Nationals

Nobody in Washington measured the 2019 season the way Juan Soto did. By October he was standing in the outfield at Nationals Park as the Nats closed out a World Series they had no business winning after opening the year 19-31. Stephen Strasburg, drafted years earlier as the arm meant to define the franchise, took the World Series Most Valuable Player award that October, with Max Scherzer and Trea Turner alongside him for a run nobody outside the clubhouse saw coming.

The franchise carries a longer story than that season alone. It started in 1969 as the Montreal Expos, the first Major League Baseball team based outside the United States, and stayed there until 2004, when the league bought the club to keep it from folding and sent it south. Washington had gone without a World Series winner since the Senators took the title in 1924; the Nationals, playing under that name only since 2005, closed the gap by beating the Houston Astros in seven games in 2019.

Before that championship, the division was where the club made its mark, winning the NL East five times — once as the Expos, in 1981, then four more times between 2012 and 2017 under the Nationals name — without ever getting past October. Ryan Zimmerman, the first player the club drafted after the move to Washington, stayed through both the lean years and the title. The rivalry with the Baltimore Orioles, played out as the Beltway Series, and the games against the Philadelphia Phillies remain the fixtures supporters mark on the calendar each year. These days the Nationals are working from a different position than 2019, rebuilding around a younger roster and looking for the next run at the division.