July 31, 2026 [LINK / comment]
As the MLB trade deadline on Monday, August 3 approaches, decisions about possible trades are having a vital impact on the Washington Nationals' postseason prospects, and vice versa. The Nats were having a pretty good month overall, but lost their last three games of July: 5-2 to Toronto on Wednesday, 5-4 to the Braves at Truist Park yesterday, and 6-2 to the Braves this evening.
Starting pitcher Foster Griffin, upon whose shoulder's the Nats' hopes rest to a large degree, had a rare bad outing in this evening's game. Still, it was close until the 6th inning, and for the second night in a row the Nats had runners on 2nd and 3rd with less than two outs, and then failed to score. That's just inexcusable. Just like the night before, the Braves immediately capitalized on the Nats failure to execute by staging a big rally: Michael Harris hit a 3-run homer, and then the Braves got one more across the plate. The solo home runs by C.J. Abrams (4th inning) and Andres Chaparro (9th inning) were merely symbolic. The Nationals did, however, set a team record for homers in one month (50) in July, leading the majors in that category for the season (164) as well as in RBIs (573), slugging percentage (.446), and stolen bases (123). (Most of that sentence was copied from the Washington Nationals page, which has just been updated with statistics for the month of July.) The Nats' record for July was 11-13, and they are now 10 1/2 games behind the Braves in the NL East, slipping back into 4th place behind the Miami Marlins. I try to be optimistic, but it's not looking good...
Yesterday and today I finished updating all the pages for past and present MLB stadiums in the southwestern states: California and Arizona, with the exception of Sutter Health Park in Sacramento. (I did Nevada a few days ago.) It was exhausting work, but I'm pleased that the pages look much cleaner and more consistent than before. One of those page updates, Candlestick Park, may be of particular interest because of the new composite photo displayed on it...
Photos of Candlestick Park taken July 6, 1961, courtesy of Mr. Vernon Hofer.
I have now created such composite photos for 28 of the current 30 MLB stadiums, excluding Sutter Health Park and Globe Life Field. Some of them (such as the one displayed above) are based on photos submitted to me by fans, and I have been very careful to credit them properly. Not all of them are yet publicly accessible, however, because only the revised stadium pages display them. I need to make a few changes to the five stadium pages for Missouri, perhaps one or two stadiums in Texas, and then Georgia (Atlanta) and Florida are all that I have left to do as far as page formatting. THEN I can get back to the FINAL PHASE OF DIAGRAM REVISIONS!!!
As the month of August gets underway, I should mention that I intend to post a new diagram for the Field of Dreams page, since a new stadium is being built there for the game between the Minnesota Twins and Philadelphia Phillies just two weeks from today! (I mentioned that in my blog post on June 26.) See MLB.com.
So when am I going to do diagrams of London Stadium or Gocheok Sky Dome? Good question! (Maybe after I pay an in-person visit...)