The Best Washington Nationals Seasons and Every October Run

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

From the Montreal Expos of 1981 and 1994 to the 2019 World Series champions, this guide ranks the franchise's best seasons by record and covers all ten of its postseason series, wins and heartbreaks alike.

The Washington Nationals franchise has played ten postseason series in its history and has won exactly five of them. Four of those wins came in a single October, 2019, when the club went from the wild-card game to the World Series title. The five series the franchise lost came in 1981, when it was still the Montreal Expos, and in the division series of 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017, and three of those four division series went the full five games.

That October record is the least typical thing about the club, which has finished with a winning record in 22 of its 57 seasons. The historical record credits the franchise, counting its time in Montreal, with 4,331 wins and 4,665 losses through 2025, a winning percentage of .481. The best of its teams were very good indeed, and some of the best never got to play a postseason game at all.

This article ranks the franchise's best regular seasons by record and then takes every postseason series in order, with the names and the near-misses. For the club's whole story, see the history of the Washington Nationals; for the players behind these seasons, the best players in Nationals history.

The six best regular seasons by record

Among seasons of 100 or more games, six teams stand apart in the franchise record. The list is dominated by the modern Nationals, with two exceptions from Montreal.

The 1994 Expos had the best record in the major leagues when the players' strike ended the season in August, with 74 wins to the Yankees' 70. There was no postseason that year. The 1979 team won 95 games and finished second in the NL East, and the 1980 Expos won 90 and finished second as well. Neither earned a playoff berth in an era when only division winners advanced.

The 2012 team won more games than any other in franchise history over a full season, and it had the best record in baseball that year, a game ahead of Cincinnati. It is also the first of four Washington division winners that lost in the first round. That is the theme of the second half of this article: the Nationals were consistently good in the regular season from 2012 through 2017 and did not win a playoff series in any of those years.

The Expos years: from 52-110 to a division series

The franchise began in 1969 as the Montreal Expos, the first major-league club outside the United States. Its first season, at Jarry Park, produced a 52-110 record and a last-place finish. Gene Mauch managed the first seven seasons, from 1969 to 1975, with 499 wins and 627 losses, and the club improved slowly, from 52 wins in 1969 to 73 in 1970 and 79 in both 1973 and 1974.

The breakthrough group arrived in the late 1970s. Andre Dawson was Rookie of the Year in 1977, the year the club moved into the Olympic Stadium. Gary Carter, a catcher who spent 12 seasons with the franchise, and Tim Raines, the franchise's career leader in stolen bases (635) and walks (793), were also on the club by 1979. Dick Williams, who managed from 1977 to 1981 with 380 wins and 347 losses, took them to second place in 1979 and 1980. Those were the best Expos teams of the first fifteen years.

The first postseason came in 1981, the strike-shortened season split into two halves. The Expos qualified as the second-half winner of the NL East. They beat Philadelphia three games to two in the division series, a round created only for that year, and then faced the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, which they lost three games to two. The decider is remembered in Montreal as Blue Monday, when a late Dodgers home run by Rick Monday beat them in the fifth game.

The club did not return to the playoffs until 2012, 31 years later. In between came the 1994 team, which at 74-40 was the best in baseball. The players' strike that began on August 12 ended the season, and the postseason was never played.

1994 and the long dismantling

The 1994 team is one of the great what-ifs of the sport. Felipe Alou, who managed the Expos from 1992 to 2001 and won 691 games, led a young club with Larry Walker, Marquis Grissom, Moises Alou and Pedro Martinez on the pitching staff. When the season stopped, the Expos held a six-game lead over Atlanta in the division, 74-40 against the Braves' 68-46. The club then sold off much of the roster and finished 66-78 in 1995.

Even so, the Expos remained watchable in the years that followed. They went 88-74 in 1996, a second-place finish. Pedro Martinez won the Cy Young Award in 1997, and Vladimir Guerrero, who hit 234 home runs for the franchise and has the best career batting average in club history (.323 in at least 3,000 at-bats), became the face of the club in the late 1990s. But the club stayed in a small market and finished fourth or fifth in the division in every season from 1998 to 2001.

The rest of the Montreal story is short. The club lost 94 games in 2001 and finished 83-79 in 2002 under Frank Robinson. In 2003 and 2004 it played part of its home schedule at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in Puerto Rico, and its best attendance in those two seasons was 1,025,639. After the 2004 season the franchise moved to Washington.

Washington's arrival and the lean years

The newly named Nationals played at R.F.K. Stadium in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and their first season finished at 81-81 with a franchise-record attendance of 2,731,993. That total has not been exceeded; the club's best season at Nationals Park, which opened in 2008, was 2,652,422.

Then came the worst of it. The Nationals lost 102 games in 2008 and 103 in 2009, and finished fifth in the division in each of those years. Manny Acta managed from 2007 to 2009 and finished with a 158-252 record. The club used the draft to rebuild, and the picks of that era became the club's identity: Stephen Strasburg, who joined the major league club in 2010, and Bryce Harper, the National League's Rookie of the Year in 2012 and its Most Valuable Player in 2015.

2012 to 2017: four division titles, no series wins

The breakout came in 2012 under Davey Johnson, who managed the club from 2011 to 2013 with 224 wins and 183 losses. The Nationals won 98 games and the NL East, with Harper, Strasburg and Gio Gonzalez leading the way.

It ended in the division series, in a five-game loss to St. Louis. The Cardinals rallied from a large early deficit to win the deciding game. Strasburg did not pitch in the series because the club had shut him down earlier in the season to limit his innings after his 2010 elbow surgery, a decision that has been argued about in Washington ever since.

The next three division winners fell short in the same round, each time by a close margin:

The 2014 series under Matt Williams included an 18-inning game that the Giants won by a single run. The 2016 and 2017 clubs, both under Dusty Baker, each took their opponent to a fifth game and each lost it. Max Scherzer, who won the Cy Young Award in 2016 and 2017 and posted a 2.80 earned run average in a Nationals uniform, anchored the staff.

The arithmetic is brutal. In best-of-five series the franchise is 2-5 overall, and the two wins are the 1981 division series and the 2019 division series. Four of the five losses came in a deciding fifth game: the 1981 NLCS and the division series of 2012, 2016 and 2017.

2019: the wild card, the Dodgers and the title

The 2019 team was not the best the franchise ever produced. It won 93 games and finished second in the NL East, two seasons after the club's last division title. It reached the postseason as a wild card, with Dave Martinez in his second year as manager and with Anthony Rendon, Juan Soto, Scherzer and Strasburg on the roster.

What followed was one of the most unexpected runs in recent baseball. The Nationals beat Milwaukee in the one-game wild-card round. They beat the Dodgers three games to two in the division series, with Howie Kendrick's grand slam in the tenth inning of the fifth game deciding it. They swept St. Louis four games to none in the NLCS, the franchise's first pennant in any city. And they beat the Houston Astros four games to three in the World Series, with the road team winning every one of the seven games. Strasburg was named the World Series MVP.

Of the club's 46 postseason games through 2025, 17 came in that October. The 2019 club went 12-5 in them; in all its other postseason games, the franchise is 12-17.

Every postseason series in one table

Putting all ten series side by side shows how lopsided the record is. Scores are the franchise's games won first, as in the historical postseason table.

Three things stand out. Eight of the ten series came in the five-game or one-game format, which is the most random kind of baseball there is. Four of the five losses came by a single game, in the deciding fifth game, and only the 2014 series ended without going the distance. And the opponents were not pushovers: St. Louis, Los Angeles and San Francisco were all established postseason clubs in the years they beat Washington.

What happened after the title

The title was followed by a fast decline. The club finished 26-34 in the shortened 2020 season and lost 97 games in 2021, trading Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers at the deadline. Rendon had signed with the Angels in the winter after the championship. In 2022 the club lost 107 games, its worst record since 1976, and traded Soto to San Diego during the season. It went 71-91 in 2023 and 2024 and 66-96 in 2025.

The club did not reach the postseason again through 2025, which leaves 2019 as an isolated peak in a franchise record that is otherwise a story of near-misses.

Lessons from the Nationals' October record

A few patterns stand out.

• A short series is close to a coin flip. The franchise is 2-5 in best-of-five series, and four of the five losses went to a deciding game. A team that wins 97 games and meets a team that won a few more is, over a few games, only a modest favorite.
• The regular-season record and the October result barely line up. The 2012 team won 98 games and lost its division series; the 2019 team won 93 and won the title.
• Ranking seasons by record is not ranking them by what they accomplished. The 1994 Expos top the list by winning percentage and played no postseason game. The 2019 team is outside the franchise's top six by record and owns the only title.

Common questions

How many postseason series have the Nationals won? Five: the 1981 division series as the Expos, and the four series of 2019. They have lost five: the 1981 NLCS and the division series of 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017.

Did the Expos ever make the postseason? Once, in 1981. They beat Philadelphia in a special division series and lost the NLCS to Los Angeles. The 1994 team had the best record in baseball but the season ended before the playoffs.

What is the franchise's best record? 74-40 in 1994, a .649 winning percentage. Among full 162-game seasons, 98-64 in 2012.

Who managed the 2019 champions? Dave Martinez, who had 500 wins with the club through the 2025 season in the historical data, the most of any manager in the Washington era.

Why does the club have so few winning seasons? The franchise lost 100 or more games in 1969, 1976, 2008, 2009 and 2022, and those deep troughs sit between its good stretches. For the full story, see the Nationals franchise history.

Where to go next

If you want the whole arc, read the history of the Washington Nationals and the best players in Nationals history. For their division rivals' October stories, see the Braves, the Marlins and the Mets, and for the larger frame, the history of the World Series. Current records are on the Nationals team page and the Nationals Park page.