Best Nationals season

We're wrapping up our look at the best season of each NL East team today with the Washington Nationals. I should point out, I'm only looking at seasons since 2005, when the team moved to D.C. and became the Nationals. I won't take the Montreal Expos history into account for this post. 

The Nationals have had some pretty good seasons in their relatively short history, winning four division championships and earning a Wild Card berth last season. Of course, in 2019 they also won their first postseason series, and then another one, and then the World Series. I think it's pretty evident that the best season the Nats have ever had was their 2019 championship season.

While I've said that winning a World Series is not criteria for a team's best season, in this case it's hard to deny that 2019 is the best year the franchise has ever had. 

The Nats didn't start out so hot last season, but as they like to point out on social media, they went from 19-31 and in fourth place in the division to World Series champions. 

The run that the Nats made from mid-May to the end of the season was a very impressive one, and although they didn't win the division and there have been other years when they had more wins, 2019 is by far their best season to date. 

The 2019 Nats set franchise records in home runs, RBIs, slugging percentage, OPS and runs scored. The pitching staff also struck out the most batters in team history at 1,511. 

Despite the success the team had, only two players - Anthony Rendon and Max Scherzer - made it to the All-Star Game. By the end of the year, more players got the recognition they deserved. 

Rendon and Juan Soto finished third and ninth in NL MVP voting, respectively. Stephen Strasburg finished 15th in MVP voting. Scherzer, Strasburg and Patrick Corbin each finished in the top 11 in NL Cy Young voting. 

The 2019 Nationals had a historic run that will be hard to repeat, and as everyone knows, it culminated in a historic World Series victory over the Houston Astros. They lost Rendon over the offseason, but they've still got a core that should be able to compete for championships for years to come.