By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 28, 2019 — Post-mortems of baseball games can sometimes be painful to die-hard fans like myself, and this past weekend certainly was excruciatingly painful for me as I watched my beloved Washington Nationals seriously jeopardize our chance to win the first Major League baseball World Series Championship in the franchise’s history.
After winning back-to-back games against the Houston Astros last week in Houston, I fully expected that this morning I would be recovering from having imbibed too much while celebrating my Nationals World Series Championship; instead, watching the Nationals players collectively display a lack of ability to produce runs, which is how games are won, was as indeed “excruciatingly painful.” In our three games over the weekend, the Nationals scored a total of three runs, while losing to the Astros 4-1 on Friday, 8-1 on Saturday, and 7-1 on Sunday.
Of course, learning that Max Scherzer would not be Sunday night’s pitcher when I switched to the game after watching football, my optimism that we would win waned considerably, but I still entertained some hopefulness that we would win after finding out that Scherzer’s replacement would be rookie Joe Ross, who had turned in a could good performances during the regular season before being sent back to the Minor Leagues to continue to hone his skills because he pitch well enough consistently to earn a place among the regular starters.
Ross pitched extremely well, but it became an up-hill struggle for the Nationals after he yielded four runs in the five innings he pitched. Let’s face it, at this point in the game, with the Nationals batting so poorly, the game was essentially over. What makes this anemic batting performance by the Nationals almost inexplicable to die-hard fans is the fact that in the first two games in Houston, the Nationals scored a total of 17 runs.
I had predicted that we would win the World Series Championship in six games, but obviously I was wrong. We now head back to Houston for the final two games, and hopefully, our “bats will come alive” and we still emerge as World Series Champions.
