I've been behind lately (and, as James pretty much came out and said a few days ago, I'm the only person covering baseball here). With the recent move, life has basically gotten in the way the last few weeks - between the job searching and the apartment searching, that's taken up a lot of my time. Still, I've been trying to update in shorter bursts than what I've done in the past, so this only tells part of the story.
The second part? There hasn't been too much that's new about the team. They have won the season series over the Orioles - and I'm sure I'd care about that more if I had lived in DC longer. As of now, all that means is we have collective bragging rights over their fans for the next year. I'd care about that, but:
- I don't know any O's fans
- I wouldn't want to brag and/or gloat with someone who's sick of Angelos
Those two things mean I'd only rub it in to O's fans that support Angelos; has anyone seen those people, ever? I figure there's two of them, and they're probably in Germany.
In addition, the O's aren't even that good. They just fired their manager, hired Andy McPhail in the front office (last job was with the Cubs, IIRC), and Angelos has promised to lay off the baseball operations. I don't believe that for a minute, and I don't think anyone else does either. Still, that doesn't solve their bigger problem of needing to actually retool and reload offensively. There's a ton of issues with the team - not the least of which involve bringing in subpar crappy veterans as continual stopgaps. Anyone who's followed the team for any length of time could tell you that, too.
So what about the Detroit series? Well, that was a pasting - but the Tigers are damn good. Was anyone surprised about that? If anything, I was floored the Nats could even be in a position to win a game. Yeah, it was a flashback to April (and if anything, I've shown I seem to blog more as long as the team's losing, which means I should've had 12 updates over that time period), but we knew that was going to happen at some point.
Now the Nats are facing Cleveland. I'll be at the game tonight - it'll be my first non-Bascik start. I'm excited; Luis Ayala is back. While that seems an odd reason to be excited, Ayala was a fantasy baseball staple for a couple of years for me, and it was a shame to see him get injured for as long as he did. Still, now he's back - and now he's inducing Travis Hafner to ground into inning-ending DPs, which I can't complain about at all. Hell, even Cristian Guzman went yard last night - anything is possible now.
So what am I expecting tonight? Well, I'm not expecting anything out of Brandon Watson. He did go 2-for-4 last night, but that means he's 2-for-7 in limited exposure. That's better than he's done in either of his other ML stints. Eh, whatever. Right now the Nats are 15-27 against teams with a record over .500. Cleveland's 12 games up. I'll connect the dots.
EDIT: in another "milestone", we're finally over 100 posts here. Never saw that coming. In addition, I'm going to update with links to a couple of other articles and websites I write for as well. Stay tuned for those.
