Washington Nationals’ lineup for 1st of 2 with Baltimore Orioles

Davey Martinez’s club beat Milwaukee in the first two games of their recently-completed homestand in Washington, D.C.’s Nationals Park, but they dropped eight-straight after that before avoiding a five-game sweep with a win in the series finale with Philadelphia.

A 3-8 homestand left the Nats 12-26 in the nation’s capital this season. Their struggling offense put up nine runs in beating the Phillies, and the win came before a much-needed off day for the manager and his club.

“I can’t wait for the day off tomorrow, and we move on to Baltimore,” Martinez said in his post game press conference on Sunday. “But it was a tough homestand. And even though today Jackson [Tetreault] did well, it’s still — we got to start limiting mistakes. We’re beating ourselves up every day. We’re making things hard for ourselves. Today we swung the bats, which is great.”

There were some of the same mistakes which have cost them in previous losses, but they put up enough runs to be able to overcome them on Sunday.

“We just got to continue to keep playing baseball,” Martinez added, “and keep learning, go out there and try to limit our mistakes.”

As usual, the relentlessly positive fifth-year skipper found things he liked, which he highlighted after the win.

“I was proud of Luis [García] today,” he said. “He played good defensively. He can hit, we all know that. He stayed on the ball today, hit the ball the other way. We need him to get better on the field. We need all these guys to — like I said, defense is important, baserunning is important, pitching is important, but we’ve got to catch the ball behind our guys, that’s the number one thing. So if we can do that, and we can continue to get these guys to throw strikes like [Tetreault did] we’ll really start having some fun. Because I think our offense is — they’re going to score runs. We had some days where we scored 4-5 runs, and just one little thing happens out in the field and things blow up. If we can limit our mistakes, at the end of the game we’ll probably be on top, but it was a good day for us. Good game, good victory, love it, guys played hard. So, I’m looking forward to a day off, so are they.”

They’re back at it tonight though…

HERE’S THE NATIONALS’ LINEUP FOR THE FIRST OF TWO WITH THE ORIOLES: