MVN - Most Valuable Network

2008 schedule - Better or Worse?

The 2008 schedule has been released (yes, I know it was a couple of days ago.  I’m slow).  The focus, as interested as people were, was on the lack of weekday afternoon games.  As someone who lives about 47 hours away from DC though - this doesn’t really concern me.   That leaves me free to be interested in the general make-up of the schedule and how that may effect the Nats 2008 season.

1) Interleague play.   The Nats played 4 solid teams and Baltimore last year.  4-2 versus Baltimore?  That seems about right.   As for the other teams, Cleveland and Detroit were playoff teams while the Twins and BlueJays hovered around .500.   This year they swap out the Indians, Tigers, and Blue Jays for the Mariners, Angels, and Rangers.   Seems like a nice improvement but really it’s only a small one.  The Angels should be as good as the Indians or Tigers were last year.  The Mariners can’t match that level but the Nats have to head out to Seattle (in the middle of a PIT-SEA-MIN road trip no less).   The Rangers, ok that’s where the small improvement is.  As for the Twins, I think if they don’t lose Santana this year they’ll be better.  Besides that, the series last year had the freaky Levale Speigner beating Johan Santana game.  They also catch the tail end of that odd road swing. 

The Nats went 5-7  last year in non-Oriole interleague.  I don’t see anything better.

1)  Schedule Quirks. 

Last year the Nats had two stretches of 9+ road games that weren’t proceeded by a similar stretch at home.  both times the Nats were dragging by the end of it.  In the beginning of the year the Nats had that crazy 20 road games in 27 games stretch which ended with losing 8 in a row away from home.  In August after trading off six game series home and away for a while, the Nats had a 10 game road stretch that ended with 6 straight losses.  Anything like that this year?

The Nats have a couple of worrisome stretches but nothing as bad.  In the beginning of the year they have that aforementioned odd Pittsburgh - Seattle - Minnesota jaunt, which might be trouble given the road trip before that is a West Coaster (SD / Ari).   But there is a nice 7 game home stretch in between with a couple days off in there.   Could be worse.

Probably a more troublesome stretch follows in Late July early August.   Immediately after the All-Star game they’ll play 9 games on the road including SF and LA, and after a 6 game homestand will head off to Colorado and Milwaukee for 8 games.  Worse yet that second road trip falls smack in the middle of the Nats longest stretch of baseball of the year 20 days from July 29th to August 17th.  If they do feel the effects of the season bearing down on them, it could screw up the homestand that ends that stretch.

On the bright side the Nats both start and end the season nicely.  They play 19 of the last 31 games at home and in the beginning of the year they have a 14 home game in 17 game stretch.  The tiny middle 3-game road trip being a quite reasonable jaunt to Houston with an afternoon game AND a day off prior to arrival. That could be a nice swing for the Nats.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.