Last Night in Fredericksburg

With all four runs coming with two outs, the Nationals doubled up the Hillcats in the opener, 4-2.

Jackson Rutledge got the start and was on fire early – retiring Lynchburg on nine pitches in the 1st with two whiffs and opening the second with a 3rd K before giving up a single and erasing it with a 6-4-3 DP. He was touching 99 with the heat while going back to the Carter administration with a changeup in the 79-80 range.

Meanwhile, Fredericksburg made the most of an infield-shift single as Steven Williams rolled a 75′ grounder to get on base, which Braden Fein cashed in with a 424′ blast to the deepest part of FredNats ballpark in the left-centerfield gap for an early 2-0 lead. An inning later, José Sánchez drew his team-leading 41st walk and scored ahead of Jeremy De La Rosa’s 12th double. Williams struck again with a single to right to give the F-Nats a 4-0 lead.

Alas, the long gaps after the two crooked innings affected Rutledge’s composure, as the 22-y.o. northpaw was noticeably less sharp and more deliberate. He went from 20 pitches after two frames to 60 after four and was lifted after taking 12 pitches to retire one of two batters in the 5th.

The 5th was also emblematic of the Nats’ preference for defense over offense, as backboard backstop Williams did his best imitation of Raudy Read, failing to get a glove on two stoppable balls that allowed both Hillcats runs to score on wild pitches. The blame was not all Williams’s, though, as Brendan Collins “helped” by giving up a single, balk, and a walk to put the two runners into scoring position.

Fredericksburg also made things closer than they should have been as Leandro Emiliani was thrown out easily trying to stretch a leadoff single into a double in the 5th and Juan Paulino was picked off third to end the 6th as he strayed too far from the base on a wild pitch that bounced straight up in the air.

While Collins pitched himself out of a win an ineffective single-and-two-walks in the space of four batters, Dustin Saenz worked around two singles to earn his first professional win.

In the nightcap, Michael Cuevas took the hill and continued his 2021 saga of pitching almost well enough to offset the bites of snakes and the miscues of his teammates. Case in point: a would-be, maybe double-play ball that Branden Boisserie fielded and threw to second… hitting the baserunner in the back of the head for an error.

Thus, instead of at least the lead runner being out and possibly two out, it was runners on first and second and nobody out for Cuevas, who, after getting a flyout, then gave up an RBI single to centerfield that was misplayed into runners on second and third. Lynchburg capitalized on the mess and drove in two more to put Fredericksburg into a 3-0 hole.

Fast-forward to the bottom of the 1st and Jacob Young leads off with a single to right, hesitates, then tries for two and gets gunned down. He overslid the base, such that even if the tag had been missed, he’d have been easy pickings for the infielder to make a second try and get him as Young laid an arms’ length away from the bag like suicidal fish out of water.

Cuevas calmed down and retired seven of the next eight batters before running into trouble in the 4th, as he loaded the bases with one out with the “help” of an error. He bore down and struck out the next two to escape the jam, then worked around his walk and Onix Vega’s error to make it through five innings on 85 pitches, 57 for strikes.

The two-out magic from Game One resurfaced in the 4th as the F-Nats got two doubles and two-run HR from Viandel Peña to tie things up at 3-3 after four.

Like the J6 rally in DC, it was a series of zeroes through the end of the 7th with Fredericksburg leaving on two and Lynchburg leaving on three. The Hillcats got the free runner over to third with one out but winning pitcher Lucas Knowles got the whiff and the popup to end the threat.

Young got his shot at redemption for Robles-esque basreunning in the 1st as the free runner in the 8th, as he took third on Darren Lewis’s sacrifice and beat the throw home on a grounder to second—despite a drawn-in infield—to give the F-Nats a 4-3 win and sweep the doubleheader.

The two teams finish the series and the season this afternoon. Rodney Theophile is scheduled to get the ball to start for Feredericksburg against Aaron Davenport for Lynchburg.