Swinging Things

It seems like every year we have a chance to talk about on-field violence, and every year we have a chance to talk about Bryce Harper being an idiot and missing games because he's an idiot, depriving our beloved Nationals of their best player, who is an idiot.

This year it all happened at the same time, and I'm overwhelmed with emotion. It's like a wedding and a graduation at the same time, which I'm sure someone has tried to pull off.

I'm sure you're not coming to Distinguished Senators for game recaps, but the basic story is that Hunter Strickland, a hulking Georgian who pitches for the increasingly annoying Giants, gave up a couple homers to Harper back in 2014 and is angry about it. To be fair, Harper did give him a look after one of them.

Given the opportunity to face Harper on Monday, Strickland plunked him in the hip, rendering those two and a half year old dingers null and void. They never happened. I'm serious — go to Retrosheet. They're gone.

Harper charged the mound, fruitlessly threw his helmet, and commenced to swinging them things.

Above: The Battle of the Dudes with Basic White Guy Names

This is where I would normally scold Harper for removing himself from the rest of this game and some others that will happen later. But I'm on his side here. Let's add up all the factors:

1. Bryce was right to be angry, and the predictability of the whole thing made it worse. F.P. Santangelo told us this was going to happen while Strickland was warming up.
2. We can afford Harper taking a few games off. They can suspend him for 112 games and we'll be fine. The point I'm trying to across here in list item #2 is that the Mets are an absolute joke of a franchise.
3. It was so rad! Did you see Michael Morse accidentally just ruining a couple of his teammates? Did you see how they had to haul Strickland off like a psychopath? Did you see?

I love fights. I love real fights, I love simulated fights, and I especially love fights where fights aren't supposed to happen, like a baseball diamond or Ukrainian parliament.

Probably none of these guys is named Hunter or Tanner or Cooper or Haberdasher.

I'm not going to feel guilty about this. A baseball game with a fight in it is better than a baseball without one, so I want to thank Bryce Harper for punching a guy in the face. Enjoy your time off, buddy.

Game Over (Alchemically)

Is it too early to proclaim "Game Over" on the 2017 Major League Baseball season? The Nats just swept the Mets in their crappy city, their crappy borough, and their crappy stadium. So we win. It's too much to come back from.

I guess. I warned you that I wasn't going to do the math, but if the Mets aren't mathematically eliminated, they're definitely eliminated according to some other discipline. Let's say that they're alchemically eliminated.

Enough about those idiots. There is seldom a reason to talk about the Mets in May, and this year is no exception. It's a franchise defined by cocaine and failure.

Also terrible announcing. Left to right: Cranky old man sexism, diseased adenoid voice, who cares

So let's talk about us. The Nationals have the best record in baseball, and it would be even betterest if we had a bullpen. So at this point we're back to me talking about Nostradamus again. The difference, I suppose, is that when Nostradamus predicted the Gulf War or whatever, everyone in France wasn't saying the same thing.

I mean, I know that the Nats are going to win the division easily and trade for a closer and maybe but probably not win the World Series. You know that the Nats are going to win the division easily and trade for a closer and maybe but probably not win the World Series. Everyone knows that the Nats are going to win the division easily and trade for a closer and maybe but probably not win the World Series.

So what do we do in the meantime? We've got five months to kill. Do you people have hobbies? Embroidery? Stamp collecting? Actually watching these games and listening to Bob Carpenter?

Do we pretend that all this stuff that's about to happen matters? There are going to be some ups and downs. Dudes are going to be injured and then not be injured any more. Maybe Bryce Harper will say something "outrageous" and we'll all pretend to be entertained by it.

A bunch of stuff that ultimately doesn't matter is going to happen, and then it's going to end. Probably badly. I'd say it's a metaphor for life, but that's too depressing even for me.

GG Ez

It's safe to say we've got this one wrapped up.

The Nationals just completed a four game sweep of the Braves, capping it with a game in which they ran Matt den Dekker and some guy named Heisey out there (I have no idea who this is. Did he win a contest or something?) and still took the Walgreens W.

Combine that with the a gritty 1-1 draw with the Marlins and a previous sweep of the hapless-but-only-because-they-keep-playing-us Braves, and the Nats are at 7-1 and in a dominant position in the division.

The National League East in 2016 has turned out to be surprisingly similar to the Franco-Prussian War. Everyone was expecting a real fight, but it was over instantly. We're sitting here in mid-April listening to a captive Napoleon III explain himself as we prepare to besiege Paris and inspire a musical.

Terry Collins (left) tries to figure out where it all went wrong as Dusty Baker (right, kickass helmet) looks on.

It's possible - MAYBE - that I'm being premature. Last year, I declared on May 11 that the rest of the season was merely a victory lap. That turned out not to be correct. But, look, I failed to take certain factors into account. One of those factors has found his natural level as Arizona's third base coach, and the other one's getting booed (already!) in Toronto.

Since those two can't make this sure thing any less than sure, we're set. Is there anyone to worry about? This division includes three teams that aren't even trying. I don't need to tell you about Atlanta. The Phillies have been tanking for a while now, and the Nats get to enjoy that starting tomorrow. The Marlins play uncharacteristically tough against the Nats, but that's not enough to stop this from happening.

The Mets? Yeah, they won last year. Won the division, went all the way to the World's Series of Base Ball, and forced me to root for the AL team for first time ever.

It was a fluke. They're a one-year wonder. The Mets are not the protagonist of this story; they were there in 2015 only to show how far the Nats had sunk. "Look what the Matt Williams did to you," said Baseball. "You have been bested by the Mets." Just as it took an FBI investigation to get Jim Bowden fired, so it took allowing the damn Mets into the penthouse to get Matt Williams out of here.

2016 has arrived, and they're already panicking. Their manager proclaimed an April 13 game against the Marlins to be a must-win, and that's as stupid as it is untrue. They did win that game, but it doesn't matter, because the Mets are only even going to finish second because they're the only one of the Nats' competitors deluded enough to think that they have a chance.

Good game. Easy.

Triumph

After a successful campaign, a Roman general could celebrate a triumph. He'd ride in a chariot through the city with his face painted red to make him look like a terra cotta statue. The crowd would cheer as they gazed upon the spoils of war, and the victorious soldiers would sing dirty songs about their leader.

At the end of the parade, the guy who lost the war would be ritually strangled. In the case of Vercingetorix, he had to wait around for five years between his surrender and the administration of the coup de grâce.

The Nationals have gone to New York, not with dirty songs and painted faces, but with the resignation of a Gaul who's killing time until it's killing time.

This happened a few weeks ago. We're just now getting around to the strangling.

I haven't been paying much attention the last couple of weeks. It's not that I've been especially busy or whatever. I just don't care. The Nats aren't playing for anything, and . . . well, I mean, do you like these guys? It dawned on me over the course of the season that I don't.

And that was even before Barry Svrluga set down the recriminations. It turns out that the Nats don't like the Nats any more than I do. It further turns out that I was right not to like these guys, since they're the most emotionally fragile pack of narcissists that ever failed. I always figured that you had to be mentally tough to make it to the majors, but the 2015 Nationals put that notion to bed.

Among other things:

• Drew Storen responded to his demotion by melting down, sulking, and breaking his thumb.
• Ian Desmond responded to his impending free agency by taking a run at Cristian Guzman's "Worst Nats Shortstop Ever" title.
• The whole team got all weepy over the Tyler Clippard trade, got even weepier about the Papelbon trade, and was just generally weepy about other dudes' paychecks.
• Jonathan Papelbon attempted to demonstrate what happened to Vercingetorix, using Bryce Harper as a stand-in.
• Jayson Werth got a day off and responded by being the biggest jackass in history.

That last one gets a block quote:

Incensed, Werth ripped the lineup card off the wall, bellowing that it was going to change. Then, according to several people who were present, he confronted Williams — not just about whether he would play that day but about what most of the clubhouse considered to be a chronic lack of communication with his players. Among the most jarring barbs, from Werth to Williams: “When exactly do you think you lost this team?” 

The Werth contract was never going to end up being a net gain. It was too long, too much money, and everyone who didn't make that offer to Werth laughed at the team that did. Still, it was looking good for a while there. Werth put up some good numbers as the Nats became a contender. He followed this up by going to jail, getting hurt, being the worst player on a team that included 2015 Ian Desmond, anonymously bitching to the media, and showing up and undercutting his manager.

He's truly the face of the team.

This season isn't a failure entirely because the players are blubbering children. The Lerners decided to get cheap when it came to improving the team. The only move Mike Rizzo made was like taking your car in for a sweet new sound system and instead installing a car bomb. Matt Williams is possibly the worst manager since Ted Turner. Still, it's not clear that these crybabies deserved any better.

I'm not going to cheer the triumphant Mets, but I'm not going to be upset when they get done strangling the Nats either.

Spine

So, that's that. The Mets came back from a 7-1 deficit last night, ripped out the Nationals' spine, and strangled them with it. It was the final turning point of the season. The time for competing has ended; now it is time for recriminations.

I've made it clear how I feel about trying to impose a narrative on a baseball season, but I also understand how tempting it is. It's never been more tempting than last night. If this were a movie, the Nats' screen time would have ended yesterday. Big shootout, Mets win, Nats wind up falling into a lava pit or something.

But, while existence may be a computer simulation, it is definitely not a movie, and the season still has a few weeks to chug along before we can get on with our lives.

Which means the Nats are still in it! I mean, if you hadn't given up a couple weeks ago, why give up now? Momentum isn't real, no matter what that fig-loving fraud Isaac Newton tells you.

"Nah, they're done. According the principles of physics, I mean. #FireMatty."

The Nats could win tonight, Matt Williams could stop bunting, and Drew Storen could decide to stop it with the sulk-pitching.

Then they could win again and again, even as the Mets are destroyed from within by their own hubris and Scott Boras. It could happen. It's not much less likely than it was two weeks ago.

It's no comfort to me - I actually did give up a couple weeks ago. But I'm happy to humor the delusions of others.

The Natsiest

This is it, people. The final countdown. We're headed for Venus (Venus).

The Nationals just beat the ever-loving hell out of the Braves, and that's great. Curb-stomping the Braves is something I will never get tired of seeing. It hasn't been the hardest task lately, but when was the last time the Nats looked like a team that could do it? It might have been as long ago as June, when they actually did it.

So the Nats are heading into this series with the Mets in as good a shape as one could expect. The Mets, meanwhile, have become so Nats-like that I have to force myself not to like them. They just dropped two of three to the Marlins - that's something the Nats would do. They lost two games off their lead over the course of a weekend - sounds familiar. They're talking about shutting down one of their starters because of innings and ligaments and Scott Boras - well, it'd be nice for the Nats to have company when it comes to that kind of stupidity.

So we're hitting the Mets at their Natsiest. That's good, because they can send us to game over this very week if they get their crap together and the Nats regress to their second most recent state.

Europe Update: Europe actually put out an album this year. They're big in Sweden, I guess. Please enjoy the first single and title track, "War of Kings."

Keep the Dog Far Hence

Sir James George Frazer posited that in pre-historic fertility cults, a sacred king representing the sun was ritually murdered to ensure a good harvest. It seems like a pretty disruptive way to organize your government, and it's probably not true anyway. Regardless, you have to wonder how the doomed king felt about all of this. Did he know?

The Nationals are in St. Louis this week for a series that could turn into the kind of ritual sacrifice that got TS Eliot so excited back in the day. Everything's perfectly set up for it:

• The Nats are 5.5 back. 
• Time may be slowing down, but it is still moving ahead and, from the Nats' perspective, running out. 
• It's getting to be harvest time.
• The Nats are the reigning kings of the National League East and thus representative of the sun.
• The Cardinals are far, far better at baseball. 

It's the baseball equivalent of drugging the king, dressing him up like a stalk of wheat, and telling him to look over there while you prepare your stone axe for the mortal bonk. 

I'm guessing that's how they did it. I wasn't there.

Meanwhile, the Mets get to play the Phillies. The Nats get the best team on the road; the Mets get the worst team at home. You have to appreciate the symmetry.

My point is that if you haven't yet given up on the Nats, you might not have any choice by the time these series conclude. They have squandered a comfortable-seeming lead and spent enough time staggering around like a recently-bonked king that merely playing well isn't going to make any difference.

To paraphrase the last thing Anne Bonny ever said to her pirate boyfriend, had the Nats fought like men, they needn't have been hang'd like dogs.

A True Story

I'm finding this all very tedious. The Nationals are 6.5 half games behind the Mets; 10 games out of the wild card. They win some; they lose some. The poor bastards who have to write about this team every day force themselves to find narratives after every game, but your narrative is only as good as tomorrow's starting pitcher.

It is - let's face it - unlikely that the Nats are going to make the playoffs. MLB's official odds put the chance at less than one in ten. Not impossible, but nothing more than a Padres or an Orioles fan can expect. Watching Nats games is thus less compelling than it used to be. As much as Carpenter and FP will deny it, we're just biding our time until the mathematicians say it's over.

Key: The Nats are the one that sucks.

I'm going to tell you a true story here. I had an outbreak of gnats in my house. There's no need to panic - the source has been identified, and crafty traps have been lain. It's just a matter of time before the last one perishes.

That's how I spend my evenings now: Waiting for the gnats to die.

Minnie Churl

I checked to see if everything still sucks, and it does.

Is it churlish to be unhappy with merely winning a series rather than sweeping it? Maybe. I don't know. I'm comfortable with my churlishness. Call me Churlie Hustle. Churl Haggard. Churles the Second, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.

What's going to happen now is that the damn Mets are going to stroll into Coors Field like they own the place, and then will proceed to own the place.

The Nationals, meanwhile, seem likely to take one of three at home from the Brewers.

If I sound pessimistic, it's only because everything sucks, up to and including my favorite baseball team.

It sounds like Ichiro is going to return to the Marlins next year.

That led me to reflect on how it sure seems like Ichiro is terrible now except when he's playing the Nats. I was relieved to discover that the statistics back up my impression.

Ichiro is hitting .262 overall, .245 against not the Nats, and a pretty impressive .394 against Washington.

So here's to the Nats for geting us closer to lots of discussions about whether Ichiro has more hits than Pete Rose. The answer to that question, by the way, is and will continue to be "No."

The Big Difference

My experiment in quantum baseball physics was a failure. I didn't watch one single pitch of that series, but nevertheless the Nationals are 3.5 games behind the Mets. I feel like it's below my station even to look at the Wild Card standings, but the Nats are 6.5 games away from baseball's very worst kinda-sorta playoff spot.

I'm just going to copy and paste myself, because it sure sounds like that series turned out the same as the last time the Nats faced the Dodgers.

The narrative seems to be that the Nats ran into a "gauntlet of aces," so who can blame them for losing? The Dodgers threw reigning MVP Clayton Kershaw, unpleasant weirdo Zack Greinke, and even Mike Bolsinger at us - we should be happy we won one of them! 

Which, I mean, yeah, it's tough to hit Kershaw and Greinke, just as it's tough to watch Kershaw's Subway commercial or (I'm guessing) have a conversation with Greinke. 

But what do we think is going to happen when we get to the playoffs? Hitting tough pitchers is how you win a World Series, dammit. The opposition isn't going to be running Jerome Williams out there in October.  

If you can't score runs off good pitchers, you lose. My evidence for this is the 2014 postseason, in which the Nationals couldn't even score runs off the remains of Tim Hudson and Jake Peavy, and they lost.

So this series loss is not something to brush off as bad starting rotation timing. The playoffs are nothing but bad timing. They don't let the Bolsingers pitch in October; you have to hit the good ones.

Change "Mike" to "Brett" and "Bolsinger" to "Anderson," and everything I wrote back in July is still true.

The big difference between then and now is that on July 21, I more or less assumed that the Nats were going to have a chance to play badly in the postseason.

Shrödinger's Nats

Legendary physicist Erwin Shrödinger didn't get HBO, so he had to wait to watch Game of Thrones until it came out on DVD. You'd find him in his lab at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies with his hands clamped over his ears, yelling "No spoilers!" while his colleagues discussed events.

That's Austrian for "When is season 5 coming out?"

Shrödinger realized that, because of quantum something or other, as long as he hadn't seen what happened on Game of Thrones, it hadn't actually happened. I know it doesn't make sense, but this is all according to physics.

This has been illustrated with a helpful parable about doing terrible things to a cat. We're against that kind of thing here at Distinguished Senators, so we went with the HBO thing.

The same principle applies to baseball games that start so late there's no way you're going to watch them. Let's face it - the Nationals are very likely to lose ground this week. But - and once again, this is physics talking - if I don't watch it and don't look at the results the next morning, it never happened.

You know how when you're a kid and there are monsters under your bed, they can't get you if you pull the covers over your head and don't whatever you do look at them? That's what I'm doing this week.

If you care about the Nats, don't tell me what happens.

Saltalamacchiato

This isn't happening against top men. The Diamondbacks aren't any good. Jarrod Saltalamacchia ("jump the stain"?), who wasn't good enough to play for the Marlins, is clowning the Nationals.

But not as much as they're clowning themselves. You win championships by doing the little things. There is no littler thing than throwing the ball to first base. It's baseball's quantum. Aaron Barrett couldn't seem to handle it, though.

Other little things include not issuing a walk when the bases are loaded (they did that one twice) and not getting outpitched by Tyler Moore.

I've had this feeling for a while now that the Nats are doomed once the playoffs start because they're shoddy at fundamentals and have a manager who's always thinking three moves behind.

I'm not so concerned about that anymore, because now I don't think they'll make the playoffs at all.

I am this worried.

The Mets are two games ahead, they're about to play a bunch of patsies, and they seem to be propelled by Destiny, who is an idiot.

The Nats are two games behind, they can't beat also-rans at home, and they refuse to tell Jayson Werth to sit down and not play baseball.

Today I was reduced to checking if the Nats would at least get a Wild Card berth.

They're three and a half games out.

First Loser

Why are all these terrible things happening to me? I try to be a good person. Like halfwit LA rackets kingpin Mickey Cohen, I have killed no men that in the first place didn't deserve killing.

The example I try to live up to.

You're not always rewarded for doing the right thing. Mickey Cohen went to prison and got brained with a lead pipe. And here I am looking at the blue, orange, and undeserving hindquarters of the New York Mets.

The Nationals' view

Matt Williams put in another masterpiece of bad managing last night. Doug Fister went into a frenzy of charity, anointing three new Doug's Dudes. (Honestly, that homer to Nick Ahmed is probably worthy of a whole Doug's Dingers post, but I'm all out of jokes about that.) After five, Fister was clearly done, but Williams sent him out to hit anyway. I don't know why Williams hates taking pitchers out of the game, but he's awfully reluctant to do it even when everyone knows it needs to be done. Cf. Joe Ross on Saturday.

Still, a good manager wouldn't have won that game. Even if you take out Doug Fister at the exact right time (i.e., while he's warming up), you don't win if you don't score.

I'm starting to think that acquiring a closer who never gets to close didn't solve all the Nats' problems.

Meanwhile, Yoenis Cespedes, whom the Nats should have at least attempted to get, drove in four runs as the Mets - who seem to be some kind of idiot team of idiot destiny - romped all over the Marlins.

At Least

I said the Nationals didn't have enough offense, and they don't.

I said Matt Williams was going to bumble them out of any chance of winning anything, and I was right.

Jeff Passan goes in hella hard on Williams here.

The reigning NL Manager of the Year hasn't acquitted himself as much of a tactician in his year and a half on the job, and his performance over the weekend did nothing to sway his reputation otherwise. It was bad enough that two unnecessary intentional walks backfired Saturday. Parking Storen and Papelbon in the bullpen for the entire series showed a troublesome adherence to standard principles more open-minded managers long ago ignored.

It's funny - Williams comes off so well when you hear him talk. He seems competent, and he uses really big words, especially for a major league manager. I think I heard him say "obstreperous" in a pregame interview once.

I'm sure that's how he got the job. Mike Rizzo already liked him, and I bet he aced the interview. "Sure, he's never managed before, but he was a really good player, and he said 'ebullient'! And 'abjure'! He even used them correctly. As far as I know."

But it's one thing to sound like a smartypants fancy lad when Charlie Slowes and Dave Jageler and lobbing softballs at you; it's quite another thing to run a baseball team successfully.

Williams can't do it, and it's too bad, and we're pretty much screwed. Even if the Nats do recover from this weekend's disaster and win the division - which is more likely than not - he's going to run into a much better manager in the playoffs and get styled on.

If the Nats don't make the playoffs, at least he's fired, right?

Results

Hey there, baseball fans. Doug Fister from your Washington Nationals here with an update on the Doug's Dingers program.

You know, there are a lot of charities out there, and they're not all equal. You've heard the stories about so-called charitable groups that keep all the money for themselves and don't get anything done. That's hard to forgive - I don't even think making The Score makes up for it!

You don't have to worry about that with Doug's Dingers, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. Doug's Dingers gets results!

Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson were toiling in obscurity, which is to say Atlanta. Everyone had forgotten about Uribe, and people thought Johnson was a chick. I know I did!

But look what happened - two patented Doug's Dingers later, and suddenly both of my dudes get acquired by the Mets. Now they have something to play for, and that's what I call results.

People thought I was crazy to intentionally give up home runs to players who weren't very good. Or at least unethical. But when I see the faces of these Doug's Dudes when they get the good news that, thanks in part to me grooving a fastball right down the middle to them, they're back in the playoff hunt - well that, makes it all worth it.

Speaking of those Mets, they just picked up my old buddy Tyler Clippard. They're really going for it up there, huh? Makes me wish I could give up a homer to myself!

Utopia

That was a close one. We were a baby's head's breadth away from disaster.

If it weren't for Michael A. Taylor, a man with the body of a man and the head of a baby's head, driving in a couple runs in the 8th and then stealing second and scoring another one, we'd be in real trouble: headed to Pittsburgh to face a superior team while only one game ahead of the damn Mets, who refuse to acknowledge the Nationals as their betters and stop trying.

Note how his hand is too big for his head. Because it is a baby's head. The head of a baby.

Thanks to Taylor, we're living in some kind of Elysian Shangri-La-Ass Utopia: headed to Pittsburgh to face a superior team while two games ahead of the damn Mets.

So things could be better, and my prescription hasn't changed. We need some offense. We need Aroldis Chapman. We need to set up a GoKickMe so we can afford Aroldis Chapman.

We'll see what happens. I'm just going to sit here pushing myself back into the sofa cushions as I watch my nightmares come true.

Wolves

We're all still furious at Marvin Hudson for throwing Bryce Harper out of the game for basically nothing, right? Even though we won? I've calmed some since it happened, but I spent some time last night musing on how much I would enjoy seeing major league umpire Marvin Hudson suspended or fired or torn asunder by wolves.

Cooler heads have since prevailed. I mean, at least he tried to help us out by getting Matt Williams out of there too.

What I do not find convincing is the argument that Harper shouldn't be removed from baseball games because people paid to see him. This line of thinking was all over the place last night, as exemplified in this ESPN piece that combines the idea with one of those Mastercard "priceless" jokes that would have been hackneyed ten years ago.

Washington Nationals ticket: $60.  

Bryce Harper jersey T-shirt: $30.  

The chance to see Marvin Hudson eject Harper in the third inning: Absolutely ridiculous.

It was ridiculous, but the first two lines do not contribute in any way to the ridiculousness. Harper deserved his ejection a week ago in Arizona, and the price of tickets or how many people wanted to see him had nothing to do with it. Would Harper's ejection last night have been hunky-dory if the fans had gotten in for free or if the stands had been empty? Does an outburst by Harper deserve more leeway than an identical blowup by, say, Tyler Moore, whom no one pays to see? I don't think we want an NBA-style caste system in baseball.

At most, the exorbitant price of a Bryce Harper jersey T-shirt should increase by one the number of ravening wolves unleashed on Marvin Hudson.

The Nationals did win, and the Mets of course lost. The Nats now have a day off to reflect on how they're in first place all by themselves, and the fact that it should have happened in April doesn't make it any less sweet.

The Mets, meanwhile, have a few hours before the Cardinals resume beating up on them to reflect on how nice it was to be in first for a while and how they're like Icarus. Icarus, you may recall, flew too close to the sun before his being absolutely terrible at flying kicked in and he died. Similarly, the Mets flew high for a while before they remembered that they're terrible at baseball and crashed back to earth.

The Mets Suck by  Jacob Peter Gowy (c. 1660)

Delayed

I was hoping to be able to slap together a quick post about how we're finally and for good in first place, but the Cardinals let us down last night. First they break Drew Storen, now this.

Did you see that game? The Mets always look idiotic, but they took it to a new level on Monday with those ridiculous Norman Schwarzkopf costumes. They looked like they were trick or treating in 1991. Except even sillier than that, since camo stops working when you put your hideous Met colors all over it and wear it with striped white pants.

"Trick or treat!"
"Oh, aren't you cute! What are you dressed as?"
"An asshole."

So it didn't happen last night, but it'll happen soon enough. Maybe tonight.

Bryce Harper won his second straight Player of the Week award, an honor that I guess is important enough to capitalize.

This isn't news to you, I'm sure, but he really is amazing to watch right now. Harper's at-bats alternate between clinical detachment, as he calmly watches a pitch an inch inside go past him, and sudden, brutal violence when he swings. It's actually kind of unsettling.

A typical Harper AB goes something like this:
Ball 1.
Ball 2.
JUMP SCARE!

Victory Lap

I don't know about you guys, but I am officially No Longer Worried.

Marlins? Taken care of.
Braves? Very much taken care of.
Mets? Well, that's just a matter of time.

Let's face it - back when the Nationals were tied with the Phillies for last place, it wasn't the Marlins, Braves, and Mets against whom they were competing. It was themselves.

It's almost as though the Nats were taking us on a tour of baseball history. On offense, the Nats recreated the magical year of 1968, when the Yippies ran wild, Apollo Something or Other orbited the Moon, and baseball players couldn't hit baseballs.

On defense they took us even further into the past by mimicking the forgotten, probably mustachioed gentlemen playing the game in 1868. Back then, they'd hadn't thought to bring gloves with them on the fielding job, and and a cleanly-handled base ball was as much of a novelty as an electric street light. Certain Nationals took this time-travel role-playing even further, fielding their positions as though they'd had an arm blown off at Antietam.

The last four series proved that the Nationals have dropped the Mr. Peabody and Sherman act and returned to the present day. The Mets will soon be swatted out of the way, and everything's going to be just fine.

Consider the rest of the season a 130-game victory lap.

We're Rolling We're Rolling We're Rolling We're Rolling-uh

Imagine how confused the Phillies were. "This . . . this can't be possible," Ruben Amaro muttered as he scanned the National League East standings. "We took every precaution; our calculations were exact. We even signed Jeff Francoeur. The experts said there was no way we weren't finishing last!"

I don't know why the Phillies are so desperate to finish last, and I don't much care. I will say that their plight reminds me of the mid-1990s, when the Phils weren't trying very hard to win and we were supposed to pretend that Philadelphia was a "small market." I remember standing around in my giant baggy pants listening to Soul Coughing and trying really hard to ignore that Philly had, like, three times as many people as Atlanta.

Amaro no longer has to worry that he should have tried harder to give away Chase Utley: the Nats are no longer in last place, and the Phillies can settle in there for the long haul.

Meanwhile, in the higher reaches of the division, the Mets got taken down a peg just like I wished for. They're still in first, but they know it won't last. Previously unbeaten at home and with a winning record against their superiors (i.e., us), they are now very much beaten at home and with a losing record against their superiors. Ha ha.

Now the Marlins come in with their weirdly Nationals-esque narrative. Terrible at the start of the season, they're currently on some kinda hot streak. If we can win this series, we'll be at least in third place and maybe even over .500. If that happens, I won't be talking so much about firing Matt Williams, although I will still be thinking it every moment I'm awake.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get me a Livan bobblehead.

Update: Success! Looks just like him.