Nationals put on power show

WASHINGTON—Ryan Zimmerman’s line drive to right-centre kept going—and going and going—until it landed in the first row.
“I just thought it was a double,” the Washington Nationals’ third baseman admitted.

The way the Nationals are playing lately, everything seems to come with a bonus.
On a Fourth of July when the ball carried well, they took advantage of a morning start against a weary West Coast team and pounded Madison Bumgarner and the San Francisco Giants in a 9-4 victory yesterday.
“Another fun day for the skipper,” Washington manager Davey Johnson said.
“You’ve got to tip your hat to the offence.”
The Nationals have been carried to the top of the NL East by their pitching, but they put up a nine-spot on the Giants for the second-straight day and are averaging nearly seven runs in their last 10 games.
“There’s no way that this offence was going to be cold all year,” said starter Edwin Jackson.
“It was just a matter of time.”
Jackson (5-4) allowed three runs in another rough first inning—the kind of setback the Nationals had trouble overcoming early in the season.
But he settled down and gave up only one more run and lasted 5 1/3 innings in the midday heat.
Three relievers combined to shut down the Giants the rest of the way.
Zimmerman, meanwhile, has spearheaded the offence’s resurgence, batting .386 (17-for-44) since receiving a cortisone shot in his sore right shoulder on June 24.
He was in a 5-for-49 slump at the time, and the travails of the team’s No. 3 hitter were becoming a concern in a mostly positive season.
“I was playing banged-up for a while there,” he noted. “And when you try to play through things, sometimes it doesn’t allow you to do the things you’ve been doing and that leads to other things and other things.
“It’s definitely a lot better when you show up to the park and you feel healthy every day,” he remarked.
Zimmerman hopes he won’t need another shot this season. He’s certainly getting plenty of mileage out of this one.
He drilled a line drive his first time up—but it turned into an out when Bumgarner made a nice slide in the grass to retrieve and throw the ball after it hit the pitcher in the leg.
No one got in the way of Zimmerman his next two times up. His double peppered the left field wall—only a few inches from a home run—in a three-run third, then he and Michael Morse hit back-to-back opposite-field homers in a three-run fifth.
Zimmerman is now 10-for-20 with four homers and 13 RBIs in six Independence Day games.
Bumgarner (10-5) followed last week’s one-hit shutout of the Cincinnati Reds with one of his rockiest outings.
He was done after five-plus innings and gave up three home runs, matching a career high.
He allowed seven runs total—more than in his previous four starts combined.
Washington goes for the series sweep tonight. The Giants, meanwhile, have lost four of five and have allowed nine-plus runs in consecutive games for the first time since 2009.
At least, for the Giants, the final game of the series will be at night. Yesterday’s first pitch came at 11:08 a.m. so everyone could get home in time to celebrate the holiday, and it came after a Tuesday game that ended late because of a rain delay.
“You travel across the country and get acclimated to the time change, and then have to bounce back to play an early game like this. Sure it played a part,” said San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy.
“But it’s part of the schedule and you deal with it,” he stressed.
“Like I said, we did what we wanted to do by getting on the board early. We just couldn’t hold it.”
Elsewhere in the NL, Philadelphia dumped New York 9-2, Pittsburgh beat Houston 6-4, Miami nipped Milwaukee 7-6 (10 innings), Chicago upended Atlanta 5-1, St. Louis downed Colorado 4-1, L.A. trimmed Cincinnati 4-1, and San Diego topped Arizona 8-6.