The Natspos Live

Midway through Thursday afternoon’s Mets-Nationals game, about the time I suspected Washington’s overcoming of New York’s lead was not going to be reversible, I remembered the Nationals used to be the Expos. It’s not as if I’d wholly forgotten from whence the Nationals moved following the 2004 season, it’s just that the Quebec connection long ago faded from contemporary concern. For the first year after the Expos had become the Nats, I considered them a hybrid: the Natspos. Montreal had been such a permanent part of the Metscape from the moment I’d begun paying attention to baseball, it was difficult to not sense their presence despite the new surroundings to which they’d moved and the new identity they’d assumed. But that was mostly 2005. Soon enough, the Nationals were the Nationals, and the Expos seemed an ancient franchise from another era.

On Thursday, the Natspos lived. The Nationals of 2025 seemed to morph into the Expos of any number of years when the Mets verged on indisputable excellence and the Expos weren’t supposed to present much of a challenge, yet did. Years like 1985. Years like 1987. Years like 1990. Years like 1998. Years when a few more wins against the Expos probably would have pushed the Mets into playoffs they wound up missing. Those Mets would have accepted a few more wins against any National League opponent to get where they needed to go, but in the moment, it was inevitably the Expos who served as particular pain in the ass. The Nationals did something similar in September 2007, to name another infamous year, but they didn’t come off as quite so, shall we say, Exponential about it (whereas the 2007 — and 2008 — Marlins did).

Well, it’s 2025, and whoever that team is that plays home games in a city that seems to have bigger problems than headquartering a last-place ballclub certainly rose up and overcame the team that came to town likely thinking it was getting a break in its schedule. The last-place Nationals took two of three from the contending Mets. I’ll leave it to the Washington faithful to decide how badly they needed this boost to their self-esteem. The Mets had more practical aspirations. They needed to take this series to firmly establish they had regathered their momentum.

They didn’t and they haven’t.

Nationals Park, as lightly populated as Olympic Stadium in its final seasons of MLB benign neglect, saw the Mets take an early lead and build on it, much as a playoff team does when facing a cellar-dweller. Per the standings, the Mets are a playoff team. It seems impossible to fathom that after watching the Mets for the past two-plus months, but if the season ended today…oh, don’t you wish? No point in pushing it. With 35 games remaining, the season appears on track to finish before you know it, and not a moment later.

The Mets were up, 3-0, once. There was a leadoff home run from Francisco Lindor, a record-setter for that sort of first-inning thing, and there was a third-inning homer from Starling Marte. Lindor’s couldn’t help but be solo, and Marte’s came with the bases empty and two out. Something about all Met scoring in a given early inning generally makes me uneasy, but one swing equaling one run isn’t really a bad deal. In the first and the third, each fella who swung for the fences made the most his respective opportunity at the instant he went deep.

The top of the fourth was a different story. The top of the fourth bulged with opportunity. The bottom of the order was coming through as best the bottom of our order can. Brett Baty, who’s been hot, singled with one out. Tyrone Taylor, who was playing only because Brandon Nimmo’s neck prevents him from admiring the Washington Monument, walked. Taylor reaching base is any capacity is as surprising as Taylor reaching the field. Cedric Mulllns, who was brought in to be some sort of improvement over Taylor, singled to right, and we had the bases loaded. Opportunity!

Hayden Senger, in for the bruised and battered Luis Torrens, who’s in there most games for the bruised and battered Francisco Alvarez, delivered about all you could ask of your Quadruple-A backup catcher. He flied to deep enough center to score Baty from third and move Taylor up from second. Senger entered his at-bat with no major league runs batted in. Now he had one. If you saw or heard it, you saw or heard something unprecedented in the life of Hayden Senger. It wasn’t a gamebreaker, but it wasn’t unproductive.

The bottom of the order did all it could. It cobbled together one run. The order turned over. Lindor, he who hit his eighth leadoff home run of the season in the first, and singled to start the third (before getting thrown trying to steal second), had a shot at putting this game if not out of reach of the Nationals, then beyond their easy grasp. It was a time to bury the team in last place a little further.

But Lindor grounded to third. The rally produced nothing else. On the surface, that shouldn’t have been overly concerning, because the Mets are, per the standings, a playoff team, and the Nationals are last, and Sean Manaea was tossing a shutout as if Sean Manaea had never stopped being the Sean Manaea of the second half of 2024. His first three innings were a strikeout-laden breeze. I went to a game in the first half of 2024 when Manaea piled up strikeouts but gave up too many runs for those to matter. He came a long way after last year’s All-Star break. He became the kind of pitcher we didn’t want to go without when he tested free agency. He became the pitcher whose absence we’d regret when he went on the IL in Spring Training.

Now he was more back than he’d been in any start since his mid-July return. Three innings of zeroes and little sweat. The bottom of the fourth, with that three-run lead in place, grew a little troublesome, but resulted in just one National run. A 3-1 edge; Manaea more or less cruising; Mets still the team with the playoff-qualifying record; the Nats still super out of it in the NL East. What else could you want to wind down a late Thursday afternoon?

I wanted to relax, but then the Exponess of the situation kicked in. The Mets walked a couple of times in the fifth, but didn’t do anything with those runners. The Nats came up in their half of the fifth, and they chipped away. A leadoff single. A bunt to Pete Alonso that Pete threw to second, which didn’t register an out. Manaea hit CJ Abrams. The bases were loaded. Paul DeJong was up. Paul DeJong, who killed the Mets two series per year as a Cardinal, has found his true calling as a division rival. Here he lifted a sacrifice fly. It was 3-2, Mets. Then another walk to reload the bases, Manaea up to 91 pitches. Geez, that happened fast.

Sean goes out, extending into veritable perpetuity the unfathomable nobody but David Peterson going six streak. In comes Tyler Rogers, who was obtained to lock down seventh innings. It’s the fifth. He’s going to throw sinkers and, somehow, you know they’re not going to sink as he wants them. One, to Riley Adams, sinks into center, where Mullins picks it up and throws it back in to instigate a rundown after two Nats score. Rogers and Mullins collaborating on a futile sequence seems appropriate. They were each acquired as theoretical upgrades. With them on board, things have remained solidly in quicksand.

Washington leads, 4-3. Montreal, determinedly and understandably uninterested in this game as it is determinedly and understandably uninterested in every Nationals game, nonetheless feels something tingle. They don’t know why. It is as if some phantom municipal limb has come to life via a distantly familiar sensation. It’s kind of pleasant. It’s almost Expolike, the city thinks for a moment, but no, that can’t be. We haven’t had that spirit here since 2004.

Perhaps I’m projecting.

In the bottom of the sixth, after the generation of further offense has ceased to interest the Mets, Rogers continues pitching, and the Mets continue sinking. Mullin comes close to catching what turns into an RBI single, the way Rogers comes close to getting out of jams. The game gets a little less close at Nats 5 Mets 3, Expos haunting the spectral premises. Who’s that in the on-deck circle — Rondell White? Tim Wallach? Boots Day?

We could pretend through the tops of the seventh and eighth that maybe we could string a couple of hits together and grab our lead back, but we were only borrowing the lead to begin with. And, to string hits together, you’d have to start with one. In the bottom of the eighth, Ryne Stanek, who’s maintained Syndergaardian flow beneath his cap if not vintage Thor command around the plate, comes in to, among other items, shake James Wood out of his deep slump. Wood’s three-run homer thrusts the Nats ahead, 9-3, and ensures any hits the Mets suddenly collect in the ninth will make only for sumptuous box score window dressing (window dressing for Low-Leverage Barbie’s Dream House sold separately). With two out and nobody on, Lindor records his third hit of the game; each progressively less impactful than the one before it. Juan Soto completes the day doing what some Met has to do in order to place a cherry atop it. Juan strikes out.

The Mets have now won three of their last five, which is the most charitable/perverse interpretation of their recent trendline. The Mets have also lost 16 of 21, a more accurate assessment of their plummeting pattern. They lead Cincinnati by a half-game for a Wild Card spot that clearly wants nothing to do with the Mets, much as we, their chronic fans, too often want nothing to do with them, either (yet here we are, enmeshed in their foibles as the true co-dependents we insist on being). If momentum is to be regathered, the garnering will have to begin with the ball slated to fire from the right hand of Nolan McLean Friday night. Momentum, you have surely heard, is only as good as the next day’s starting pitcher, which 2025 experience tells us is the worst thing you can be told as a Mets fan four of every five nights. If David Peterson is your next day’s starting pitcher, you instinctively make room on that table where you stick everything in the likely event momentum will arrive by 10 PM the next business day. If anybody else starts, you don’t disturb all your crap that’s otherwise gathering dust. McLean’s first start, however, indicated that equation might change. Still, he’s making only his second start, so how much you want weigh him down with expectations is up to you. Expecting anything consistent out of the Met lineup — anything positive — is its own fool’s errand.

At least we don’t have to withstand the ghosts of the Expos this weekend. What a relief! Now to check to see where the Mets road trip sends them next, while I take this large swig of water…