The Nationals didn’t deserve to win the NLDS, but really, neither did the Cubs

The NLDS series between the Cubs and Nationals was at times chaotic. It was surreal, exciting, meandering. Slow at some points, somehow even slower at others. But then it would explode into bursts of mania and hilarity and great baseball at the drop of a hat.

The Nationals downfall was perversely expected by the time things finally got down to the final innings of Game 5, but that wasn’t before the Cubs tried to give the series away multiple times in the games before that (and at least a few times in the final game as well).

Chicago didn’t really deserve to win this series. If the Cubs weren’t playing the platonic ideal of a depressing baseball team, there’s a very real chance that their flaws in the series would have been capitalized on way earlier and things would have been wrapped up before they could say “the only person left in the bullpen is John Lackey.”

If the Nationals came out on top though, they wouldn’t have really deserved to come out victorious either. Sure, it would have been more satisfying for baseball fans to see them finally win a playoff series — and cathartic for that entire fan base. But looking back at the five game set, as much as the Nationals came through in the clutch to get the win, there was also an unfortunate grab bag of plays and missed opportunities that doomed them, beyond the usual missed opportunities that come from their entire franchise being a bad luck charm.

Watching it was like watching two people in bumper cars who can’t steer worth a damn bumping into each other over and over again on an empty track until the laws of physics and probability finally turn one car enough to pass the other. It doesn’t mean the person in that car is the better driver, just that eventually one outcome must happen before the Earth and the sun crash into each other and implode.

The Nationals meltdown in the fifth inning of Game 5 was the most blatant example of how bad luck and a seeming subconscious inability to not want to win derailed things, but those occurrences happened throughout each of the series’ games in more compact ways.

Washington squandered a strong pitching performance (including a no-hit bid into the sixth inning) by Stephen Strasburg in the first game by allowing two unearned runs.

In Game 2, Chicago deciding to let Carl Edwards Jr. face Bryce Harper in the eighth inning was the best choice. As everybody knows by now, he hung a curve that Harper sent 421 feet over the wall to tie the game.

In Game 3, the Cubs committed four errors in the first six innings but somehow managed to win the game despite themselves. That Washington managed to only score one run off that comedy of errors, failing to take advantage of Scherzer dominating on the mound, was even more difficult to watch.

Chicago kept doing things like giving Michael A. Taylor fastballs to pitch, and he kept hitting them. Just because it didn’t eventually cost them the series doesn’t make it any more explicable.

There were errors and mistakes that were forgivable of course, such as Jayson Werth losing a pop fly in the lights in Game 5 or Chicago’s bullpen not being a leak-free tank of water in every single high-pressure situation (sorry, Game 4 Wade Davis).

This entire series was rampant with “No you! No you! No YOU!” insanity that recalled a couple of children arguing over who has to tell their dad they shattered a window playing hockey in the driveway. Except it was an imaginary fight over who wants to do well in the playoffs. Completely normal.

It’s not that each team was capitalizing on the opportunities it was given — there was constant chaos but not in a way where it felt like one team was forcing the other to make mistakes. It was as if both teams just happened to have siloed collapses in the most unfortunate way possible and their opponent was randomly in the vicinity when it went down so it happened to reap whatever rewards might be falling from the sky.

Neither of the teams played like it really wanted to win a playoff series, even though that’s the entire point of this little endeavor and of course they both wanted to win.

For the Cubs, their almost-blew-it-in-the-last-three-innings win meant being able to continue the success of last season and not bow out of the postseason in the first round a year after winning it all. For the Nationals, a win could have meant finally clinching their first-ever playoff series and putting a heartbreaking playoff past behind them.

Those final scenarios could have easily been swapped, and it wouldn’t have been surprising based on this five game series. Enough foibles and tripping over their own feet happened that either way things fell, it would have seemed pretty reasonable.

Because watching it all go down, it felt like both teams were constantly pushing the winning hand across the table and daring one another to accept a victory each was afraid of taking.