CHICAGO (AP) \u2014 Joey Wiemer and Keibert Ruiz homered and the Washington Nationals earned a season-opening series win with a 6-3 victory over the Chicago Cubs on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Jake Irvin (1-0) allowed two runs and three hits with seven strikeouts and a walk in five innings and Clayton Beeter, the last of four Washington relievers, worked a clean ninth for his first save. Washington took two of three in the series.<\/p>\n
Alex Bregman hit two solo home runs \u2014 his first since joining the Cubs as a free agent \u2014 and Ian Happ added one.<\/p>\n
Brady House and Daylen Lile hit consecutive two-out singles off Shota Imanaga (0-1) in the first and Wiemer followed with his second homer of the season to give Washington a 3-0 lead.<\/p>\n
Imanaga also gave up Wiemer\u2019s leadoff triple in the fourth, but stranded him there with three straight outs. Wiemer was 3 for 3 with a walk.<\/p>\n
Ruiz added a two-run homer off reliever Hoby Milner in the eighth.<\/p>\n
Bregman, who signed a five-year, $175 million contract in January, hit a solo shot to center to start the fourth and Happ added his second of the season two pitches later to make it 3-2.<\/p>\n
Bregman added an eighth-inning solo shot to right field off Cionel P\u00e9rez.<\/p>\n
Imanaga was pulled after walking the leadoff man in the sixth. He gave up six hits and four runs while walking two and striking out seven.<\/p>\n
Winnipeg Jets forward Jonathan Toews, who captained the Chicago Blackhawks to three Stanley Cups, threw out the ceremonial first pitch.<\/p>\n
Up next<\/p>\n
Nationals: at Phillies where Washington’s Foster Griffin faces Philadelphia’s Taijuan Walker on Monday.<\/p>\n
Cubs: host Angels. Ryan Johnson starts for Los Angeles against Chicago’s Edward Cabrera on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO (AP) \u2014 Joey Wiemer and Keibert Ruiz homered and the Washington Nationals earned a season-opening series win…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":691676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-691675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116316273887146361","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}