WASHINGTON -- For most of the season, Eury Pérez has looked like the kind of arm that can escape almost anything. On Friday night, the Marlins right-hander finally ran into a mess he couldn’t clean up.
Pérez unraveled in the third inning of Miami’s 9-2 loss to the Nationals, a stretch that started with eight straight balls and ended with five Washington runs, four walks, a wild play at the plate and Brady House’s 445-foot homer. By the time the inning ended, Pérez had thrown 41 of his 74 pitches, and his night was done after three innings.
“It was a long inning, fatigue levels were high,” Pérez said through an interpreter. “I was trying to stay in the game in that inning, looking for somehow a pause, so I can take a breather. ...
It was hard. After that, the manager took me out of the game, and he had all the reasons to do that.”
The outing was Pérez’s roughest since he returned from the injured list in late June with a strained thigh muscle. He still struck out five and gave up only two hits, but the command that had helped him post a 1.80 ERA across his previous 11 starts disappeared at the worst possible time. Even with that strong run, he had walked three or more in four of those outings.
Miami had a chance to make the third inning look manageable early. Pérez struck out Abimelec Ortiz on three pitches, then got a major assist from the ABS system when catcher Joe Mack won a challenge by millimeters to turn a full count into a called third strike on Dylan Crews.
That didn’t hold the inning together. Pérez threw a wild pitch to Daylen Lile, hesitated as he moved toward home, and Mack’s throw sailed above the 6-foot-8 pitcher as Andrés Chaparro slid in. Jacob Young also scored on the play, putting Washington ahead 2-1 after Mack’s hurried scoop throw bounced into the infield grass.
“I was confident that I was going to be able to get out of the inning,” Pérez said through an interpreter. “Pitching from the windup position, I think I feel a little bit better.
Then the wild pitch happened, and I had to throw from the stretch. And it made it a little more difficult for me to finish the inning there."
Pérez stayed in briefly after absorbing the collision on Chaparro’s slide, but the damage kept coming. He walked Lile, then left a 2-1 sinker up to House, who launched it into the top reaches of the picnic-porch seating in left-center.
“I think there's only so long in this league where you can dance around that number of free passes,” manager Clayton McCullough said. “The stuff at times to be able to get himself out of some of those jams. And he almost did tonight, but you put yourself in that spot often enough and it's going to come back to bite you.”
The loss snapped Miami’s run of success against Washington, as the Marlins fell to the Nationals for the first time in nine games. It also left them at 68-67, four games behind the Padres for the final National League Wild Card spot and three behind the Diamondbacks with 27 games left.
Jackson Kent, the Nationals’ No. 9 prospect per MLB Pipeline, earned his first career win by working seven innings of one-run ball. He allowed three hits and four walks, and McCullough said the rookie “kept us off the barrel” with ground balls, weak contact and a sharp mix of changeups and other pitches.
“I think he kept us off the barrel,” McCullough said. “A lot of ground balls, a lot of weak contact.
How he used the changeup and really mixed all of his stuff in. So, just all around, not a great night for us.”
Xavier Edwards provided Miami’s lone run with a single in the seventh.
Washington added four more in the bottom of that inning against Patrick Monteverde, and Heriberto Hernández answered with his 21st home run - his third in six games - off Max Kranick in the eighth.
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