The NL East isn’t so good right now

Not everything is all bad in the NL East. Bryce Harper and Giancarlo Stanton are monsters mashing the ball all over the place, with Harper the early front-runner for NL MVP. Max Scherzer nearly threw a perfect game on Saturday and is right there with Pittsburgh Pirates ace Gerrit Cole in the early Cy Young race. Bartolo Colon has nine wins and Shelby Miller has a sub-2.00 ERA.

Yet, despite the Nationals having possibly the MVP and Cy Young leaders on their roster, they’re just 37-33 but in first place in an incredibly weak division that barely has two teams over .500 and also features the worst team in MLB in the Philadelphia Phillies.

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The Nationals are on a nice little win streak, victors of three games in a row after an impressive three-game sweep over the Pirates, who had previously been red hot. That sweep in conjunction with the New York Mets losing five games in a row has Washington a game and a half up in the division.

The Nationals have a pedestrian run differential of +18, while every other team in the division is in the negative. The Mets have a run differential of -18 and have a crazy home/road difference. New York is 26-11 at home and 10-24 on the road. Weird. The Braves have a -13 differential and the Miami Marlins have a -20 differential. Not horrible, but certainly not good.

Then there’s the disastrous Phillies, who are a wretched 25-47 with a run differential of -119. The next worst team in the majors has a run differential of -87, and that’s the Milwaukee Brewers.

So things aren’t too hot right now in the NL East, but the Nationals certainly have the potential to make a big splash (15/2 odds to win the World Series, per Bovada), and perhaps the Mets and Braves stick around in the division to make it a good race down the stretch. There’s plenty of time left.