NATS (43-32) WORSE THAN BREWERS TWO DAYS AGO

 Gio been looking 
 shakier than fuck lately; 
 road struggles tripping 

 seven losses in a row; 
 luckily, Mets also suck 

NATS (43-31) WORSE THAN BREWERS THREE DAYS AGO

 Maximum Scherzer 
 strong with the strikeouts, but weak 
 with allowing runs 

 where the fuck is Bryce Harper, 
 the dominating presence? 

NATS (43-30) WORSE THAN DODGERS TWO DAYS AGO

 suffering series 
 sweep against Los Angeles - 
 5-game losing streak 

 one more series before this 
 road trip is done - the Brewers 

NATS (9-3) WORSE THAN MARLINS YESTERDAY

 honestly sort of 
 halfway happy they're on a 
 two-game losing streak 

 it's only fucking April; 
 don't be peaking too early 

NATS RISE TO GLORY game nineteen

Nats got four hits, scored two run. Caveman Jayson Werth is in third slot batting .191. Lead-off chump Denard Span is .240. No fucking offense happening, so you could have space pitchers who dominate multiple planets but no runs means fuck yo. Other end of dugout field positions was Marlines, who smashered 14 hits in Sunday matinee, with four runs to sweep Nationals series. Lead-off dude for Marlins went 4-for-5 yesterday, yet didn't get an RBI nor score a run. So he was going apeshit, and yet had nothing to do with any runs directly, although the psychological destruction of opposing pitchers and weakening their will to resist your offensive advances as a team could certainly be construed as a direction action, no? Gio got knocked up again, and the once indomitable and futuristically inspiraing One-Two tandem of Strasburg/Gio is looking lost a little. Not necessarily shot, but psyche's questioning things, existential crisis of sorts, which affects baseballers more than most other sports because baseballers be standing around a lot of time with too much thinking and shit going on. Long DC histories of lack of run support, lack of offense can damage pitching psyche - "Am I wasting my life? Is all this physical energy being expended for anything of substance? Is this all for just simple dollar bills in form of paycheck? What am I doing here?" Another hit, as man in red hat ponders these questions, another runner in scoring position, another early exit from that little cocaine bump of a pitcher's mound. Life is temporary but god losing streaks will feel like forever.
Nats are 7-12.

"In The Belly of the East": Tyler Kepner of the NY Times Slums It For A Weekend

As previously noted in this space, Kevin Gregg is the worst.

"For the fourth season in a row," Tyler Kepner writes in the Times, "the Blue Jays will almost certainly finish fourth while the Orioles finish last. Yet, in some ways, this was baseball in its purest form, the game for the sake of the game, with nothing to prove in the standings. The teams fought for three compelling days, one game ending with a go-ahead hit and the two others with the tying run at the plate." This is worth reading. For Kepner, seeing losing (or barely winning) baseball up close like this is something of a novelty, and part of me would like to resent that, but I can't. In unthrilling but steady prose, Kepner describes the genuine pleasure to be found in a well-played, hard-fought three-game set without anything resembling postseason implications on the line, played before relatively few fans, even. It is still baseball, and baseball can always be awesome. This puts me in mind of a friend's story about his late (as in, his 20s) conversion to baseball: at a nothing game in the middle of the summer between teams that obviously weren't going anywhere, this friend of mine was witness to an epic at-bat, one of those million-pitch encounters where everything close gets fouled off forever. This single at-bat won my friend to baseball. Sure, baseball was still slow and lazy and archaic and actually kind of bizarre, all of those things he'd thought before, but in the middle of all this strangeness and profound meaninglessness, the outcome of this particular at-bat could not have mattered more to this pitcher whose count was getting out of control, and this batter who was treating this plate appearance like it was the most important of the hundreds he'd have that year. My man was like, "Oh, OK, baseball. I get it now." It's easy to get baseball when you're watching the late innings in a close game seven of the World Series; it takes a different kind of character to really get baseball in a nothing game on a nothing day in a nothing season. For that, it takes my man Matty, or, indeed, Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. Kepner showed up on the Jeff Blair radio show (you can listen here) to discuss this further; Matty did not. 


Lots of great stuff here, including the annual ritual of Rookie Cosplay, but the real highlight for me is this:


"Johnson works a walk, and Gregg crumbles. A single, a hit batter and a wild pitch tie the score before the rookie catcher J. P. Arencibia wins the game with a pinch-hit single to left. In the clubhouse, Arencibia wears a Maple Leafs cap backward as he speaks for the cameras. Pitcher Brett Cecil shoves a hockey stick at him, and Arencibia knows what to do.

"'We played hard — all three periods,' he says, to belly laughs from reporters and teammates. 'I don’t think the third baseman was expecting me to go top shelf.'"

Beauty!

KS