The Washington Nationals are in a puddle, yet there is not one person you can point the finger at. The whole bullpen seems stuck, like a team trying to throw water out of a sinking ship. Colin Poche is one of the players who is feeling the chillwave of backlash coming toward him from the fans. And he felt it when, just earlier this month, he was heckled in Colorado. And weirdly not just for his game, but his hairline!

“Someone said something about my hairline, which I didn’t think was too bad,” said Poche.

But while he can wash that incident away with a laugh, what’s not funny is his ERA of 15.00. Lucas Sims is right there in the middle of the mess, battling with a brutal 15.26 ERA. He is fighting off bad outings and only hearing the backlash growing louder.

Sims is simply trying to find a footing of his own. And for him, every outing feels heavier when the ERA is dragging on.

“It’s frustrating because, as a competitor, you want to go out there and, obviously, do well,” Sims said to the Washington Post. He added, “But it’s knowing that we’re, what are we? Fifteen percent into the season? There’s a lot of ball, and I know I have a lot of better pitching to come.” And he isn’t wrong, because the numbers do show they need to get better and do it fast. Look at Jorge Lopez also with an ERA of 8.18!

The Washington Nationals’ bullpen as a whole is at a painful 6.89, a dead-last position in the majors.

Dave Martinez had a closed-door talk with them and tried to calm down the storm before it sank the season. Because the early struggles are now a pattern, they simply cannot ignore them. Still, the season is young, and the road is long, and so better days might be waiting. For now, though, until things change, the backlash might not stop, only just increase! Meanwhile, another moment of the Nationals is getting attention, rather controversially.

Did the Washington Nationals pull a rare triple play?

Triple plays are a kind of rare magic in baseball. But on Friday night, the Washington Nationals seem to pull one off against the New York Mets, or at least that’s what the scoreboard says. Up 2-0 in the fourth inning, the Nationals were in a jam with two New York Mets runners on base. Jesse Winker hit a hard line drive toward Nathaniel Lowe.

From a distance, it did look like the ball might have hit the ground. Brandon Nimmo and Mark Vientos took off running, thinking it was not caught. But the first base umpire ruled it a catch, and Lowe quickly doubled off both runners to complete this triple play. Now, Mets fans were furious and wanted replay angles to show the ball hitting the dirt first.

But here is the real kicker: By rule, line drives and fly balls in the infield aren’t reviewable. If the umps didn’t change it there, the play stood. No matter how clear and what the replay looked like. And Carlos Mendoza was not a fan of this saying: “Frustrating, obviously, because we all saw what happened.” 

If the call meanwhile had gone the other way, the inning could have exploded for the Washington Nationals.

For the Nationals, this was a bullseye! A triple play is right for the history books for the team. And for the Mets, it’s just dreaming—what could have been. For once, both teams had parties, who were both “frustrated.”