The 2016 baseball season has just turned its first corner, the calendar flipping from April to May. The top two teams in the NL East should be sorry to see April leave. The Washington Nationals and the New York Mets have, as expected, set the pace in this division and while the other three teams have either exceeded expectations, fulfilled them to the letter or fallen historically short so far, we are still in the “anything can happen” stage of the season. The Mets, as we know stumbled out of the gate, going 3-5 with a measly two homers over their first eight games. Since then, they’ve gone 14-4, while clouting 38 homeruns. For their part, the Nationals broke out quickly, going 14-4 themselves before getting swept by the surprising Philadelphia Phillies. They now stand at 19-8, a game-and-a-half ahead of the good guys.
As the old saw goes, the season is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Right now, the Mets and Nats resemble a couple of skinny Nigerians on the streets of Boston. Everyone predicted a dogfight between these two teams before the year began and it looks like everyone will be right. It’s true that both are lucky to playing in a decidedly weak division and it’s starting to look as though the winner of the East will probably be the team that has the best record vs. the Atlanta Braves. The Mets are 5-1 on that front, while Washington is 6-0. To your intrepid columnist, this slightly resembles the beginnings of the 2009 season, when whoever was in first place between the Phillies and Mets in late May was determined by which team was playing the Nationals that week. Slightly. There’s no comparison between these defending NL Champs and that limping, woebegone squad. The similarities end with the logo on the uniform, the home ballpark and David Wright – yet another example of why the length and breadth of a full season’s tapestry can’t be judged by those first few stitches. That being said, however, the Nats haven’t yet been able to shake the Mets off their tail and given the Mets’ pitching strength, for the most part – looking at you, Matt Harvey — that bodes well for the rest of the year.
The Mets have just embarked on an 11-game West Coast swing, four games against the San Diego Padres, four in Los Angeles vs. the Dodgers and four in the Colorado Rockies’ thin air. They then come home for their very first confrontation of the year with the Nationals. Much like early August last year, all eyes will be on Flushing that weekend. Let the fun begin!
We fans wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Early returns show the NL East as not a weak division.
Right now it’s the only division with four teams above .500
Sure, the Phillies may be doing it with mirrors. They’re also 11-7 against teams with a record of .500 or better. The Marlins have won 9 of their last 10 games and are 10-8 against the good teams
The Braves are probably the worst team in the league. But each division has its patsies and it doesn’t seem accurate to paint the East as the weak sister.
Re: the Phils. Their Depth won’t hold, but they’ve found some young Arms…the 3rd Baseman is Real. The Rule 5 CF’er- Ordubel- is a real player. The have some youth in the wings and they’ll be losing payroll very soon….. an excellent path ahead for them.
Right. The Phils are doing it with starting pitching. W shall see what it is that league-wide familiarity with those starters does breed, but they are well ahead of where most of us had them pegged.
The Nats make an interesting laboratory test case. Their record has been created by very good pitchers doing even better than expected, plus two position players hitting near-out of their heads. All the while they have five position players doing very little with the bat, and a closer they don’t trust.
It’s an unstable mix; something will change. Either their hitters will begin to hit and the Nats will — well, they won’t “turn it on,” they’re already playing .700 baseball. Let us say that their early record will prove not to be an illusion. Or, maybe their pitching comes a bit closer to Earth — I’m thinking Strasburg gets slightly dinged, and Roark cools off a bit — in which case a good run by the Mets might put the Nats in a familiar position, that of watching the Metropolitans pulling away from them.
What I don’t expect to see is more of exactly the same.
The Nats and Mets have hardly played a good team since day 1. I think both records are a bit inflated, and not sure who either team really is until we see more play against top teams. I thought KC was a juggernaut, but the air seems to have come out of that balloon. This Cubs series will be interesting to see.
I think instead of Nigerians with reference to marathons and Boston you meant Kenyans. Nigeria may produce some decent sprinters, but the African elite marathoners mainly come from a small, mountainous part of Kenya and adjacent Ethiopia.
You know, several years back someone looked around and saw that (something like) 95% of the elite short distance runners in the world could show their origins as west African, while nearly as high a percentage of the elite long distance runners traced back to eastern Africa. Different geographical realities and a population that mostly stayed put for centuries led to the different outcomes.