Table of Content

  • Sanchez and Scherzer: a pair of historic performances

    Nov. 1, 2020: Twice in MLB playoff history, a team has had two of its pitchers carry no-hitters into the sixth innings or later in back-to-back games. The two teams were different – the Detroit Tigers in 2013 and the Washington Nationals in 2019 – but the two pitchers were the same: Anibal Sanchez and… Read more

  • Stevenson’s outside- and inside-the-park homers

    When Andrew Stevenson’s fly ball got past the Mets left fielder in the first game of the Sept. 26, 2020, double-header, the result was an inside-the-park home run, the least common hit in modern baseball. What made Stevenson’s race around the bases even more unusual was what had happened in his previous at-bat: He had… Read more

  • Four homers in a row? The Nationals have done it twice

    Sept. 3, 2020: After it happened for the first time ever in 1961 and then again in 1963 and 1964, no team would hit four consecutive home runs for another 42 years. Then in 2006, the Dodgers began what has become part of an overall homer barrage that has included back-to-back-to-back-to-back clouts six times. Until… Read more

  • Soto’s Citi Field blasts and a look at long homers

    Aug. 13, 2020: Two days after Juan Soto hit a 463-foot homer to dead center at New York’s Citi Field, the Nationals young slugger topped that with 466-foot blast to right against the Mets, one of two he hit in an 11-6 loss on Aug. 12. Soto’s blast, the third longest hit at Citi Field… Read more

  • TV’s ‘Home Run Derby’ was heavy on the Senators

    July 1, 2020: Home Run Derby, which I watched in reruns in the early 1960s, was a syndicated TV show originally broadcast from January to July in 1960, with half-hour segments filmed in 1959 at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. The show gave MLB’s top slugger’s three outs each for nine innings to see which… Read more

  • 15 years in, here’s where the Nationals stood

    June 13, 2020 (updated, May 2021): The 2019 World Series victory was the triumphant culmination of the Nationals’ 15th season since Major League Baseball returned to the Nation’s Capital in 2005. In eight of those full seasons, all of them in a row since 2012, the Nats finished with a winning record, but it took… Read more