David Huzzard: Nationals need a hot streak

With the Nationals' 4-1 victory over the Colorado Rockies on Wednesday evening, they won back-to-back games for the first time since July 29 and 30. It was also the first series that the Nats have won in the month of August. The Nats' recent cold stretch has put them in an unfamiliar position. In 2012 and 2014, I wrote this same column about what it would take to overtake the Nationals, and now the Nats are the team hoping to overtake the Mets.

The good thing for the Nationals is that the Mets aren't exactly running away with the division. The Mets have the fewest wins among the six division leaders and are the only division leaders not at least 10 games over .500. Still the Nats have a lot of ground to make up. If the Mets go .500 in their final 42 games, they'll end up with 85 wins. In order to match this, the Nationals would need to go 25-18 in their final 43 games. That sounds like a record the Nats can obtain, but that is if the Mets go .500.

There is an inverse to that, and the Nationals can help the Mets out with it. The Nationals play the Mets at the beginning of September and then in the last series of the season at the beginning of October. With the way things are headed, that last series of the season could be for the division. The Nationals are going to have to play better than they have for most of the month of July if they are going to make it to that series with hopes of making it for the division, but baseball is a game of streaks.

While the Nationals are owed nothing and the Rockies series could be a blip on the radar, no team stays cold forever. The series win against the Rockies could be the start of a hot stretch for the Nationals and maybe even a win streak. The Washington Nationals haven't won more than three games in a row since June 19-28 when they won eight in a row. With one more game against the Rockies before coming home to play the Brewers, Padres, and Marlins, the Nats could be looking at the beginning of a long winning streak, and they need it.

Baseball is a game of streaks, and the teams that we think of as good end up making the winning streaks longer than the losing streaks. So far in 2015, the Nationals have two losing streaks of six games and two winning streaks of at least six games. Winning streaks are nice, but they aren't the most important thing. They will happen if the Nationals simply start playing better baseball. The more important thing is winning series. The Nationals have already done that against the Rockies, and if they can go 6-3 on the upcoming homestand, that will help to keep them in the race or make up ground.

During the recent losing stretch, every aspect of the game failed the Nationals. Their starting pitchers got rocked, the offense got shut down, and the bullpen was lit up. The players they have are better than they looked during that stretch, but it is because of that stretch that they are 3 1/2 games behind the Mets and need a stretch just as good as that one was bad. Baseball owes no one anything, but it is a game of streaks, and the 2015 Nationals have been prone to month-long stretches of either terrible or great play. For their hope and ours, let's hope that the best hot stretch is yet to come.

David Huzzard blogs about the Nationals at Citizens of Natstown. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidHuzzard. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our regular roster of writers.