Washington’s recent run seems to have Nationals fans cautiously optimistic about the overall direction of the team...

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Nationals fans, sign up HERE to join FanPulse.

Davey Martinez’s managerial approval rating is up again, for the sixth straight week, to a full-on 51% after it hit a season-low 11% in Week 9 of the SB Nation’s FanPulse voting. The run to get back to .500 surely has something to do with the opinion of the work the Nats’ second-year skipper has done to right the ship after a disappointing start to the 2019 campaign.

His 51% approval rating is the highest since Week 2 of the voting, when he fell from 73% to 53% after the Nationals struggled out of the gate.

Confidence in the overall direction of the team has held fairly steady in the last few weeks, coming in at 53% this time around, after it was 56% and 52% in the previous two weeks.

As things stand now, heading into Week 15, the Nationals’ 7-3 run in their last ten, which has left them 17-8 in the month of June, 8.0 games back in the NL East, and 2.5 back in the race for the Wild Card spots in the National League one game past the official halfway point of the 2019 campaign.

“We’re playing good baseball recently,” GM Mike Rizzo told 106.7 the FAN’s Sports Junkies this past Wednesday, “and hopefully we continue and make up some ground. But it’s a day-to-day thing. I don’t try to get too far ahead of myself and look too far into the future of the schedules and that type of thing, we’ve put ourselves in the position where we have to play day-to-day baseball and play well, win games, and worry about games behind and upcoming schedules later on, but it’s time to just go out and win each and every game and let the chips fall where they may. We put ourselves back in a position to be a factor so we’re happy about that and we’re hoping to continue to play well and put ourselves in an enviable position in the standings.”

We’ll see how the results this afternoon affect both Martinez’s approval rating and the team confidence meter in Week 16’s voting since the latest poll will go out on Monday’s off day...

MEANWHILE: The national baseball FanPulse question this week had to do with funding for new parks around the majors, and who should be paying for them.

Not surprisingly, the support for tax payer funded ballparks is not high...

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