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WASHINGTON — The Washington Nationals will go for their third straight win over the Miami Marlins on Saturday night behind ace Max Scherzer.

After a team meeting on Wednesday Jaguars Elite Jerseys , the Nationals (44-43) have posted back-to-back emotional victories over the Marlins (36-54). On Thursday, it was an historic comeback from a 9-0 deficit for a 14-12 win and Friday was a walk-off homer from pinch-hitter Mark Reynolds leading off the bottom of the ninth inning.

“We’re all human, so having a walk-off win everyone’s in a little better mood coming to the ballpark the next day, have a little more giddy up,” outfielder Adam Eaton said.

Nationals manager Dave Martinez admitted he was looking for someone to end Friday’s game with one swing.

“Thought about pinch-hitting Michael (A. Taylor). He gets on, he can steal, but then what?” Martinez said. “So I said, ‘Hey, we need somebody who can hit a home run right now and Mark is the perfect guy.'”

Reynolds’ homer on a 3-1 pitch off Kyle Barraclough erased the bad taste of Washington’s not scoring with the bases loaded and no outs in the eighth and rewarded the work of a bullpen that provided four scoreless innings.

The Marlins had all kinds of chances against Gio Gonzalez, who threw 114 pitches in five innings, but the Nationals turned three double plays and Gonzalez struck out Justin Bour and Garrett Cooper with the bases loaded in the fifth after walking in the tying run.

“I thought our offense did a pretty good job with Gio,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said. “We just didn’t really capitalize.”

Scherzer (10-5, 2.16) is looking for his first win since June 5. A loser in four of his last five starts, he has allowed only 10 earned runs while the Nationals have been shut out three times.

In a 4-3 loss to the Red Sox on Monday night, Scherzer’s only mistake came on a bases-loaded double by friend and former Detroit rotation mate Rick Porcello.

“That’s where you’ve got to be better, no matter what,” Scherzer told mlb.com. “You’ve got to execute pitches against everybody. Just because it’s a pitcher doesn’t mean you can ever let up. Not saying I did, but the onus, the focus is on every single pitch. You’ve got to execute.”

Scherzer went six innings and struck out nine to become the 11th pitcher in MLB history with at least 1,000 strikeouts with two clubs. He leads the National League with 174 strikeouts.

He’s 8-3 with a 3.39 ERA versus the Marlins in his career.

LHP Wei-Yin Chen (2-5, 5.55) starts for the Marlins and has a 9.85 ERA in seven road starts this season.

Chen’s last two outings have been very good. He hass thrown 12 innings — six each against the Tampa Bay Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks — and allowed one earned and eight hits while striking out 10 and walking one. He allowed one unearned run in no-decision against the Rays his last time out.

“I think it was the life on my fastball,” Chen told mlb.com, via his interpreter, on what was working against Tampa Bay. “Tonight, sometimes I didn’t get my fastball to an ideal location, but I was still able to jam them, get them to get weak contact.”

Against Washington Chiefs Elite Jerseys , Chen is 1-5 with a 4.15 ERA in nine career appearances.

Over five seasons as ace of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Gerrit Cole threw one of the game’s hardest, heaviest fastballs, and he threw it often. The pitch helped him make millions of dollars. It put him in contention for major awards. Hitters swung through it again and again, and Cole seemed content not to mess with a good thing.

But when Cole was traded to the Houston Astros this offseason, a funny thing happened. He became more frugal with his fastball and ended up more overpowering than ever.

Cole has joined some of the game’s best pitchers – including Cleveland’s Corey Kluber and the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw – in benefiting from a puzzling baseball paradox: In an era when pitchers are throwing harder than ever, they’re maximizing success by using fewer fastballs.

Pitchers – even ones with blazing fastballs like Luis Severino and Chris Archer – are using more offspeed than ever recorded, and while many aces think the downturn is a trend, some believe baseball could be entering a new age dominated not by 100 mph heaters, but by a steady stream of breaking balls and changeups.

So why is the hardest-throwing generation of pitchers ever going the way of the junk-baller?

Depends who you ask, but one culprit stands out to Cole, Kluber and Kershaw: baseball’s swing-changing batters.

”You can call it launch angle, or you can call it the upper cuts,” Cole said. ”There are a lot of swings that are dictating breaking balls.”

Cole’s move away from a fastball-first approach is striking given the reputation of his hardest pitch. He topped out at 99 mph as an ace at UCLA, and his fastball was the headliner on a resume that earned him an $8 million signing bonus as the first overall draft pick in 2011 by Pittsburgh. Under the guidance of Pirates pitching coach Ray Searage, Cole pounded the bottom of the strike zone with that heater, and for years, it worked. He was an All-Star and finished fourth in NL Cy Young Award voting in 2015, and was considered among the game’s most overpowering starting pitchers.

Then baseball’s flyball revolution took flight – a movement of hitters using upper-cut swings designed to crush exactly the kinds of sinking fastballs Cole was delivering. After never allowing more than 11 home runs in a season, Cole was tagged for 31 last year.

So it was time to change things up.

From 2013-17, Cole threw his fastball 65 percent of the time – well above the league average. But this year, he’s cut that fastball rate by about 10 points, replacing those heaters with sliders and curveballs. The new look is working. Cole is 8-1 with a 2.59 ERA through 15 starts and leads the American League with 138 strikeouts.

”I think you’re just continually trying to mess timing up, especially when guys are trying to slug,” Cole said. ”When they’re trying to hit it out of the park every time, you have an easier time changing speeds.”

Kluber and Kershaw have made similar adjustments in the past couple years. Both Cy Young winners rank among the league leaders in fewest fastballs thrown this season.

”Guys are geared up to swing for a fastball,” Kluber said. ”I guess it’s almost rare now to see somebody actually Rams Elite Jerseys , like, go the other way with the breaking ball.”

Kluber has set a career low with a fastball rate of 41.8 percent this season. Same for Kershaw, who has dropped from a 72-percent fastball clip in 2010 all the way to 42.8 percent in an injury-hampered 2018.

”The hitters tell you what you need to do,” Kershaw said. ”And for me, I guess it’s been throwing a lot more breaking balls.”

Cole, Kluber and Kershaw suspect the tide will turn back, perhaps soon, once hitters recalibrate to the number of four-seam fastballs pitchers are throwing up in the strike zone.

But Trevor Bauer, Kluber’s analytically-minded teammate in Cleveland, thinks the offspeed uptick is only going to spread.

Two years ago, Bauer and Indians closer Cody Allen watched as 6-foot-8 Yankees fireballer Dellin Betances carved up Cleveland’s hitters with a fastball that averaged 98 mph. Allen – no slouch himself with a fastball around 94 mph – told Bauer that if he could throw hard like Betances, he wouldn’t even bother with a breaking ball.

”No,” Bauer recalled telling Allen. ”He should never throw a fastball.”

Bauer’s theory is that the threat of a 100 mph fastball might be more dangerous to hitters than the fastballs themselves.

”As guys throw harder, guys have less and less time to hit that offering,” Bauer said. ”So they have to speed up in order to catch up to it, which, that makes the breaking ball more effective.”

Hitters are left picking between two nasty poisons – risk being behind on triple-digit fastballs, or jeopardize taking ugly swings on breaking pitches as they dart out of the strike zone.

Veteran slugger Todd Frazier was with the Yankees last year when New York’s hard-throwing bullpen led by Betances, Aroldis Chapman and Chad Green overpowered hitters while also posting the lowest fastball rate in the majors.

”I have to set my feet for 98 mph, and understand I might get 84-88 mph slider,” said Frazier, now with the New York Mets. ”It makes it tougher on you.”

And yet, Frazier and his fellow hitters aren’t close to jumping off their fastball-first approach.

”The baseline of hitting is the fastball,” Mets teammate Jay Bruce said. ”You have to stay on the fastball. For me personally, that’s what my timing of th