Hey, of course I’m happy about it, but I’m also a worrier by nature. Part of me wishes that if you manage to shutout the Astros, do it the night you’re up against Cole/Verlander and hopefully scrape out a win.
Stanton is a scratch with an injured quad.
Today’s lineup:
DJ Lemahieu (1B)
Aaron Judge (RF)
Gleyber Torres (2B)
Edwin Encarnacion (DH)
Brett Gardner (CF)
Gary Sanchez ©
Gio Urshela (3B)
Cameron Maybin (LF)
Didi Gregorius (SS)
Starting pitcher: James Paxton
Now THAT was a game!
well since la is out the ws should be nats and astros…but probably will;l be nats and yankees …so go nats (with a jay ward yaaay!)
Correa had a hell of a game. If he’s back on, that’s great news for the Astros.
Astros bullpen did a lot better than I was expecting, too. Things are looking up!
I’m off to Nationals Park for Game 3 in a couple of hours. I have the feeling this series may still be a long way from over, but hope they make it 3-0 tonight.
I’m having flashbacks to the 1986 NLCS regarding the Astros pitching, with Verlander in the role of Nolan Ryan and Cole as Mike Scott. Here’s my prediction. Astros win game 3, Yankees 4 and 5, and if it gets there the Astros will almost certainly win game 7 with Cole. Game 6 with Verlander is going to be the key game for this series.
Looking good so far. 
Shit, I don’t mind losing, but this is getting embarrassing. How many games are we gonna go with 1 hit into the late innings?
This is about as lopsided a series as I’ve tasted in a while. Reminds me of the World Series in 2004 or the NLDS in 2009. We’re being dominated from the first pitch to the last. I think the Nats’ll probably finish the sweep tomorrow.
On that note, some teams I don’t wanna lose to and I take the losing hard (like the fucking Cubs for instance - Mets are the worst). But I could deal with the Nats. If they win - and it’s starting to look like they will - they certainly are a classy franchise and deserving of it. They’ve built their team the right way, and their fans aren’t hooligans like the Mets or Cubs.
Nats, please, just put us out of our misery tomorrow night. FFS, this is horrible. Don’t give me hope. Just end the fucking thing.
I’m watching from Kabul and Nats Park looks like it is rocking.
This series is over. I just hope that for the sake of Nats nation their layoff between winning the NLCS and game one of the WS isn’t too long. If you all are lucky either the Yankees or Astros will run the table and finish it in 5. Weird things happen when team A sweeps through the early rounds while team B is scratching and clawing their way there. In fact I think the Cardinals of 2006 were the beneficiaries of that set of dynamics. The Red Sox were in 2007 as well.
I am still too traumatized from 2012 of game 5 to pop an champagne yet. I’ll only go so far as to say that the Nats look good (please don’t smite me baseball gods).
This strikes me as one of those observations that is more about people trying to find causation where none exists. Sure, sometimes teams that run the table in the Championship series then sometime lose the World Series, but sometimes they also win the World Series, like the 1995 Braves. I don’t see enough evidence, over the past 25 years or so, that the number of games it takes to win the DS and/or the CS constitutes a beneficial “set of dynamics,” or is a reliable predictor of World Series performance.
If someone has actually run the numbers and found a correlation that I’m missing, I’d be happy to hear it, and to concede that I’m wrong. But too often, these sorts of claims emerge from unreliable observation of a few unusual cases. It’s like arguing that Derek Jeter was a great fielding shortstop based on watching a highlight reel of three or four of his leaping throws from deep in the hole.
There are just as many examples of teams with short layoffs getting plastered by teams with long layoffs. 1987 Twins, 1991 Twins, 1995 Braves, 1996 Yankees, and on and on. It doesn’t matter.
Yeah, I’d just look at the immediate circumstances.
Everybody in the Nats’ rotation so far this series has gone 7+ innings and 100+ pitches in their starts, with Stras throwing 117 pitches last night. A couple extra days of rest probably would make it easier for them to go 7 in the World Series too, and that matters since the Nats’ middle relief is their one Achilles’ heel.
If the Nats make it, the Seattle Mariners will have the distinction of not only having the longest playoff drought among all major pro sports teams in the US (yes even longer than the Browns) but as the only MLB team to never make the World Series. Go Mariners!
The nicer thing about a layoff is just that you can reset the rotation. Come Game 1 of the world Series, someone will be very rested; Game 1 of the World Series is on October 22, and so if the NLCS were to go seven games, the Washington rotation would be rested this way:
Patrick Corbin (NLCS Game 4) - 7 days
Anibal Sanchez (NLCS Game 5) - 6 days
Max Scherzer (NLCS Game 6) - 4 days
Stephen Strasburg (NLCS Game 7) - 3 days
Of course, if games six and seven never happen, then Washington skips Corbin and Sanchez and starts Scherzer and Strasburg in WS Games 1 and 2, which I assume they’d prefer. Nothing wrong with Corbin or Sanchez but that seems preferable.
I won’t say the Cardinals can’t win tonight, but I don’t think they will. They’ve got the look of a team that’s given up, at least in my useless opinion.