

Danny Espinosa scores at home Friday night. (By Nick Wass / AP)

Remember Friday night, when Danny Espinosa broke for home on a cleanly fielded bunt, with no outs and the top of the order coming up, with the score tied? This was aggressive base-running at its finest, a clever way of pressing the issue, the athletic Nats forcing a visiting opponent to make a defensive play. The Pirates threw the ball to first and then home without managing to record an out, the Nats took their first lead of the night, and the inning turned into a four-run jubilee.

“That changed the game,” teammate Stephen Drew said of Espinosa’s dash. “It changed the game, just right away. He got a good read, and right after that, the floodgates opened. It’s just something that we try to do. It’s a hard league, and anytime you can get that extra 90 feet is huge.”

Now remember Sunday night, when Trea Turner broke for second on a cleanly fielded single, with no outs and the top of the order coming up, with the score tied? How should we regard that play? Let’s scan the online responses:

“Rookie mistake,” “dumb,” “rocks for brains,” “stupid,” “gaffe,” “blunder,” “egregious error,” “minor league base running,” “the TOOTBLANiest TOOTBLAN of all time.” (A few other choice descriptions didn’t make it past our censors.) Surely no smart baseball man could defend an incomprehensible decision such as that, right?

“I was okay with it,” Mike Rizzo said after the Nationals lost in 18 innings, one frame after Turner was thrown out at second. “It’s one of those plays where if you make it, you’re a hero, and if you’re out, you’re a goat. But we built this team on being aggressive. We’ve been doing that all year.”

A GM defending his rookie after a tough outcome? Maybe that’s all it was. You could point out that Turner hesitated before breaking for second. You could argue that he would have been better off staying at first and just trying to steal the base. You could say that a rookie can’t take the bat out of Bryce Harper’s hands (he was due up fourth that inning.) Or you could listen to Clint Robinson talk about the message Dusty Baker has delivered to his club again and again this season.

“He says, ‘Hey I want you guys to be aggressive. You guys are athletic. I want you guys to go; I want you to trust your instincts; I want you to be baseball players,'” Robinson said. “‘Go be aggressive; go be baseball players. You make a good read, go.’ It’s all the time, any time he talks to us.”

Robinson went Friday night, going from second to third on a no-outs pitch in the dirt just moments after Espinosa’s sprint home. A perfect throw might have gotten him. Instead, the ball went into left field and Robinson scored.

The sequence felt emblematic of Washington’s zestier approach this season. In the 14th inning of Sunday’s marathon, Turner stole second, giving the Nats their 58th stolen base of the season. Why does that number resonate? Because they stole 57 bases in all of 2015. Middle-of-the-lineup guys Harper, Jayson Werth and Anthony Rendon combined for seven stolen bases last season. This year, they have 27.

Good luck measuring base-path aggression, but the Nats rank seventh this season in Fangraphs’s “Ultimate Base Running” metric, which attempts to approximate the value of taking extra bases and avoiding outs. Last season they were 20th.

Part of the difference — in stolen bases and in aggression — is because of the injuries that plagued so many Nats regulars last season. But part of this is an intentional approach. Rizzo has wanted to hire Davey Lopes for five years; he finally landed the first-base coach and base-running guru this offseason. Third-base coach Bob Henley is constantly in players’ ears about not being timid; “if you get a read, go; trust yourself,” Robinson said, repeating Henley’s words. “Run like your hair’s on fire. … And that’s good; it’s good to have a coaching staff and a manager where you can play free and just be a baseball player and not be timid.”

Rizzo called Espinosa one of the best baserunners in baseball (and “the toughest bastard we’ve got on the team”); the shortstop is back to being an every-day player this season. And while the Nats lead the National League in home runs — their only run during six hours of Sunday baseball came on a solo shot — they want to do more than that.

“It was a conscious decision, a point of emphasis,” Rizzo said. “We’re back to 1985 baseball. You don’t have 20 guys hitting 50 homers. You have to manufacture runs, and 90 feet is big.”

That’s why the GM was also okay with Harper getting thrown out trying to go from first to third on a single Saturday evening. If you ask your players to dance closer to the edge, sometimes they’ll tumble over that precipice and go sprawling. Sure, this occasionally will leave players looking a tad silly. Just ask Turner, who was beating himself up Sunday night, saying, “I know I screwed up; I know baseball.” What does it feel like when you’re en route to second and you see that the ball has hopped on an earlier flight?

“Not good,” Turner said. “It’s not a good feeling. But like I said, it’s a chance I took. Looking back at it, it was bad. But I was aggressive, and I feel like that’s better than being on your heels.”

That’s been Washington’s approach this season, and it’s likely to continue. In other words, sometimes, a few TOOTBLANS is just part of the TOOTPLAN.

(That, by the way, was the writing equivalent of getting thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double.)