With their 2-0 loss to the Rockies yesterday, the Nationals continue to hold onto a .500 record halfway through the third week of the season. Across Nats Nation, fans have been thrilled to be out of the cellar for the first time in a couple years. Last night I realized another effect this has on my baseball watching.
For the first time since 2005 I have a reason to pay attention to the standings. A real reason. My team is actually performing decently in comparison to other teams. The Mets have stayed in last place in the NL East for about a week and a half, and the Nats are a full game ahead of them with the Dodgers coming to DC. And I’m also enjoying the thrill of the Nats’ being only 1 game back in the NL wildcard, tied with Colorado.
So I now look to see what the other teams are doing. I’m sorry to see the Astros break their four-game winning streak and lose to the Marlins 5-1, since this means that the Fish maintain a tie with Philadelphia for first place in the NL East.
The Nats play the Dodgers for a three-game series starting tonight, and I have hopes that Luis Atilano, who takes Jason Marquis’s place in the rotation after a miserable start to the season by Marquis, the 15-million-dollar man, will succeed in his major league debut.
But I’m also concerned about the Mets-Braves series. The Nats need for the Braves to succeed to keep the Mets in the basement; but Braves success will also strengthen their hold on 2nd place in the division. The Nats can’t gain on the Braves without the Mets gaining on the Nats.
So this is what it feels like to have a real team, eh?
As I write this, the Cardinals and the Mets are locked in a scoreless battle in the bottom of the 18th inning. St. Louis just had Felipe Lopez on the mound. FLop walked Angel Pagan, but otherwise got the side out.
[EDIT, 11:08 PM:] The Mets just took the game 2-1 in 20 innings. When they put Pelfrey in (a rotation guy on an off day, a real pitcher), he shut them down.
A few minutes ago, Ubaldo Jiminez just pitched the Rockies’ first no-hitter, beating the Braves 4-0.
The Pirates beat the Reds in the bottom of the 9th in Pittsburgh when, with the bases loaded, Lastings Milledge took a walk to push in the tying run; then Garrett Jones hit a walk-off single. The Reds’ closer Francisco Cordero has to be the goat of Cincinnati right now.
And I like to think that our own Nationals started the wild and crazy festivities on this baseball Saturday when Livan Hernandez pitched a complete-game shutout while his teammates put runs on the board to beat the Brewers 8-0. For a very few minutes, the Nats were tied for second-place in the NL East (with Florida and Atlanta, after the Braves lost to the Rockies but before the Marlins finished off the Phillies). Florida’s victory over Philadelphia, however, put the Marlins at 7-5, while the Nats and the Braves are sitting at 6-5, tied for third in the division.
Did you follow all that?
It feels absolutely brilliant to be a fan of a team that is right in the thick of things–albeit after two weeks of baseball. I even made it onto the scoreboard at Nationals Park today, when I urged everybody to get on their feet with two outs in the 9th and Livo on the verge of his first shutout since 2004. What a wonderful game this is!
The rock wall behind home plate tells the world that this is NATIONALS PARK. This is new. For the first two years of the stadium the granite was plain and classy, and the identity of the stadium was indicated by the curly-W logo to the left of the granite.
This year the granite is festooned with the words NATIONALS PARK (all caps, all plain block letters). My initial reaction was that it looked clunky and stupid. But then I saw the logo behind the batter at the new Target Field on opening day of the Twins’ new ballpark. And I began to understand.
I would not be surprised if a naming-rights deal were struck with a sponsor this year. The letters behind the batter this year might be there to get us used to seeing a name there. Not that the Lerner family need any more revenue streams from the place or anything, but we’ve been hearing about the possibility of corporate naming rights for Nationals Park ever since it was built, and we’re now in year #3 of the ballpark.
This is, of course, pure speculation on my part; and I’m nobody, a mere fan who reads the news every day. Are the clunky letters on the granite wall merely a placeholder for Geico Park or something similar?
The Nats just beat the Mets 5-2. Took the series in New York two games to one. Jim Riggleman actually made the umpires video-review a home run, so Josh Willingham got his first grand slam of the year. (Cf. Acta, Manny, April 2009, who chewed gum while the umpire crew stuck it to his team.)
Livan Hernandez went seven full innings of shut-out baseball. He even got a base hit. A great outing by the big guy.
And the Nats are at .500 for the first time in two years and two days. About damn time.
Made it happen against the Mets today. 4-3 Nats. Lannan: 5 IP, 3 ER, 3 BB, 2K. But Clippard! 3 IP, 7 K, nothing else! Capps saved it after walking two to load the bases, but Harris saved Capps by making an incredible diving final-out catch.
Willie Harris will next be convincing all nuclear powers to give up their weapons, and he’s working on a cure for hay fever.
With the Nats’ 8-2 loss to the Mets on Friday, the Nationals are now 1-3 for the first week of the season. A lot of people have talked this week about the Nats’ (or individual players’) paces so far. The Nats are roughly on pace to end April 6-17. This would be pretty close to their 5-16 record in April of 2009–the beginning of the ugliest Nats season so far. There go our hopes for sitting at .500 for even a single day, for the first time since April 2008.
Continue reading ‘Can anybody here pitch?’
The Philly-Phan disaster of the Nationals’ Opening Day still has Nats fans boiling, but there’s baseball tonight. The Nats have a second chance, this time against a pitcher who struggled at the end of last season, Cole Hamels.
The outrage and venting over this mess seems mostly to have taken place in two venues: Mark Zuckerman’s Nats Insider and the WaPo’s Nationals Journal–albeit much, much later on in the NJ. (And a shout-out to Dan Steinberg for picking up the ball and running with it in the first place on the Post’s D.C. Sports Bog.)
But above all, it was Mark who did the important initial investigation and who has allowed everybody on both sides to blow off all necessary steam about the Kasten sell-out of Nats Nation on Opening Day. In comparison, not a word seems to have appeared on the MASN Nationals site. No surprise there, considering the close relationship between Nats management and the TV network of which they’re partial owners.
Mark’s right: back to baseball. Mike Morse starts in right field tonight, in a second-game-of-the-season change of plans. No more Willie and Willy platoon out there?
Adam Kilgore prints his entire email exchange with Kasten in the Nationals Journal.
A lot of people remain quite upset about what happened at Nats opening day. With a stadium oversold with groups of the other team’s fans–who happen to be legendary as some of the worst fans in sports–what could have been a beautiful opening day became a miserable experience for many.
One of the longest threads of comment-venting about this is on Mark Zuckerman’s Nats Insider. (Of course, Mark, who first dug into this, is an independent journalist and not a mainstream-media reporter.) Continue reading ‘Opening-Day storm rages’
The Nationals’ Opening Day loss was miserable, of course: 11-1. But worse was the “fan experience.” The team oversold blocks of OD tickets to busloads of Phillies fans–legendary as the rudest, most boorish fans in North American sport–who overtook Nationals Park and actually booed during the introduction of the home team.
The icing on the cake came in about the 7th or 8th inning, when the Nationals PA man made what I believe was the only such announcement of the day, telling all participants in something called “philliestailgate.com” to meet their bus at such-and-such a corner after the game. A second later that announcement was posted on the high-def video scoreboard.
So not only did the Phillies fans fill the seats with their blocks of tickets, they literally had the management of the stadium on their side. Meanwhile we very few Nats fans were left to defend ourselves against the drunken Phillies boors at every corner.
It was bad enough to have a team so awful that it allowed the opponents to score double-digit runs for the second home opener in a row. Our own team ownership rubbed our faces in it by making Nats Park into a kind of Citizens Bank Park south.
Tom Boswell lets the team have it in today’s Washington Post with both barrels today for all these ignominies.
Oh, and Barack Obama (for whose presidential campaign I actually knocked on doors in November 2008) had the incredibly poor manners to don a White Sox hat on the pitcher’s mound of Nats Park, while clad in a Nats jacket for the first pitch. I guess he doesn’t understand that he’s not the President of the White Sox.
As one commenter put it on Nats Insider, I had trouble sleeping last night after this debacle. Really.
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