Nats Park is pretty dead these days unless the Phillies are in town and it becomes Citizens Bank South. But man, it is a party compared to Loan Depot Park, which has to be the most depressing environment in the majors (at least the A’s and Rays in their minor league rental homes have some intimacy with the fans). Even with the Nats winning the first two games of the series with some offensive outbursts, watching these games has felt like a slog.

I can only imagine how bad it is to play in them, although at least this stadium has the air conditioning that their previous home did not. Still, you have to play the games, and the focus has waned thus far in each day of the series. This team still needs to get better at maintaining their mental edge for more than four days in a row.

This time it was another day, another shabingus of a defensive inning from the Nationals, this time in the bottom of the sixth immediately after tacking on two runs to a 1-0 pitcher’s duel lead. CJ Abrams - who earlier had whiffed on a relay throw from center field that Josh Bell had to slide over and stop between the mound and home plate - started the inning by booting a ground ball. That was immediately followed by two hard singles, the second of which Dylan Crews (of all people) muffed on the transfer, allowing the trail runner to scamper to third. THEN Luis García Jr. appeared to swipe tag Jakob Marzee before throwing away the attempt at a double play, except first base ump Laz Díaz overruled his own second base ump in the moment and called Marzee safe (the Nationals challenged that ruling and lost). That Díaz #umpshow got both Miguel Cairo and Jake Irvin ejected, and then the Marlins promptly scored two more against PJ Poulin. The circus ruined what had been a good start for Irvin for maybe the first time since his Minnesota homecoming.

And then the bullpen began looking like the bullpen of April and May, and the seedy bus stop billboard law firm of Poche, Sims, and López. It was ultimately Jackson Rutledge, who had pitched so well for the past couple of weeks, who ultimately let go of the rope, surrendering a towering Xavier Edwards three-run shot just over the glove of Dylan Crews (who timed his leap perfectly - hey, when “Smooth Operator” says it about your outfield defense, it’s true) to make the score 8-3 in the eighth. The rest, with CJ Abrams and James Wood held to 1-for-8 with five strikeouts, was a mere formality. Robert Hassell III got jobbed on a called strike three for the second time to end the game, as Brian Westerbrook had no better a game than Díaz (let us hope that the arrival of the challenge system next year spells the end for Díaz, the worst crew chief in the sport).

I do not believe that a Luis García Jr./CJ Abrams middle infield can be a foundational piece of a winning team, certainly not in Washington. The lack of consistent mental preparation day in and day out shows up in their below-average defense (García Jr. is just 25 but already has next to no range due to his horrible first step, and the über-athletic Abrams has been a bad-to-really-bad shortstop for his entire career. The lack of preparation and over-reliance on physical gifts also shows up in García Jr.’s refusal to walk - his 107 career free passes would be the worst full season of Juan Soto’s entire career - and in Abrams’s all-too-frequent nights where he tries to yank every curve on the outer edge for a five-run homer.

What I would like to see the Nats do is get Christian Franklin up here for a couple of weeks to see if he can be the Deluxe Alex Call that his professional track record shows he can be. If it looks like that is in the cards, the temporary 2026 solution should be to live with Nasim Nuñez’s bat in order to have his glove at short over Abrams (who can move across the infield). It might take a DFA of García Jr., but he’s been effectively a replacement-level player across five of his (parts of) six seasons in the majors, and it would mean moving on from Jacob Young, because the offense could not survive Young AND Nuñez as regulars.

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