And you may ask yourself, well How did the Nats get here?

The Nats are 48-48.  A .500 team. The Nats expected more. We expected more. How does a team expected to be say... 56-40 right now end up 8 games behind where they should be?

A couple of those games can be thrown out to luck.  Pythag has them as a 51 win team based on runs scored and runs allowed.  They are about 4-5 games behind where they should be in one-run games. But they are still underperforming.  What's gone right? What's gone wrong?

RIGHT

Though it feels like nothing, the Nats haven't been devoid of some good fortune this year. Mark Reynolds and Matt Adams have teamed up for basically a full half-season of GREAT offense. Juan Soto has been a two month revelation hitting at star levels as well.  That's almost two positions in the order that have unexpectedly hit like stars for a couple months. When healthy, Rendon has been Rendon and Eaton has been Eaton which can't necessarily be expected off of injury. Speaking of guys being themselves Max has been Max, which means the best pitcher in baseball which is expected in a way but you can never expect THE BEST as a planner, just up there. Hellickson has been more than that Nats asked for in his limited 5th starter role. Doolittle was probably his best self in the first half earning an All-Star berth.

WRONG

Yes, Zimm was replaced by a weird star amalgam. Yes, Eaton went down and the OF struggled for a while, but then the Nats found Soto. If those were the only problems the Nats would still be on track. But you know the drill. Rendon missed a month. Kendrick went down a month and a half in and Difo failed at providing offense at 2nd. Zimm was awful for his month before going out. Murphy has been awful for a month since coming back.  Catcher has been the expected hole with Wieters healthy or without. There has been an injury issue that overwhelmed the acceptable depth they created, and exposed the unacceptable lack of depth they did not address.

Add to that MAT reverting to being MAT, Turner not progressing at the plate, and Bryce finding himself in a months long slump and you have an imbalance. Despite finding two stars in the pocket the Nats needed more and for the first half as a whole they have found themselves a middling offensive team

Still that shouldn't alone make the Nats, a team built around a best in baseball rotation, a .500 team. The Nats needed more failure. There have been the injuries to Hellickson and Strasburg (4th non-full season in a row for Stephen) which exposed the lack of depth behind the originally planned 5. Cole, Voth, Rodriguez, and Fedde are all questionable in a major league rotation at this time. But about three months missed out of like 17 and a half potentially missed by your starting 5? Every team would sign up for that to start the year. That's actually pretty good. Maybe I should have mentioned that in the right section. No that's a blip compared to the more pressing issue.

Hellickson has been great but he's also been limited. That was the plan, but it meant the other starters were supposed to pick up slack so the pen could help finish the games Hellickson started. Strasburg's injury pushed that but at the same time Gio and Roark started flailing badly.  Now instead of covering for 1 pitcher the bullpen needed to cover for 3-4 pitchers and no pen can be expected to do that.

The pen itself found itself predictably exposed for the 193rd year in a row. Neither Madson or Kintzler had been as good as they should have been meaning the Nats really needed someone to step up and no one did. Solis looked like he might but he faltered then went out. Miller did step up for a while but the magic only lasted so long. Guys like Grace and Collins have been fine but just as other guys. Kelley had been maddeningly really bad at giving up homers, making it hard to trust him as he started to put it back together.  Injuries, the variable bad performances, and the as always questionable last couple arms made the Nats dig deep into their minors and it hasn't been great. They did try to address it with the trade for Herrera but he hasn't been good. It could be the timing, coming in about when the pen was asked to do far too much. Or it could be Herrera just isn't that good anymore, his 2017 being thoroughly mediocre. It's not that the pen has been bad. It's that the pen, once again, was not planned to be a strength so unsurprisingly it isn't one.

The end result is a pitching staff putting up numbers just as middling as the offense.  Middling + Middling = .500.

The first half has been a little unfair to the Nats.  They planned for injury issues with a good enough bench. Kendrick and the new Lind, Matt Adams? You aren't often asked to dig 3-4 deep for very long. Then again they knew they had more injuries than normal coming in to the year and they knew catcher would be an issue. It probably would have been wiser to add one more ML bat to the mix. It still wouldn't have been enough to cover everything, but it would have softened the blow of the deeper than expected injuries.

While the offense was something like planning for a level 2 emergency when anyone could see a level 3 one coming and then getting a level 4. The pitching was a failure to plan for anything at all. Again. By now we've learned that three reliable arms in the pen is the minimum and the Nats finally got there this year, but a minimum is a minimum and a major league team looking to win it all should do more than that. The starting pitching on the other hand was no plan at all, assuming that the years of good fortune with health and talent would continue on indefinitely. This is always a gamble but it's also one that most teams swallow because good pitching is expensive. Plus it was an issue that bum-rushed the Nats in a month with the injuries and failures piling up on each other. So, to me the lack of depth is a little forgivable. The failure to do something going forward would not be.

Enough talk of the past. What's done is done. Tomorrow we talk about what needs to happen going forward.