out the game. Rauch coughed up two runs to allow the Cardinals to tie things up. Brian Sanches came on in the 10th and gave up a solo home run that gave the the Cardinals a brief lead. Sanches was bailed out by the offense and picked up the victory in the process.
The Nationals fell behind 4-0 in game one and got their only run of the game in the eighth inning on a Felipe Lopez RBI single. Cristian Guzman helped lead the offense as he was the only player to pick up two hits on the game. Third baseman, Kory Casto had a hit but also walked twice. Game two featured a lot more offense for both clubs. Elijah Dukes was an absolute monster for the Nationals. Dukes got bumped up to the second spot in the line up and really responded. He collected four hits and four RBI as he had two singles, a triple and the game winning HR. With a man on in the tenth, Dukes crushed a two run homer off of Ryan Franklin to gave the Nationals the walk off win. Cristian Guzman also had four hits for the Nationals.
The Nationals will stay at home to start a weekend series with the San Francisco Giants. Jason Bergmann will start the game on Friday. Game time is 7:35pm.