A Testy September Looms For Nats

Marry Andujar's Law (In baseball, there's just one word — you never know) to Berra's Law (It ain't over until it's over) and you have perhaps the most important baseball wisdom available. And it stops the actual or alleged experts not one whit. Case in point: the Washington Nationals, who are struggling as I write merely to keep themselves in the rear view mirrors of the New York Mets in the National League East.

Rolling the clock back to about that point between the final week of spring training and the first week of the regular season, I noticed that damn near every one of those experts, reposing in various portals, picked the Nationals to take the NL East at least. And no small volume of them went far enough to pick the Nats to win the World Series this time around. That was then, this is now, and the Nats — who entered the weekend just finished six games behind the Mets — approach September in do-or-die mode.

On July 30, the Nats, flaws and all, sat neatly enough at the top with a 54-46 record, three games in first place, as they hit New York for a weekend with the Mets. The Mets were already a surprise second place team in a weak enough division and had just slipped to the three back thanks to losing two of three to San Diego. The Nats weren't exactly going to be pushovers.

Pushovers, no. But it didn't mean the Nats couldn't be had. Wilmer Flores — whose tears when he learned he was to be traded to the Brewers for Carlos Gomez were captured on camera and went viral to the tenth power, until the trade fell through — proved just how much he wanted to remain a Met in the Friday night game, when he flattened a Felipe Rivero service on 1-1 and yanked it over the left center field fence in the bottom of the twelfth.

The following day, Nats manager Matt Williams paid dearly for his apparent indifference in having two top flight closing options — incumbent Drew Storen and freshly-acquired (from the Phillies) Jonathan Papelbon, going to neither man, not even after Lucas Duda — the Mets' first baseman in the middle of a particularly powerful string of his own — tied the game with a mammoth home run. With a two-all tie you'd have expected to see Storen at least come out for the eighth. But out came Matt Thornton instead. And into the left field corner went Duda's RBI double, while the Mets went to their closer Jeurys Familia to finish it off.

Come that Sunday? A marquee match between Jordan Zimmermann and the Mets' impressive rook Noah Syndergaard. It turned into a marquee mash early and often — for the Mets. They didn't just rock Zimmermann, they nuked him: Curtis Granderson (two-run homer) and Daniel Murphy (solo) with back-to-back bombs; Duda (stop me if you've heard this before) with a two-run shot one hit later. Yuniel Escobar's solo off Syndergaard in the sixth seemed almost like an excuse-me shot.

Since that weekend? The Nats have lost 14 out of 25; the Mets have won 16 of 24. The Mets spent the weekend just finished dropping two of three to the Red Sox, probably because their staggering road sets in Colorado and Philadelphia — they swept and battered both teams — ended up draining them to a small extent. The Nats entered Sunday split with the Marlins and had a 7-4 lead after seven innings Sunday.

Lots of things went wrong for the Nats until now. Their team leaders weren't going to get a lot of people listening when they were hitting .199, .220, or .229. That's what (in order) Jayson Werth, Ryan Zimmerman, and Ian Desmond were hitting through 27 August. Werth, Zimmerman, and Anthony Rendon have missed almost half the season with injuries. (Zimmerman is hobbled by the same condition — plantar fasciitis — that throttled Albert Pujols for a couple of his earlier Angel seasons.) And there's a lot of feeling around those watching the Nats regularly that the team didn't do as acute a job as they should have done in monitoring the disabled list considering the injury histories of some of their troops.

They've been riding rookies such as Michael Taylor, Joe Ross, Clint Robinson, and Rivero. Danny Espinosa may be reviving his career, and Bryce Harper may be putting up a sterling season, but Harper should have a lot more runs batted in for his home runs, and you can't drive them in when they're not getting on base in the first place. (The team OBP entering Sunday: .318. Only one regular not named Harper has an OBP higher than the team total: Escobar's .367.) Not to mention that he, too, has an injury history that needs closer watching.

But Max Scherzer, their marquee free agent signing from last winter, has had to see remarkable pitching undermined by team inconsistencies and shortcomings. (Scherzer's ERA? 2.88. His fielding-independent pitching? 2.75.) Stephen Strasburg is having a hard luck season, but he didn't last four innings Sunday and got pounded early enough when Justin Bour hit a 3-run homer in the first and Derek Dietrich went solo in the fourth. Doug Fister has had it so inconsistent that he went to the bullpen, and this is his walk year. Gio Gonzalez has been a bit of a mess.

There's a small financial side to things. The Nats are still battling in the courts to pry what MASN, the cable network owned by the Orioles, hasn't been paying them for their television rights. The Nats can work things in the offseasons but they're not always in a solid enough financial position to bring in-season reinforcements aboard. Getting to deal for Papelbon near the non-waiver trade deadline was probably a stroke of luck. While, somehow, the Mets were able to shore up their offense at that time — Yoenis Cespedes (especially, and look at the tear he's been on of late), Kelly Johnson, to name two — and have just reached for some bullpen reinforcement, landing Addison Reed in a waiver deal with Arizona.

The Nats are also addled by a manager who's still learning on the job and doesn't seem to learn quickly enough. Flash back to last year's division series, when Matt Williams was fool enough to hook Zimmermann one out away from a complete-game shutout, and turned it into an eighteen-inning marathon and a 2-0 series hole. This year, when he doesn't sit on his two closer-capable bullpen bulls, he lets slow-footed hitters prone to double play balls, like Escobar, swing on 3-0 with men on the corners, ground into another double play, and blow a game to the Padres that the Padres seemed willing to hand them on a platter.

Terry Collins, the Mets' skipper, may not be renowned as a brilliant tactician, but the once-mercurial Collins has managed to shepherd a surprising team to the top of the division and keep them there. Now he'll be tested more severely than at any time in his life, perhaps, as September knocks on the door, the time comes to manage those yummy young starting pitchers adroitly enough to keep them in shape for a postseason's work, and the Mets have something big to prove the rest of the stretch. Did we mention Collins may also be managing for his job?

Now the injury bug has bitten the Nats again. Denard Span is out for the season facing hip surgery, barely after returning from his previous injury. Taylor and Escobar are fighting day to day injuries now. Lately it seems like even when the Nats win, they lose. They managed to beat the Marlins Sunday afternoon, but that still keeps them five and a half back of the Mets. And guess who the Nats get to play twice more before the regular season ends.

From the set with the Marlins the Nats get to tangle with the Cardinals, who are slugging the NL Central out with the Pirates and the Cubs. They'll host the Mets to begin next week but visit the Mets on the final weekend of the season. The Mets have a few breather teams to face before tangling with the Yankees at mid-month. By the time they get to that final weekend, it may be later than the Nats hope.

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