Nationals Baseball: Monday Quickie - Scratchin and Survivin

Monday, August 03, 2020

Monday Quickie - Scratchin and Survivin

Thanks to the Merry Marlins and however they admit to having gotten Corona Virus the Nats have a long weekend off. They'll get back to playing tomorrow. So no stats for you. I won't do it before 10 games. 

In the meantime the two other active NL East teams have moved on and the Braves are handling the Mets and opening up a solid lead in the division.  Again really all you should care about* is the Nats getting to .500.  This is a crazy year so just get in seems like a decent strategy.

The NL has Atlanta, Chicago, and the Rockies on top. The Rockies are a bit of a surprise but they were in the WC hunt most of last year and the Dodgers are just a game behind them.  The worst team in baseball record wise is the Pirates at 2-7. But the Mets and the D-backs are also floundering. If those teams are really this bad .500 for the Nats is a cake walk.

In the AL there haven't been surprises at the very top. The Yankees, Twins, Astros/A's all leading their respective divisions. The one surprise at all is the Baltimore Orioles sitting at 5-3, but all that is is two games over .500. No team is worse than 3-7

What do we want this week?  Same thing as every week, keep playing. Baseball was ready to at least pause if one more team had a mass virus event after the Casino-loving Cardinals became number 2, but that hasn't materialized yet. More importantly, the Phillies, who were the Marlins on-field opponent before getting pulled, have not seen an outbreak of their own. That suggests, what we mostly thought, the game itself shouldn't be a spreading event. Now there's still time for positives to show up but that is an important piece of news for ALL sports, because if baseball spreads every sport is going to. That it hasn't means there's a chance for other sports.

So baseball NEEDS the Phillies series to go off without a hitch. It'd be fantastic if there were no more outbreaks though another team screwing up toward the end of the week is probably work around able. Three teams out seems to be the max disruption the league can handle. There's too much interplay to deal with more.
 

*beyond the season even finishing

5 comments:

baseball racks said...
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Jimmy said...

Braves losing Soroka sucks pretty bad for them. Kid was legit.

Shane said...

How is Miami behind Atlanta in the standings? I understand they haven’t played many games, but winning % is higher.

Anonymous said...

@Shane,

It's what happens at small sample sizes and trying to take percentages. They're one game back because they are 1 game over .500 while the Braves are 3. If the Marlins were to go 4-4 (i.e. stay at 1 game over) and the Braves didn't play a game (so that they'd play the same total number of games), then they'd be one game back at 6-5 vs 7-4

Cait said...

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