Washington Nationals news & notes: Nats' bats break through late in 9-3 win over Blue Jays...

OFFENSIVE WOES ... THEN LUIS GARCÍA, JR.:

Joey Meneses went 4 for 30 (.133/.133/.167) with a double and five Ks on the Nationals’ seven-game road trip to Miami and Texas.

Jesse Winker went 4 for 27 (.148/.233/.259), hitting one home run, and taking three walks while striking out eight times in 30 plate appearances.

Keibert Ruiz started 5 of the 7 games, and went 2 for 18 (.111/.200/.278), hitting a home run, taking a walk, and striking out three times.

Eddie Rosario went 0 for 14 with a walk and five Ks in five games (four starts) on the trip, and he was mired in a prolonged 0 for 30 slump in the last 10 games.

Davey Martinez’s club scored 33 runs in a four-game sweep of the Marlins, but scored just two runs in three games against the Rangers, dropping 2 of 3 in Arlington, TX.

Martinez reiterated his support for Rosario again following Thursday’s 6-0 loss in the series finale in Texas, after talking about getting the veteran outfielder going earlier in the trip. He said Rosario is well aware his manager believes he’ll turn things around and start hitting like the player who put up a .255/.305/.450 line, 24 doubles, and 21 home runs last year with the Atlanta Braves.

“I’ve talked to him plenty. He understands how I feel about him,” Martinez explained, “... and like I said, watching him over the years and what he can do, when this guy get going he’s going to help us win games, and I hope that day is today. He’s going to get a chance to play against right-handed pitching, he really hits them really well, so hopefully today he breaks out of it.”

Rosario went 0 for 2 with two Ks in the third of three with the Rangers, but he wasn’t alone in struggling against Nathan Eovaldi and the home team’s relievers.

“We got to start hitting the ball up the middle,” Martinez said when asked about the offense struggling overall in the series, repeating his offensive mantra.

“If our lineup is going to start getting going a little bit, we got to start getting some stuff going. We get guys on base and can’t put 3-4 hits together, so we got to get going, but other than that, we had a good road trip, we really did. Get back home now and try to go 1-0 tomorrow.”

Talking about what they could do to turn things around is one thing, of course. Going to the plate and doing it isn’t easy.

“If you think hitting is easy, you’re really mistaken about this game, because it’s not,” he told reporters before the flight home to the nation’s capital.

“So we just got to keep going, keep grinding. These guys are working hard, I know they are, so we’re going to keep grinding and like I said, come back today and go 1-0 tomorrow.”

Having multiple hitters in the middle of the lineup slumping at once is a recipe for disaster on the offensive end, so the Nationals need some, or, preferably, all the hitters highlighted above to figure things out.

“We’ve got some guys that are pressing a little bit,” Martinez acknowledged. “They want to try to get out of it with just one swing. They’ve just got to be patient, and like I said, try to stay in the middle of the field and hit the ball hard. Like I said, get the ball in the strike zone and just try to stay in the middle of the field. We can’t try to do too much.”

In spite of the concerning lack of production from some of the hitters, the Nationals did win 5 of 7 games on the trip, so some things went well for the club.

“We got to start — the middle of our lineup has got to start driving in some runs for us, but overall,” Martinez said, “I thought we played really good defense, our pitching was really good this road trip, those are a lot of the positives — ran the bases really well, so like I said, we’ll get our offense going, we’ll be fine.”

The offense produced just one run through six innings in the series opener with the Toronto Blue Jays last night, however, and the Nationals were down 3-1 in the nation’s capital before Luis García, Jr. stepped up as a pinch hitter with two on and two out in the home-half of the seventh inning and hit a three-run shot to center on the first pitch he saw, matching the run-total from the previous 33 innings in one swing, 4-3 Nats.

Nick Senzel doubled to drive in a run later in the inning, and the home team added four in a four-run bottom of the eighth as the offense busted out for eight runs in two innings in a 9-3 win.