The Washington Nationals continued to play spoiler for their National League East rival New York Mets on Sunday, as the team took another game from the team in Queens and now have them on the verge of missing the postseason as a whole. With just about a week left in the regular season, the Mets will need to dramatically improve their play, as they lost their grip on a playoff spot for the first time since early April.
While Juan Soto and his Mets could easily still make the playoffs by just winning a handful of games in this final week, the reality of the situation is that they missed a golden opportunity over this weekend. After winning the series opener 12-6 on Friday, they lost on both Saturday and Sunday in wild fashion, giving the Nationals the perfect opportunity to play spoiler.
Daylen Lile was the star of the show on Saturday night, as his dramatic, go-ahead inside the park homer lifted the Nationals to a 5-3 lead that had Mets fans pushed to the brink of their sanity. If that wasn't enough, Jacob Young made a pair of insane plays on Sunday that single-handedly kept the Mets from winning the game. His circus catch earlier in the game is arguably the play of the year, and his home run robbery in the 9th was the cherry on top of an incredible defensive performance.
Someone who wasn't known as much of an incredible defensive performer during his time with the Nationals was Carter Kieboom, who was once the top prospect in the organization who was supposed to be one of the future stars of this franchise. He was once deemed untouchable in trade talks and was thought to be the third baseman of the future, but his failure with the Nationals was just one of many shortcomings of the Mike Rizzo era of player development.
However, the former top prospect has now found himself back in the big leagues with the Los Angeles Angels as of a couple days ago, as they placed young star shortstop Zach Neto on the IL, ending his season. Kieboom had some solid numbers for AAA Salt Lake, slashing .319/.368/.449 with an .817 OPS, but as any Nationals fan knows, Kieboom has never struggled to be a great hitter in AAA.
Kieboom will now get a bit of an opportunity to show what he can do in his latest chance at the big league level, as the 28-year-old still has some talent. Hopefully for Kieboom, who didn't pan out at all in Washington, he can become a big league fixture and recognize his immense talent that once made him a first round pick and one of the prospects in the sport. For the record, he went 1/3 in his debut over the weekend for the Angels, but his role remains unclear for the last few games.
What do you think Carter Kieboom can do for the Angels? As always, please let me know on X, @DCBerk.