Old School Baseball?

That would be Shank's words, not mine:

Old-school Nationals, at last, are first

HOUSTON — They were born as the Montreal Expos in 1969 and made the playoffs only once in 36 seasons. Montreal’s best team, the 1994 Expos, might have won a World Series, but there was no World Series that year because of a work stoppage.

When the Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005, they were wards of the state, literally owned by Major League Baseball. MLB hired their manager and general manager. Until this year, the Nats never won a playoff series. They were legitimate heirs to the old Washington Senators.

And now they are Faustian champions of the baseball world, with a team that started the season 19-31.

Shank expands on the aforementioned 'old-school' angle:

The Nationals are an homage to old-school baseball. They rely on scouts more than analytics. They still have guys in the front office who chomp on cigars and go with their instincts. General manager Mike Rizzo has a staff that includes six former scouting directors, four former managers, and two former GMs. All of Washington’s scouts played pro baseball. The operation is about people more than numbers. They’ll take a lunch over a launch angle.

The rest of it is game recappage, etc.

Shank On Game 6 Of The World Series

It's pretty much what you'd expect:

This World Series was a dud. Then Game 6 happened, and now we get a Game 7

HOUSTON — Something about Game 6.

Game 6 gave us Carlton Fisk and the home run for the ages in 1975. It gave us Don Denkinger blowing the World Series for the Cardinals with a bad call in 1985. It gave us Bill Buckner and a late Saturday nightmare in 1986. It gave us Kirby Puckett’s walkoff in the Metrodome in 1991.

Game 6 is only truly great when it gives us Game 7 and that is what we now have. Stephen Strasburg and the Washington Nationals stunned the hardball universe Tuesday, beating Justin Verlander and the Astros, 7-2, to force Game 7 at Minute Maid Park.

UPDATE - Fixed the typo in the headline - sorry!

Shank On Game Five & The Rest Of The Series

Pretty good column by Shank, actually:

An Astros World Series championship sure feels inevitable

WASHINGTON — It feels like the old Senators could have done better than this.

The World Series is not over, of course. Stephen Strasburg could mow down the Astros on Tuesday and then anything could happen in a Game 7, right? That’s what Kevin Millar would say.

But a ’Stros championship feels inevitable after watching Houston sweep the Washington Nationals three straight by a 19-3 aggregate at Nationals Park. The Astros hit three two-run homers in Sunday’s 7-1 win.

The Nationals were already having a bad weekend when righthander Max Scherzer awoke Sunday morning with neck spasms and was unable to raise his pitching arm. Already reeling from back-to-back dull losses on their home field, the Nats no longer had their trusty ace available for a critical Game 5 of the World Series.

That's Because They'll Let Anybody In

48th MLB park for me pic.twitter.com/c9ngvaPB0K

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) October 25, 2019

Reader responses were positive and constructive:

You’ve trolled at 48 parks?

— Johnny Fontane (@JohnnyFontane1) October 25, 2019

It’s all about you Shank

— Gil Aguiar (@GilAguiar5) October 25, 2019

And something negative to say about each one

— DMD (@dmd031474) October 25, 2019

Cut your son off after the the 4th inning cuz; well, you know

— Richard Chavez (@richavez81) October 25, 2019

Is that also the pick number you had at the intern draft?

— Pete (@SawDustMaker88) October 25, 2019

Do they hate you yet?

— Tony Diliberto (@del4819) October 25, 2019

The Bad Old Days

If it weren't for the fact that there's always a losing team, Shank would have nothing to write about.

Is that an evergreen comment or what? While this column's of better quality than his previous one, it's because Shank writes about a theme (losing / being terrible at something) that he's eminently qualified to write about:

Looking back at the bad old days of Washington baseball

WASHINGTON — The World Series this weekend returns to our nation’s capital for the first time since 1933. Like everything else in this town, it’s complicated.

Major League Baseball in Washington is a study in failure and unrequited love. This is a city that lost two big league franchises in a span of less than a dozen years, a city that suffered through 33 summers of Baseball Prohibition after the perennial basement-dwelling expansion Senators bolted for Texas in 1972.

The expansion Senators were a punch line when I grew up in Central Massachusetts in the 1960s. The old adage about the original Senators — Washington, first in war, first in peace, last in the American League — still applied to the 1960s version. We took comfort in this in Red Sox Nation. The Senators were just about the only team annually worse than the Young Yaz Red Sox.

The Provincial Shaughnessy - A Continuing Series

Here's another column template for which Shank has based countless columns on - it's all about Boston!

HOUSTON — The Houston Astros and Washington Nationals are engaged in the 115th World Series and a lot of folks in Boston have tuned out because the games are too late, the pace is too slow and . . . in case you hadn’t noticed . . . the Red Sox are not here.

But the Sox are always here, don’t you know? Everything in life traces back to New England and the Red Sox. So here’s a clip-and-save, handy-dandy guide to how New England and the Red Sox are represented in a Astros-Nationals World Series:

And this is part of what Shaughnessy considers 'representation':

■ If the Nationals win the World Series it might help the Red Sox in their PR campaign if they have to trade Mookie Betts. Bryce Harper was The Franchise for Washington, but the Nats couldn’t re-sign him and then went out and won the National League pennant anyway. A championship for the Nats makes it easier for the Sox to justify trading their best player. They can point to Washington and say, “Look what happened after the Nationals lost Harper.” Meanwhile, if you are thinking about a logical place to trade Betts, consider the White Sox.

■ The Red Sox have David Price in the middle of a seven-year contract that pays him $31 million per season. Chris Sale next year starts a five-year, $145 million deal that puts him on the threshold of Price. This series has Stephen Strasburg (seven years, $175 million), Max Scherzer (seven years, $210 million), Zack Greinke (six years, $206.5 million), and Justin Verlander (two years, $66 million). It also has Houston righty Gerrit Cole, who is a free agent and will be making more than any of them by the time spring training rolls around.

To save the reader some time, these two brief examples purporting to demonstrate how 'the Red Sox are always here' - baseless speculation and player salary comparison that amounts to a huge non sequitur, for lack of a better way to explain the useless nature of that comparison. There are other attributes of this column that make it suck like a bilge pump but you don't need me to point the rest of them out, as you may be familiar with them by now. If he was trying to make a convincing case about this series being 'the Red Sox are always here', he fails poorly.