It is my great pleasure to welcome you, not just to the wonderment that is the National League East, but also to actual baseball. (The Orioles don't count; they play in the American League and are owned and operated by the Grinch.)

As a lifelong fan of the game I'd like to offer some valuable insights you will no doubt find excrutiatingly helpful.

1) The Nats will not be good, not this season.
2) Conversely, they will not be bad.
3) The distinction, a maddening sort of middle of the road, semi-futility can only be truly appreciated in a sport which plays 162 REGULAR SEASON GAMES! I'm almost willing to guarantee that every time the Nats start to put together a healthy winning streak, or start to show some real, gasp!, talent, some unexplainable, heartbreaking fate will befall them; their star slugger will fall awkwardly in the shower and wind up on the DL for some interminable amount of time, robbing their lineup of the heart of its power and production, or their diamond-in-the-rough star pitcher will suddenly lose any and all ability to locate home-plate, seemingly spraying baseballs in every single direction but straight.

More likely, the entire team will just sink into some mysterious gloaming wherein any and all inherent skill for playing the game will simply disappear; the ability to hit, to pitch, to field, even to competently run the bases, will, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, go straight out the window.

4) Those are the times to stick with your Nats.

Stick with them you must, and stick with them you will, for if you don't, quite possibly the most remarkable relationship in all of sports, that of a fan and his favorite 'ball team, will elude you now, and possibly forever, and you will, on occasion, find yourself waking up in the middle of the night wondering what that empty, hollow feeling is inside of you.

5) You WILL go to at least one home game.

You have no excuse not to. Not in a sport that has 81 HOME GAMES; not in a sport whose regular season lasts roughly half the year; not in a sport that plays games every day of the week and at all times of the day.

There is simply no other sport more magical, more transcendent, live and in person, than baseball. From the first splash of green when you emerge from the tunnel and the field spreads, like a child's hope, before you, to the chatter in the stands during warm-ups, to the smack of a perfectly tossed, hard-biting slider into the mitt of the waiting catcher, the batter grimacing as his caught-napping hack of a swing torques his whole body into the dirt of the batter's box, to the crunch of peanut shells under your feet as you leap to your feet, your heart, oddly, both stopped and in your throat, as the towering majesty of a home-team homerun streaks heavenward before arcing gracefully over the outfield wall, to the goofy grin on your mug as you leave the stadium with 25,000 other fans after your boys win a big one.

6) You will find yourself drawn back for more than one.

7) The Braves will win the Division.

They always do, not that it ever seems to do them any good. The Braves are the Jim Kelly-led Buffalo Bills of baseball. The Marlins will give the Braves a run early, but fade down the stretch. Woe to any other teams in the playoffs if the Fish win the wildcard, though; they have a nasty knack, unbecoming an expansion team, of winning the World Series if they can latch onto that wildcard.

The Phillies will be irrelevant; the Phillies are always irrelevant. Don't ask why. By the end of the season, most of baseball has forgotten Philadelphia even has a team.

The Mets will be a disaster. The Mets have, in recent years, taken on the role of divisional train-wreck. They will simultaneously implode and explode, a difficult combination to replicate in the rest of the universe ruled by conventional physics. The only thing left of the Mets at the end of the season will be mutters of "we looked so good on paper…," and the sound of millions of dollars being flushed into the Hudson.

It is a foregone conclusion that the Nats will finish in last, but they'll look good doing it. And they will get better. They'll get better much more quickly than people think. Don't worry; they won't stay on the bottom for long. The Mets will be fighting them tooth and nail for sole-cellar-dweller-residence status in no time.

So, welcome Nats fans. Jump on the bandwagon and enjoy the ride. And sleep easy knowing that your guys have, without a doubt, the best nickname of any pro team in all of sports.