Lucky or Unlucky : 2018

We've gone over this before but every baseball season is a mix of things going right, things going wrong, and things going as expected.  We predict our fortune based on some sort of equal breaking of the right and wrong, but that rarely happens. Instead the breaks are unequal in distribution and impact and your record reflects that. Let's see what I take away from the Nats in 2018

UNLUCKY

Murphy being out longer than anticipated - The plan was initially made with the expectation that Murphy would be back, if not at season's start, then soon after. But as the off-season shifted to Spring Training it became apparent it was going to be longer than that. Slow injury recovery is not in itself unlucky but when one month became two and Murphy didn't get back in until mid June that meant half a year of subpar Murphy.

Eaton out early - Eaton was supposed to be a spark plug at the top of the line-up but was lost for 2017 a month in. Finally back he picked up right where he left off... and then got hurt again. Key piece missing a big chunk of time again.

Kendrick goes down - Injuries matter but how much they matter differ. What's important is not just there's an injury but who, when, and how long.  Kendrick was a key piece to the Nats providing coverage for multiple positions, specifically OF and 2B and when he went out relatively early in the season it created an issue because of the two injuries noted above. That was partially solved with Soto and partially not with Difo.

Doolittle, Kintzler, and Madson don't do what they are supposed to - this is a real tenuous unlucky because any group of three pitchers is going to have one likely get hurt or fail and we don't know how much of the failure here is the fault of Martinez's heavy usage (especially with Madson) but you'd kind of expect one to have a full very good year and the Nats didn't get that. Doolittle was very good, but hurt. Kintzler was ok, and hurt. Madson was not good and hurt.

LUCKY 

Soto was more than ready - not much to explain here. He was forced into action and nearly won the ROY with possibly the best teenage season ever. You can't expect that. Short explanation for a big effect

Adams/Reynolds overperform - It was good planning to fill in the Zimm back-up role with quality players for the second straight year. But Adams, like Lind last year, was really good for most of the time, and Reynolds, who should have been just an ok fill in was better than that. Two for two here.

AS EXPECTED

Max, Stras, Tanner - Max is to the point where Cy Young seasons are expected. Stras is to the point where good, but injury abbreviated seasons are expected. Tanner downshifted his expectations with his 2017 and matched it this year.

Wieters/Severino/Kieboom is a mess - We knew, we all knew catcher would be pretty bad in 2017. Well maybe not those that fooled themselves about Severino but the rest of us. They didn't overachieve and were all below average. This was painful but expectedly so.

Zimm is good at the plate for half a year - Look at his games played over the past few years. Look at his offensive performance the past few years. Nothing about this year could be considered a surprise. At this point 100G of 110 OPS+ is what Zimm is. There's a lot of variability but this is the base.

Trea Turner isn't special - Last year you could be disappointed by Trea's average performance but you could also chalk it up to injury recovery. This year you probably secretly hoped for more but there wasn't anything there despite being healthy enough to play in all 162.  Disappointing perhaps but not unlucky, not when what you are hanging your hat on is 70 games from 2 years ago. Now if you believe his defense suddenly became all-world then you might differ with this take but defensive stats are not meant to be annual and are iffy even in the 3 year view so I'm not going there

MAT is MAT - Look at MATs stats! LOOK AT THEM. THIS IS MAT. Low average, no walks, some pop, great D. In four of five seasons now he's been so remarkably consistent that expecting anything else would be insane going forward. Sure you might have hoped for more after last year's better numbers, but that hope should have been dashed when April produced MAT numbers again.

Deep bench depth was an issue - To be fair it's going to be an issue for most teams. You rarely go 25 deep. But Difo and anyone that needed to be called up bc of injury from AAA are barely major leaguers.

Pen depth beyond the three could be trouble - Lots of arms, but very little consistency or track record. There was a good chance most of them would flame out and most of them did. Did they find a decent arm here and there? Yep and that's expected too. Holland was very good in a brief spell. Miller was ok. Nothing here should surprise you. Why did it seem worse? Well they were supposed to compliment the top 3 but when those guys didn't hit their targets these guys became more important.

QUESTIONS

Bryce - unlucky? I wouldn't say so.  The season was a little worse than expected. The problem was more timing than anything else. He has his crash right when the Nats were crashing everywhere else with injury returnees and Gio and Roark struggling. But is that unlucky? I lean more toward as expected but I leave it open

Gio - same goes for Gio here. On one hand he didn't pitch that much worse than would be expected if you follow his historical track. On the other hand there last year was better so does that raise your expectations enough that you feel his fall is unlucky? I don't know. I'll leave it open but you'd have a harder time convincing me that this wasn't in the expected category.


One thing you may see - the Nats didn't get that unlucky when it came to performance. They hit a lot of expectations mainly, and Soto covered a chunk of their unluckiness. So maybe you have them a couple games off of expectations. 90 to low 90s instead of low to mid 90s.

Why then were they so far off? Well unluckiness outside of player performance is one reason. The one-run game issue* cost them a few games (but only a few). The rebirth of the NL East with a .500 Phillies team and a good Braves squad cost them a few more. You can't plan for the former, and the Nats were hoping to have a year longer before the latter became an issue. They were wrong there. The Nats were a little unlucky this year but not nearly unlucky enough to explain the 83 win record.


*you know I like to look at 2 run games too just to see if there was a wild swing there that either countered or enhanced what happened with 1 run games. Nothing to speak of. 21-22. Pretty normal.