Some may have noticed the bottom of the InGame article Game #1 Opening Day marks the 20th in Nats’ history a new section at the bottom of the page, and that is what you see in the image above. And, yes, the link for InGame text above will be listed for every gamer article this season.
TalkNats plans to celebrate the 5 and 100 year anniversary of the two World Series wins by their Washington baseball teams. As we discuss each game in this 2024 season, the bottom of the article will contain a brief summary of the comparable game from each of the 1924 and 2019 seasons. What you saw yesterday was generated using downloaded data for the game results. The links for Box Scores and Standings take advantage of the features at Baseball-Reference. We hope/plan to add other content for interesting games throughout the year.
As Ray W. noted earlier this week in his classic Of Three Forlorn Springs, no one in baseball expected the Senators led by a rookie manager, Bucky Harris, to win anything, and especially the World Series in 1924. And this SABR article highlights Harris’s long career. Everybody probably remembers the local media and social media’s calls to fire the Nationals manager, Dave Martinez, during the first few months on the 2019 season. Despite the challenges, Harris and Martinez won the World Series those years thanks to Bumpy Roads and Lucky Bounces. Should we hope/expect that this year? Almost certainly not, but the cautionary tale is that baseball is unpredictable.
Regardless of the prognosis for this year, as James Earl Jones infamous phrase in the iconic Field of Dreams movie was that “People Will Come.” We will be here talking about all facets of the game, analyzing, over-analyzing, expressing dissatisfaction, and hopefully finding legitimate reasons to praise this 2024 version of the Nationals, Mike Rizzo, Martinez, the Lerners and the players. But it is still baseball, so we will be here, and fans will show up at the stadium and will listen to the radio call and watch the games on TV because that is what we do because the one constant through all the years has been baseball. It’s part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good.
We don’t know when the next Nats’ player will replicate a Juan Soto single that will drive in the winning WC game run after the Ryan Zimmerman broken bat blooper; or the Howie Kendrick home run off of an almost perfectly placed pitch; or the Stephen Strasburg WS MVP performance; and more.
But we can hope and expect that better times are coming.
