When it comes to baseball, as the saying goes: I know just enough to be dangerous. The thing i’m far more familiar with is the recent history of how Washington, D.C. sports teams perform when the lights are at their brightest.
So, it’s with that in mind that I say our Washington Nationals did themselves no favor in the National League postseason race, having dropped two of their three games against the team they were chasing for the top seed in the conference: the Los Angeles Dodgers. In fact, in true-to-DC-sports form, the Dodgers had a 3–15 record since the last week of August, and still started last weekend by outscoring the Nationals by a 10–2 combined margin in the first two games of the series. That included peppering Edwin Jackson with seven runs on six hits in just two-and-one-third innings, and then outlasting pitcher A.J. Cole, who was ok for the most part (allowing three earned runs in five innings), but got very little run support from a Nationals offense that has been sputtering as of late.
Even after rebounding against the packing-it-up-for-the-winter Atlanta Braves, the Nationals find themselves four-and-a-half games behind the Dodgers for the #1 seed. Some people think the Nationals are more focused on getting healthy and shaking off the rust before the postseason, rather than trying to steal the top seed from Los Angeles. If that’s the case, and Washington enters the postseason as the #2 seed, we could be looking at yet another one-and-done for this Nationals team.
Why? Because their opponent in the National League Division Series would be the Chicago Cubs. You remember them: the reigning World Series champions, the team with the best record in baseball over the last 30 games (20–10), employing a rotation of four really good pitchers (Kyle Hendricks, Jake Arrieta, Jon Lester, and Jose Quintana), and two of the best hitters in all of baseball (Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo).
Yeah, i’ll go ahead and give that potential matchup a big fat “no thanks.”
Washington has 10 games left on their regular season schedule, starting with their three game set against the New York Mets. All three of their remaining opponents — the Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, and Pittsburgh Pirates — have anything left to play for, other than being a spoiler for the Nationals.
So if you’re a Nationals fan, you need to pray for: 1) the Nationals to close out that stretch with authority, and 2) the Dodgers to stay ice cold down the stretch; they’re 1–4 since taking the series from Washington, and six of their remaining nine games are against the two teams sitting at the bottom of the NL West (the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants).
Simply put: if the Washington Nationals — and us fans — have any aspirations of the team reaching its first National League Championship Series since the team arrived in town in 2015, facing the Cubs in the opening round in the postseason is not the way to get there.
