The Nationals are 20-17 and trail the Phillies and Braves only by small margins, a small miracle when you consider the physical toll taken on their bodies 37 games into the 2018 campaign.
On April 25, they played a three-hour-and-thirteen-minute game, resulting in a 15-2 win, against the Giants in San Francisco. That game ended at 3:58 p.m. Pacific. After a five-hour flight that loses three hours across time zones, assuming four hours passed between leaving AT&T Park and takeoff, the Nationals would have touched down in D.C. sometime around 4 a.m. Eastern on April 26, their latest day off.
The Nationals next get a day off on Monday, May 14. Coming off Sunday Night Baseball at Arizona the night before -- assuming it's only a three-hour game and a four-hour flight -- the Nationals should land in D.C. around 7 a.m. ET on their day off, after only playing 17 games in 17 days on the heels of their last day off (the one that began at 4 a.m. ET on April 26).
MLB schedule makers astonishingly did not see a natural fit for a Nationals day off this past Monday, May 7, leading into yet another east-to-west coast trip.
So after a 5-4 win against Philadelphia on Sunday -- a game which ended at 5:08 p.m. ET -- the Nationals hopped aboard a San Diego-bound jet to begin another west coast swing, their second in less than two weeks, the next day.
GM Mike Rizzo, in his weekly appearance with The Sports Junkies -- sponsored by Burke & Herbert Bank -- was asked how his club didn't get a day off between series against the Phillies and Padres.
"The schedule makers, it's a computer program, first of all," Rizzo said. "You put the criteria in and it spits out a master schedule, which is extremely, extremely cumbersome and difficult to do if you think about all 30 teams and fitting them into these little boxes."
"There's strict rules about time travel and how many timezones you skip," he informed. "Is there a mandatory day off? Now if you were going west to east, there certainly would be and will be a mandatory day off, like when we come home Sunday from Arizona."
"We play that ESPN Sunday night game that starts at 8 o'clock Eastern, so we fly home on our day off," he said. "We'll be flying all night. We'll get to D.C. after the Sunday game, which will be Monday morning, at about 7 a.m., and that's considered our day off."
On the flip side, the Nationals won't have another West Coast trip for the rest of the season, thanks to a grueling April/May travel schedule. And they get another day off on Thursday. After only six days off in two months -- if you can truly even call it that -- the Nats will get a whopping six days off in June.
Twelve days into that exhausting 17-day blitz, the Nats have managed to go 9-3, and have won nine of their last 10 games, with five to go before their next schedule half-day off. They've managed to find their stride amid the toughest part of their schedule all year, but still remain a game-and-a-half back from the Braves and in third place. They were six games back on April 27. Talk about gutting through adversity.
"This season is a grind. It's a very physical job to travel like these guys do," Rizzo said. "The days off that you get, they look good on paper, but when you're flying all night and you get in at 7 o'clock in the morning, is that really a day off? These guys will go home, they'll sleep until 1, 2 o'clock and they'll be groggy the rest of the day. So what have you done on your day off?"
"It's a grueling 162 games in 185 days with day-offs built in, but it's still grueling and these guys deserve a lot of credit for making it through these seasons," he added. "That's why we say this thing is a marathon. And with these two west coast trips in the beginning of the season, it certainly is testing our depth, because of the injuries and the way you travel and perform."
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