Can You Root Against The Nationals?

Charlie Pierce:

On a purely baseball level, there's very little not to love about these guys. They're a young team led by an old guy; manager Davey Johnson looks at this point like nothing more than Hubie Brown coming out of the past to lead the Memphis Grizzlies a few years back. They have a legitimate rookie star in Bryce Harper, who broke out of a terrible slump Sunday with a triple and a monstrous home run, and who, at the end of a season in which he became both a baseball and YouTube sensation, shows all the signs of a man exhausted by a year's worth of clown questions. On those occasions, being able to lapse into fluent Belichickian is a valuable skill, bro.
"It doesn't matter whether my numbers are crappy or not," Harper said Sunday. "We're in first place, that's all that matters."
"I think he was trying to send a message to me — 'Don't bench me.' That's what you're missing," Johnson said. "I think that, sometimes, he just gets a little frustrated and overaggressive."
And, Sunday, they were led by pitcher Gio Gonzalez, who earned his 16th win on a day in which he left his best stuff back around noon, when he prepared for a game that wouldn't actually begin until four hours later. Gonzalez is a throwback — a Whitey Ford–size guy in an era in which the gap between major league pitchers and NBA three-men is closing rapidly. On Sunday, with almost everything he threw staying up and dangerously over the plate, Gonzalez battled out of deep trouble on several occasions — most impressively in the fourth inning, which began with a leadoff triple by New York's Ronny Cedeno — and kept his game alive long enough for the Nationals offense to build him a cushion.

I love to see former Reds manager Davey Johnson doing well (fired from the Reds for living with his girlfriend), but if the Reds meet up with the Nationals in the playoffs, I'll be damn sure to be rooting that the Nats lose like Teddy Roosevelt in the Presidents' race.