thurdl sports

Let's go...Braves?

Ah, the pain, the pain of it all.

With about two and a half weeks left in the baseball season, the Nationals are 8 games out of the NLE and 3 games out of the Wild Card. What this means is that the NLE is all but decided, and the Braves are going to walk away with their 102947th consecutive pennant, tying a winning streak that dates back to the Lions. No, not the Detroit Lions, I'm thinking Lions v Christians here.

They'll swoon in the playoffs like overstereotyped characters in an 19th century costume drama, but that's neither here nor there right now.

Thus, it comes to a point where all good Nationals fans must rise to the call and...cheer for the Braves? Right now they've still got 7 games scheduled against teams ahead of us in the Wild Card race: the season series closer with the Phils tonight, and then still a home and away split with the Fish. The best thing that can happen for the Nats right now is to win as many games as possible, the onus is always on us. However, the second best thing that could happen is the Braves taking absolutely as many of those games as possible. And, of course, there's that pesky team outside our conference that has played all the NLE teams it's going to this year, but let's just focus on the NLE.

The Nats are playing game 3 of a 12 game stretch against sub-500 teams right now. Of course, three of those games are a trip to the bastard Padres who swept us at home a few weeks back, but let's not think about that. This is absolutely the time that we need to get as many wins in as we can, as the last six games are against the two NLE teams standing between us and second place in the division, and a hopeful wild card bid. Those games scare the crap out of me, so I'm really hoping we can get ahead of those teams going into that season ending run, and then have the motivation of "it's ours to lose" to hopefully not screw up that hypothetical lead.

And to get that hypothetical lead, we need the Braves.

Go Braves.

posted by thurdl @ 1:18 PM