New kids on block meet old guard in NL championship
WASHINGTON When the delirium dies down, when this historic victory sinks in, the Washington Nationals will remember the stakes of a season living on.
They must prepare for another fight, a longer one, against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Nationals are the new kids on the block in their first National League Championship Series, while the Cardinals are the old guard, the establishment, the holder of the second most World Series titles with 11.
The NLCS is a place the Nationals have never been, but it is not unfamiliar. This team, as it will tell you, has been playing elimination games since May 24, since the day it returned to Washington at 1931 and its manager Dave Martinez was seemingly destined for the door. The Nationals are not that team anymore. They are the team that got healthy, hit and tied the Los Angeles Dodgers for the best record in the National League after the season’s 50th game (74-38). They are the team that overtook the Dodgers when it mattered most, in the NL Division Series. They are the team that flew to St. Louis Thursday morning with a chance to put themselves in the World Series.
The Cardinals present a serious and immediate challenge to whatever dreams the Nationals have. It might not seem like it, because the NL Central champion won the fewest games of any team in the LDS (92), but the Cardinals possess traits that make a club difficult to deal with in October.
They have a capable starting staff, a deep bullpen and a solid defence that didn’t make more than two errors in a single game all season. They have some experience with catcher Yadier Molina, starter Adam Wainwright and outfielder Dexter Fowler. They, perhaps most dangerously of all, have confidence. They sprang a 10-run first inning on the Atlanta Braves in their own Game 5 and bounced the NL East champion from the post-season with a 13-2 victory.
Manager Mike Shildt embodied the mindset his team will bring to their series with the Nationals as he stood in the visitor’s clubhouse in Atlanta. The 51-year-old usually appears deferential in his cap and glasses, but the hard-charging Tony Larussa disciple emerged in the clubhouse after the game. He delivered an expletive-laden speech that, unbeknownst to him, one of his younger players livestreamed on social media.
“No one (expletive) with us. Ever,” he said. “Now, I don’t give a(n expletive) who we play. We’re going to (expletive) them up.”
In Game 1, the Nationals likely will start Aníbal Sanchez and the Cardinals likely will counter with one of their veteran right-handers, either Wainwright or Miles Mikolas. The four aces in this series — the Cardinals’ Jack Flaherty and the Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg, Max Scherzer and Patrick Corbin — are unavailable because they gave all they had just to get here. (Flaherty started Game 5 and the team decided not to sit him after the explosive first inning.)
Yet, for the Nationals, Sanchez might be an advantageous matchup. The veteran right-hander baffled the Dodgers with his offspeed pitches in Game 3 and he could do the same to a Cardinals team that has struggled all season with breaking balls and off-speed pitches. The Cardinals have offensive talent, such as first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and left-fielder Marcell Ozuna, but they are not a juggernaut. Their team on-base percentage, runs scored and home runs were the worst of any playoff team and they’re susceptible to simple adjustments.
The Braves flummoxed the Cardinals in a Game 2 win while throwing 12 four-seam fastballs in 116 total pitches — something the Nationals could look to exploit with Strasburg’s curveball, Corbin’s slider and Sanchez’s offspeed weapons.
The biggest questions for the Nationals heading into this series are the availability of Victor Robles, their starting centre-fielder out with a hamstring strain, and Kurt Suzuki, the personal catcher to their top pitchers who left Wednesday’s game after being hit by a pitch. The Cardinals are healthy after veteran infielder Kolten Wong returned from a hamstring injury that kept him out for nearly two weeks. He played throughout the NLDS.
The Cardinals, in some ways, resemble the Nationals. Both teams were hobbled to varying degrees to start the season only to rebound. Both teams rely on mostly veterans with some youth. Both teams are led by old-school managers who deploy flexible utility players (Washington’s Game 5 hero Howie Kendrick, St. Louis’ Tommy Edman) and embrace parts of the game analytics suggest are detrimental. They like sacrifices and bunts. They tied for the NL lead in steals with 116. They talk about run production with the word “manufacture” instead of “math.”
Perhaps the sharpest divide between these teams is in the bullpen. The Nationals have two trustworthy relievers, Daniel Hudson and Sean Doolittle, and a best-ofseven series will make it difficult to conceal this weakness. Yet the Cardinals bullpen, which had the fifth-best ERA in baseball this season (3.92), looked shaky at times against the Braves.
This is particularly true for closer Carlos Martínez. The right-hander was erratic and told reporters he was struggling with the recent death of someone close to him.
Each team will use its best and though the Nationals might have a liability in the bullpen, it might hold up better against a weaker offence. Right now, though, it’s impossible to say. After all, the Nationals weren’t supposed to beat the Dodgers in the first place.