N-A-T-S, Nats, Nats, Nats!
The Washington Nationals are surging into the playoffs. They'll play a home game Tuesday night against the Milwaukee Brewers.
The Nats ran their winning streak to a year-high eight games with an 8-2 victory Sunday over the eliminated Cleveland Indians in a regular-season finale.
"No matter how you start, the objective is to get to the postseason. The boys did that," Nats manager Dave Martinez said. "We can all sit here and say, 'Hey, it was ugly in the beginning.' But they stepped up and endured a lot and we're going to the postseason."
It's been more than a century since a major league team went from 12 games under .500 to as many wins as the Nats accumulated this season.
The Nationals finished second to Atlanta in the NL East with an 11-win improvement over 2018, when they missed the playoffs in Martinez's rookie year as a skipper. They did it without a winning streak longer than five games until now. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, via the Nationals, Washington's 93 wins are the most for a team that was 12 games below .500 since the 1914 Boston Braves went from 28-40 to 94 wins.
Before Sunday, Washington didn't know whether it would face Milwaukee or St. Louis on Tuesday. But St. Louis wrapped up the NL Central title by beating the Chicago Cubs 9-0, relegating Milwaukee to a wild-card spot.
Attendance
The announced attendance of 36,764 gave the Nationals a season total of 2,259,781, an average of 27,899. Those numbers are down from 2018, when Washington had 2,529,604 spectators, an average of 31,230 — and represent the worst season figures since 2011, when the team drew fewer than 2 million fans.
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Metro for Tuesday Night
Metro will run late to accomodate fans attending the game at Nationals Park and the Washington Mystics' playoff game against the Connecticut Sun.
Extra trains will run both before and after the games and will keep running at least 20 minutes after the end of the games, up to one hour later than their normal closing time, according to Metro's website.
