The 5 key players of the NL East

Cancel your meetings! The final installment of 2015’s key players is here! If you’re looking for previous installments, they’re all over here. Today, we’ll look for the key players of the NL East, which is going to be a little tricky, considering this is the only division in baseball with two clearly awful teams that won’t contend. Who in the heck will be their key players?

Your Key Player for the Phillies is just shut up and leave us alone to be sad, according to an online vote at The Good Phight, a Philadelphia Phillies blog.

That makes sense. Regardless, we forge on. These are the players who will likely give you an indication for how the season is going. As goes this player, so goes his team.

We’re mostly in agreement that the Nationals have a superteam from another planet, and that they didn’t need Max Scherzer, but ha ha ha ha, now they have Max Scherzer. “That’s a nice rotation, there, pennant-winning Tigers,” the Nationals said under their breath. “Be a shame if something happened to it.”

With Jayson Werth and Denard Span out to start the season, though, their lineup is just a little troubling. Ryan Zimmerman and Ian Desmond are nice supporting hitters, but every injury thrusts them into larger run-producing roles, which they aren’t totally built for. None of it matters, though, if Harper becomes a superstar, which he’s been threatening to do since he came into the league. Remember, there used to be “Trout or Harper?” debates, and both sides had excellent arguments. Those were the days.

The arguments can happen again. You gotta believe me. For example, you wouldn’t be surprised if the Dodgers’ Joc Pederson became a star, would you? Of course not. He’s a top-20 prospect, and he tore up the Pacific Coast League last year. Of course he can be a star.

Joc Pederson is older than Bryce Harper.

We’re used to Harper, as if this is as good as he’s going to get. We were spoiled by Trout, as if 20-year-olds are ever supposed to do what he did in his first full season. Both ideas are ridiculous. Harper still has untapped talent -- vast reservoirs of it -- and if the Nationals are going to win their division by 10 games, they’ll need Harper to tap into that well, or else run the risk of winning the division by seven games.

The Mets will need to hit, see. They have pitchers and pitchers, and then they have pitchers after that, even if they get hurt. If the Mets can get another great rookie campaign or two from a rookie starter, they will have one of the best rotations in the game. With that should come a contending team, postseason appearance, and chance to win the whole danged thing. They’ll need to find dingers from somewhere. Why not from Granderson?

Well, for baseball reasons. Still, if you’re looking up and down the Mets’ roster, looking from extra offense from somewhere, no matter how unlikely, Granderson is still somewhat intriguing. We’re just two years removed from back-to-back 40-homer seasons, and while it’s probably as likely that he’ll get attacked in an alley by his advancing age and be out of baseball in two years, there’s still a chance of a late-career renaissance. The rest of the lineup is filled with known quantities who will do expected things, depending on how pessimistic you are about David Wright. If Granderson is finally healthy, he has the best chance of beating projections.

If he stinks again, well, the Mets will probably have one of those maddening, so-close-so-very-close seasons that all-pitching, no-hitting teams have. Do you know how hard it is to find good pitching and keep it healthy? Hard. Now imagine wasting it. If you’ve ever followed a team like that, you’ve experienced a unique pain. The Mets will need at least a couple of their veterans to find a keg of youth elixir if they want to avoid that same fate.

The Braves need a key player to give them hope for next season and the years beyond. Alex Wood should be outstanding, as should Julio Teheran. Even if he can be erratic, Shelby Miller should be a part of that brighter future. That leaves Minor, the iconoclast who isn’t buying into the trendy Tommy John clique, and moving straight to shoulder problems.

The Braves aren’t going to win the NL East with or without Minor, but he still a chance to be either a) a part of the next good Braves team or b) someone who will bring a part of the next good Braves team back in a trade. That’s the difference between a season that’s hard to watch but easy to appreciate and a season that’s hard to watch and bereft of silver linings. The 4,835th different young Braves pitcher going down to an injury would be extra discouraging.

Minor wasn’t very good last year, and it’s not like he ever had the upside of a Cole Hamels or other first-round lefties, but if he bounces back and has an excellent season, you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of how the Braves are feeling. They’ll be emboldened to try, try, try again in 2016, or they’ll sell high to a team desperate for pitching at the deadline.

I didn’t say the key players were all supposed to be fun.

Do you realize that Dee Gordon is already in his arbitration years and getting expensive? Ayup. He’s a Super 2 player, he’ll make $2.5 million this year, and the salary will keep climbing after that. Yet somehow the Dodgers were able to trade him and get not one, not two, but three good prospects back. Oh, and a solid middle reliever. It was a stunning deal, absolutely stunning.

IT HAD BETTER WORK, THEN. Crikey. If Gordon repeats his 2014 season, he’ll be a spark plug at the top of the lineup, exactly the kind of player the Marlins need before the outfield beef starts dingering things up. The trade will make sense then, and I’ll gladly write a mea culpa at some point. If his second half was a harbinger of doom -- .284/.300/.348, with four walks and 47 strikeouts in 250 at-bats -- the Marlins will have an overpaid, overrated, impossible-to-get-rid-of player who cost them a chunk of their farm.

And that’s if he hits for average. What happens to him if he hits into some poor luck, or if he’s more like the career .256 hitter that he was before last season? He’ll have the defense and speed, sure, but he also gets thrown out about 25 percent of the time when he attempts a stolen base, pretty close to the rate that nullifies any of the gains his thievery provides. He would be Juan Pierre in the infield.

Which probably explains why the Marlins got Gordon, actually. The last time the Marlins won a World Series, they got 162 games from a player who slapped and swiped. They might think that’s the blueprint to success, and after watching the Royals last year, maybe they’re right. Maybe the stolen base is underrated. The Marlins sure invested a lot in this theory, though, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll probably be bitter about it all season.

He’s the best player on the team, clearly. If he pitches well, he will be an oasis of watchable baseball in a desert of unwatchable. He will be a fan favorite who allows the masses to remember a happier time, someone who can remind folks that the pleasure of watching baseball isn’t something wholly dependent on championships and postseason success. Sometimes, the pleasure of watching baseball is watching an all-time franchise great doing all-time-great-player things right then and there, to hell with the standings.

Now picture him pitching poorly. Or picture what happens if he ... no, I’m not even going to type it. The Phillies have a chance right now to exchange Hamels for what’s in the box. Remember that from Let’s Make a Deal? Everyone loves the mystery box. Except there’s a chance that baseball will sit on the box. Baseball will sit on the box before the Phillies can make a deal, and there will be puppies in the box. You like puppies, right? Well, they’ll be all squished because baseball is a sociopath and the Phillies were asking for franchise-altering talent from organizations that didn’t want to give it up, and now look at what they’ve done. You thought you were getting at least one baseball player worth watching, and instead you got a box of squished puppies. Good job, Phillies.

That’s what happens if he pitches poorly. Or he could be fantastic and a player worth watching yet again! He has been very, very, very good for a long time, so very good, and if he is again, at least Phillies fans will have some sort of consolation prize. He’s also the way that Phillies fans can feel far worse about this season than they’re already expecting to.

You can pick “Maikel Franco” if this all makes you feel too squeamish.

Sorry.