Last Night's Action: Home Run Derby

Phillies 5, Nationals 3: Everything was smooth sailing for John Lannan and the Nationals. Willie Harris and Cristian Guzman were hitting at the top of the order, the Nats capitalized on an error by Chase Utley, and Lannan retired 14 of 15 batters between the second and the sixth innings. Sadly, in the majors, they play a full nine, and the WFC brought their lumber come the seventh inning. After Ryan Howard grounded out to start the inning, three of the next four batters -- Jason Werth, Raul Ibanez, and Carlos Ruiz -- crushed solo home runs. Walking opposing pitcher Pedro Martinez (4-0) was just the icing on the cake for Lannan (8-11), all his fantastic ace-level work firmly erased on three bad pitches. Willie Harris pulled one back on -- what else? -- a solo home run in the bottom of the seventh, but Utley canceled that out with another longball for the Phils. Counting Ibanez's earlier dinger, Philadelphia scored all five of their runs on solo home runs -- fitting for a team who is now only the 12th team in major league history to feature four batters (Werth, Howard, Utley, and Ibanez) with over 30 home runs in a season. As far as the Nationals go, the game is pretty much a fair assessment of the team as a whole. There's about two-thirds of a moderately decent, even at times good, baseball team in there -- it's just a matter of finding that other third that's the really elusive part.