Washington Nationals News: Morales and Simpson Take Down the Braves 9-5

The best Washington Nationals news of the season so far came from two names most of the country could not have picked out of a lineup card Tuesday morning. Yohandy Morales put up three hits with a home run, Jared Simpson threw three perfect innings out of the bullpen and walked off with the win, and Washington beat Atlanta 9-5 on Tuesday night.

Nine runs. From a roster that just got its September reinforcements out of the minors and handed them real innings in a real game.

Start with Simpson, because relief lines like that do not happen by accident. Three innings, nobody reached. Not a hit, not a walk, not a hit batsman, no defensive miracle needed to bail out a bad pitch, because there apparently were not any. A young arm gets called up in September and the usual script is one clean inning in a blowout to see how the heart rate holds. He got three and never gave the Braves a baserunner. That is the kind of outing a pitcher remembers in his sixties.

Morales did the loud half. Three hits, one of them over the fence, in a game where Washington needed the runs to hold off an Atlanta club that got to five and could not close the gap. A three-hit night with a homer is a good night for a veteran. For a kid whose name the PA announcer is still getting used to, it is the kind of thing that buys a whole month of at-bats.

Checked the almanac: September used to mean a 40-man free-for-all, whole bullpens rotating through in the eighth, teams carrying twenty pitchers just because they could. Since 2020 the clubs get 28. Fewer call-ups, more meaningful innings for the ones who make it. Nights like Tuesday are the entire argument for that rule.

The two clubs finish the series in Washington on Wednesday afternoon at 1:06 ET. What I want to see is whether the Nationals stay stubborn about it: keep running the kids out there against a Braves lineup that will not be in a charitable mood after Tuesday. September baseball for a team out of the race is a scouting report you write with your own eyes. Washington got two good pages of it in one night.