April 20, 2026 [LINK / comment]
Nats eke out a win back home
The Washington Nationals seem to have improved this year, at least as far as batting goes, but so far they just aren't winning as many games at home. After an uplifting 5-2 road trip through Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, they lost the first two games against the Giants in Nationals Park. On Friday night, Zach Littell gave up 6 runs in the 2nd inning, but he was allowed to pitch through the 4th inning, when he gave up 2 more. James Wood homered in the 7th inning, but it didn't affect the outcome. Giants 10, Nats 5. On Saturday, Wood hit hit his 6th of the year, and the Nats tacked on 4 more in the 2nd, but the Giants clawed their way back, and were on the verge of a win in the bottom of the 9th when Brady House hit an RBI single. Curtis Mead was thrown out at 3rd on that play because he didn't slide, for some reason. In the 10th inning the Nats loaded the bases with nobody out, and somehow failed to score. Two unforgivable miscues combined to allow the Giants to prevail 7-6 in 12 innings.
On Sunday, Miles Mikolas did not actually start the game in which he was supposedly the "starting" pitcher, for the third time this season. P.J. Poulin got through two outs in the first inning, and then Mikolas took the mound. Does he have some kind of jitters peculiar to starting pitchers? Be that as it may, he actually had a solid outing for the first time, getting through four full innings before Andrew Alvarez came in to relieve him. The Nats scored on a clutch RBI single by Keibert Ruiz in the 5th inning, followed immediately by a home run by Curtis Mead to make the score 3-0. (He thereby atoned for his "sin" of the previous day, some said.) Alvarez finished the final four innings, getting the win but not the save, which he would have if he had not been the winning pitcher. Overall, the Nats are now 8-5 on the road and 2-7 at home.
Tonight the Nationals welcome the first-place Atlanta Braves to town. The Nats are currently 5 games behind first place, so even if they somehow sweep the Braves in the four-game series, they will still be in second place.
Fenway Park, etc. page fixups
I did some "spring cleaning" with two of my baseball web pages: first, the Stadium statistics, which has updated seating capacity information, indicating the various cases where stadiums reduced their capacity in later years. (That is a growing trend these day, evident in Coors Field, Progressive Field, and elsewhere.) Second, Fenway Park has been reformatted and now includes some newer, bigger photos. In general, I am trying to make the overall format more consistent with other pages, and in the case of Fenway Park I added some larger-size photos. (I did likewise with Progressive Field a few days ago, and will keep up a steady pace on such revisions to other stadium pages in the months to come.) Another change worth mentioning: I am getting rid of the columns showing the "Overhang / shade %" because they are of relatively marginal use and based largely on crude "eyeballing" techniques.
Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, during a tour on September 5, 2016.