You’re a fan without a nation.
The 2014 MLB Playoff field is set, and while you mourn your beloved New York Yankees from your home probably nowhere near New York, you need a surrogate team. Well, the Washington Nationals bandwagon is accepting applications, and no other franchise makes a better case for your temporary affection.
The single biggest selling point for Washington isn’t its National League-best 96-66 record, but the way in which those 96 games were won.
And the only way to truly understand the grit that defines the Nationals is to take an uncomfortable trip down memory lane.
The Nationals don’t play with a chip on their shoulder, they carry around a family-sized bag that they picked up from a 2013 season that can only be qualified as an abject failure.
Washington was coming off a 2012 campaign that saw them earn the best record in baseball, and the core of that season’s roster was still intact for 2013. But the Nationals under-performed from the get go, finding themselves in the conversation for “baseball’s most disappointing team,” according to an article by SportingNews’s Justin McGuire that year.
The individual parts were a disappointment – i.e. Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg – and their sum was a disappointment.
It is for that reason that Washington is taking nothing for granted this year, and it’s made the Nationals the most fun team in baseball to watch. And from top to bottom, every member of Washington’s roster wants to win every game.
And they want it bad.
In a season that spans 162 games across five-plus months, two distinct moments during the summer of 2014 can be pointed to as evidence of that spirit.
In middle-to-late August, Washington matched its franchise-record win streak of 10 games.
That’s not the impressive part.
Half of those games were won in walk-off fashion. The Washington Post’s Neil Greenberg calculated the likelihood of a run like that to be around 0.0977 percent.
That’s the kind of season 2014 has been for Washington. The Nationals are extremely talented, and they’ve won the games they’re supposed to win, which should have been good for six or seven of those 10 games.
The remaining wins in the streak? Baseball giveth and baseball taketh away, and the Nationals have made good on the former this year.
The other instance that encapsulated what Washington has been able to do this year fell on the very last day of the season.
Jordan Zimmerman’s no-hitter in game No. 162 of the year saw him exercise complete dominance over helpless Marlins hitters, until the very last out.
Steven Souza Jr. took over in left field before the start of the ninth inning, making just his 21st big-league appearance of the season, and made arguably the catch of the season to preserve the first no-hitter in franchise history.
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