Les Nationals de Washington

Let's get something straight, it's a crying shame that the home of most of North America's finest titty bars no longer has a Major League team.

The plight of the Expos is another topic for another day (in short: it's Réne Lévesque's fault) but let me tell you, seeing the face of Keith Hernandez on the wall as you make your way into Chez Parée somehow just feels right.

Of course, I'm saying this as someone who never had the "pleasure" of sitting in an empty Big O, half-heartedly supporting a bunch of losers whose best players would be plucked from their ranks year after year, wasting the talents of the scouting and development system that honed and discovered such greats as Pedro Martinez, Vlad Guererro, Larry Walker, and a host of other well-above-average Major Leaguers-- plus, of course, Henry Rodriguez.

Now that the team is dead and gone, one would think that the pseudo-rivaly with their Canadian cousins would have been buried along with it, yet MLB continues to hold it in purgatory, bringing the Washington Nationals into the Rogers Centre for a three-game weekend set that begins on Friday.

Before we move on, let's get another thing straight: there was never really any rivalry between these two teams.

Sure it was fun to see the two teams square off at first, but with Interleague Play having begun in 1997-- when the Jays were deep into their (so far) decade-and-a-half of mediocrity, and les Expos already in their death throes-- the matchup hardly produced more than a brief spark.

And that's fine. Toronto and Montréal don't need something as minor as a baseball game to create animosity between them. Shit, hockey doesn't even get the job done anymore. How could it when there are such timeless things as snobby Pepper cunts or sexually-repressed Protestant anglo fuckfaces to get worked up about?

In other words, this bastardized rivalry, much like Interleague Play itself, is pretty much a farce.

And that brings us back to the Washington Nationals, the Jays' opponent for the weekend. The Nationals have already rubbished the 100-loss predictions that were coming their way during the pre-season, but still use a pitching staff comprised of players even their own fans have never heard of, and an employ an offence anchored around the unpredictable Dmitri Young, and a 22-year-old Ryan Zimmerman.

So, in theory, the artists-formerly-known-as-Expos should be more ripe for the pluckin' this weekend than a drunken homely girl with low self-esteem in the seat next to Parkes.

In theory.

Of course, we all know how this being favoured thing usually goes for the Jays-- especially their hitters.

Here are the projected pitching matchups for the weekend (though I'm pretty sure the names of the Washington pitchers are made up):

Friday 7:07 pm:
Shaun Marcum (3-2, 3.53) v Mike Bacsik (1-3, 4.34)
Saturday 1:07 pm:
Roy Halladay (6-2, 4.56) v Levale Speigner (2-2, 7.79)
Sunday 1:07 pm:
Josh Towers (2-4, 5.31) v Micah Bowie (3-2, 3.89)