So far this season, and particularly Sunday against the potent and picky Cubs, Roark has not pitched like the affable, do-whatever guy he seemed during last year’s chaos. He has attacked at all moments, for better or worse, challenging hitters, making them beat him. Sometimes they have. The Cubs put a runner in scoring position with fewer than two outs in five of the six innings Roark pitched Sunday. He allowed one run, an unearned one, when Ben Zobrist reached on an error and scored on a wild pitch. The key to holding a deep lineup like Chicago’s down despite high-stress situations?

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“Execute pitches. Bear down and don’t give in,” Roark said. “Once you give in, that’s when they attack, so you just have to keep executing pitches and going after them.”

Roark scattered four hits, walked two, and struck out seven in six innings. His pitch count rose as the Cubs worked him to deep counts, but when he got in those counts, he threw strikes. He relied on his two-seamer, which he painted on the outside corner time and time again, mixing it with a sharp curveball and solid slider and change-up that he threw for strikes. That mix has earned him a greater percentage of soft contact than any Nationals starter, according to FanGraphs.

“Soft contact” is a statistic calculated by Baseball Info Solutions (BIS), and is the most desirable of three categories of contact quality — soft, medium,and hard. According to FanGraphs, no National League pitcher was inducing a higher percentage of soft contact than Roark, entering Sunday.

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“Tanner was outstanding,” Nationals Manager Dusty Baker said. “We would have loved to have got another inning out of him, but he had 106 pitches after the sixth. We had to go out there and get him. It was a tie ballgame, and we were hoping to get that pinch hit. Tanner’s been doing his thing. If he keeps pitching like that, he’s gonna win a lot of ballgames.”