Photo by MudflapDC
Though last season ended in heartbreak, the Washington Nationals spent the past few months tooling up their roster to come into the new season even stronger than before. With a lineup that features a reigning rookie of the year, an upgraded defense, and consistent hitting throughout, along with a fearsome starting pitching rotation and improved bullpen, the Nats are many prognosticators’ favorites to repeat as division champions and go even deeper into the playoffs.
Unfortunately for superstitious types, those prognosticators include the staff of Sports Illustrated, which is using its baseball preview issue to coronate the Nationals as the odds-on favorite to win this year’s World Series. On paper, that’s great. But it’s also foreboding as Hell.
“Like the ’86 Mets, the 2013 Nationals are the best team on paper at the start of the season,” Tom Verducci writes in the new issue. That Mets team, for what its worth, was led by current Nationals manager Davey Johnson, who will be moving to the front office after this season. “And like that championship team, Washington has young power pitching, a deep bullpen with multiple closers, a blend of power and speed, and an unmistakable swagger.”
That’s all well and good and encouraging to Nationals fans, except for one glaring fact: Sports Illustrated usually gets it wrong when making a consensus pick to win it all. Last year, the Texas Rangers and New York Yankees were the most popular predicted World Series winners among the magazine’s writers; only one scribe, Cliff Corcoran, even guessed correctly that the actual champs, the St. Louis Cardinals, would make it to the World Series. And in 2011, the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies were the most common picks; only Mel Antonen guessed correctly that it would be the San Francisco Giants.
This year, four of seven Sports Illustrated writers making end-of-season guesses—Verducci, Joe Lemire, Jay Jaffe, and Joe Sheehan, are going with the Nationals. We hope they’re right. But in case it all goes horribly wrong, at least we’ll know who to blame.
