Well, while the Nationals may be playing in Baltimore this weekend, heading to Walters is still a great idea.

The Tokyo Olympics are finally here, and Walters is a great spot to catch all the action,

whether you're into gymnastics or swimming, track and field.

Walters has enough TVs to watch everything and anything your heart desires.

And now hand of the belt.

The kick in the pitch. Swinging a fly ball hit to deep center. Stevenson going back. He's going to have a play. He'll make the catch. Runters will tag. Here comes Bertie from third down the line to score. And El Farrell will go to third of the second out of the inning. It's a sacrifice flying a run batted in.

For Miguel Rojas, it's his 27th RBI of the year. The Marlins now lead by the score of three to one.

And welcome to Nat chat for Thursday, July 22nd, 2021, along with Nationals Insider, Mark Zuckerman of Massinsports.com.

I'm Al Galdi, host of the Al Galdi podcast. Well, it doesn't happen often these days, but it did happen on Wednesday night. The Nationals barely scored. The Nationals had a hard time scoring. This was almost like a game from back, you know, in the good old days of May when the Nats' offense struggled, a 3-1-10 inning loss to the Miami Marlins. So the Nats are denied the three-game sweep. Nats fall to 45 and 50 on the season and are back to being six games behind the

National League East leading New York Mets who did win at the Cincinnati Red 7-0 on Wednesday.

Look, you win the series, so it's hard to complain too much about this. It was,

though, disappointing to see the Nats only score the one run. And Mark, it was such a frustrating

night offensively. Four double plays hit by the Nats, 0 for seven, with runners in scoring position.

Again, it was a game reminiscent of the way things had been for the Nats offensively in the

earlier portion of the season.

It felt exactly like that, Alan. You know, I agree in the bigger picture. Hey, you took two out of three from the Marlins. That's what you're supposed to do. But that's a game that's right there for the taking. I mean, you got great pitching from Eric Feddy. You got great work from the bullpen up until the 10th inning. all you got to do is push one run across and you're going to win the game two to one and they just could not do it. Josh Bell had opportunities, struck out with the runner and scoring position in the first, flied out with the runner and scoring position in the eighth. Like you said, the double plays, Turner, two of them, Soto won, Bell one, for whatever reason. It just didn't happen for them at the plate in this game. And, you know, it's one game, so you're not going to complain about it too much. But boy, you know, you get to the end of the season and they miss out by one game. Here's one you can look back on and say they were this close to winning it. Yeah, the double plays really stand out. We've talked about this before, but Juan Soto hitting all of his double plays,

hitting into all of his double plays, hits into another one on Wednesday night to end the bottom of the third. The real mystery, though, is Trey Turner. Two double plays in this game, one in the bottom of the first, one to end the bottom of the fifth. I mean, you know a guy guy that fast, a guy that good of a hitter, it shouldn't be that way. I know some of this is flukish. And I don't know if there's anything you can really do to avoid hitting into double plays. I mean, some of it is just kind of the variance of the batted ball. But like of all the guys on the Nats to have a double play problem this season, he's certainly not one of like the leading contenders going into the season. And yet if there's like a knit to pick with Trey offensively this year, it is all of these double plays. He's got 13 of them. And Soto leads the majors with 16, but Turner's pretty close behind. He's like maybe fourth in the majors with 13. And I know people always surprised when they see that because they say,

boy, this isn't a guy who should be hitting a lot of double plays, but he does. I think some of it is he hits the ball hard. You hit soft grounders. It's hard to double them up. But I don't care how fast you are. You hit a rocket right at the shortstop or second baseman. They're going to turn two on you. it doesn't matter how good you are getting down the line.

So in some ways, I think it's evidence of how consistently hard he hits the ball.

You know, maybe you'd like him to elevate it a little bit more like we've talked about with Soto all along. But again, big picture, you really can't

complain much about what Trey Turner is doing for you offensively. And if you look at historically,

the players who lead the league in double plays, they're usually the best players. It's like for a long time, Cal Ripkin had the all-time record, I think, for double plays hit into. You're playing a lot. You're coming up with runners on base. You're putting the ball in play. You know, more often not you are going to get the hits, but a lot of times you're just going to hit the ball hard and hit it right at somebody, and this is what ends up happening.

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