The 6-2 victory capped the most unlikely of World Series. The road team won all seven games. That had never happened before. Only the baseball gods can understand how this stuff plays out sometimes. The team that started 19-31 is the World Series champion — for the first time in franchise history, going back to its birth in 1969 as the Montreal Expos, and the first time for a Washington baseball team since the Senators in the halcyon days of 1924.
The Nationals trailed 3-1 in the eighth inning of the wild-card game. They trailed 3-1 in the eighth inning of the final game of the division series against the Dodgers. This time they decided not to wait that long. Manager Dave Martinez likes to say, “Let’s go 1-0 today.” The Nats went 1-0 in the biggest game of the season.
“You know what? This is — I mean, honestly, all these years, all this hard work, this year, the struggles early — I mean, this is what it’s about right here,” Kendrick told Buster Olney in the immediate aftermath of the on-field celebration as Max Scherzer gave him a big hug. “This is what it’s about. I mean, words can’t even describe this feeling. It’s phenomenal. This group of guys that we got here, we fought all year. This makes it sweet. This is so sweet right now.”
“It was fitting that the Washington Nationals’ first World Series title required all 7 games,” writes @TylerKepner. It was “the greatest victory in the history of a luckless franchise in a city that had waited nearly a century for a night like this.” https://t.co/C0n6Iidg8F
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 31, 2019