The struggles of the Washington Nationals has been one of baseball’s big surprises in the first half of the 2013 MLB season. The Nats are a .500 club, with a 33-33 record and 5 ½ games behind the Atlanta Braves in the NL East. Washington is 6 ½ out of a wild-card slot.
Stephen Strasburg is slowly but surely building his way to the not-so-magical 160 innings pitched limit that Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo says is the absolute bottom-line shutdown moment for Strasburgh’s season, including the playoffs. I’ve still got a hard time buying that Rizzo would really not his let his best pitcher go in […]
2012 was supposed to be the year for the Washington Nationals, where they at least posted their first winning season since moving to D.C. from Montreal in 2004 and made a run at the playoffs. To use political parlance in this election year, let’s say that the early returns are looking good for the Nats, as they’re off to an 8-3 start and lead the National League East at this early date. Washington’s goals for the season are modest—85 wins would fulfill the goal of a winning year with room to spare, and might be enough to steal one of the two wild-card berths. At the very least it keeps them in contention. Therefore, if the Nats just get solid years from their top-level players, they’ll have enough to do that. With that in mind, TheSportsNotebook takes a look at the stars inside the D.C. Beltway.
The nation’s capital is where TheSportsNotebook stops today in its March run of major league baseball. The Washington Nationals have never had a winning season moving from Montreal in 2004. They have never made the playoffs in D.C. (even in Montreal they only made it in 1981). Expectations are high among Nationals’ fans to at least end the first streak and to give a real run at ending the second. TheSportsNotebook evaluates the personnel of a team that went 80-81 a year ago (c’mon MLB, let them play a makeup a game and try and get to .500!) to see if incremental improvement is in the cards. We’ll use our usual measuring sticks of the ability to get on base, hit for power, starting pitching and relief pitching.