Around a week ago, we had a moderately good feeling around this team, or at least a hoepful one. Yes, the bullpen stunk but the Nats were doing what they needed to and their 6-5 record after 11 NL East rival games (6 on the road) was right on target. Even if things didn't go exactly as planned, if the outcomes were as wanted, who cares?
Well part of doing what is expected is beating up on the dregs. 6 games against the Giants and Marlins, two of the worst teams in the majors, should end up with 4 maybe 5 wins. The Nats got 3. Performing against good teams? Good! Underperforming against bad teams? Bad!
This week is a tough one. The Nats swing over to Colorado today, after being in Miami yesterday. Given the Nats penchant for already complaining about things beyond their control, I imagine this has gotten on their nerves and will lead to subpar performance as well, but we shall see. This is important though because for the most part Colorado hasn't been good this year. After the Nats face them it's a run of at least "so far" solid opponents until you get close to Memorial Day. Another series loss heading into a PHI MIL LA road trip... I don't know. It feels like a set-up for a run that puts the Nats behind the 8-ball early.
We're now 20 games in or about 12% of the season, so we can start to look at the hitting stats and see if there is anything that stands out....
CATCHER - This is the expected situation but one the Nats hoped to avoid. Gomes, the younger better defender, is not hitting and Suzuki, the tried and true bat, is. This is why you got both - you can balance this - but the hope was Gomes would hit and become the A choice with Suzuki as the back-up. Instead expect more platooning.
FIRST - Zimm was dead in the water, then hit two solo shots yesterday. He's typically a slow starter, so it's hard to look at anything here with certainty. He is yanking the ball but that's better than being late on everything. Adams is swinging from his heels early - hard, pull, pop - but that's it. It's a PH line not a part timer one.
SECOND - Kendrick has been great too but it's a crazy
unsustainable power surge and it's only over 35 ABs so really we should
get back to him in about 2 weeks when he has gotten to enough PAs. Dozier has also been swinging for the fences like Adams but he's worse. Contact way down. Swing and miss way up. Swinging at more. If there's something that looks like a take-away out of all these early stats it might be that Dozier is done.
SHORT - Turner got hurt. Difo is not an everyday player but we knew that.
THIRD - Rendon has been awesome.
LEFT FIELD - Juan Soto's K rate has jumped from 20% to 27.3%. That's not necessarily bad - such things can be accompanied by more power - but his isn't. His pop is a little lower than last year. As he's 20 we don't worry about this for the long haul but for 2019 this is why you can't just assume he's going to step up and be a team-carrying star.
CENTER - Robles seems to be teetering on the brink. His K rate is super high - like nearly twice as high as usual. But as I noted talking about Soto that's made up for by a continued jump in power. He's sort of become the best MAT. The question is what will win out. Can the pitchers work that K-rate and make him ineffective, can he learn make better contact, or will a balance be found. This is the fun of a rookie season.
RIGHT - The worry about Eaton is a continued decline in power. He's down to a guy the Nats thought might give you 15 homers to something under 10. 40 doubles and triples is most likely 30. If this isn't an early season fluke (and the drop in power last year suggest it's not) he'll have to start leaning into taking more pitches to maximize his offensive value.
My big worry is Dozier - but if Kendrick is simply good that negates that. Rendon fills the superstar void that Bryce leaving caused*, but who then fills in for Rendon, or last year's Soto? Currently they are relying on Robles to pound the ball (not expected) and a high BABIP for Eaton who otherwise is doing nothing. These could all be early issues, and we could see some improvements especially with the Soto/Robles duo but there are some concerns to keep an eye on. And of course, Turner coming back will turn a hole into a likely plus. This offense right now needs help, but there are places where you can see it coming from.
*Hey - you may not have liked the average but he got on base and hit homers like a star.
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We're floating along without our second best offensive weapon in Trea Turner. I'd say its all okay - assuming he's not out for more than what we've been told to expect.
We now have a sample of 182 games with mostly the same core group of guys that indicates this team simply may not be as good as everyone thought.
The offense still tends to be streaky, the bullpen is still mostly unreliable, and the baserunning, defense, fundamentals, and coaching border on atrocious. And as if all that wasn’t enough, it looks like time and wear and tear may be starting to affect Max now (I came into the season afraid that could happen, but hoped I’d be wrong).
Max is fine. His K and BB numbers are right in line with what he's been doing for the past few years. The reason his performance hasn't been great is that he's sporting a cool .395 BABIP against, roughly .100 points above his career norm. The high BABIP might suggest Max has gotten easier to hit, but retaining his elite strikeout ability suggests otherwise. And even if Max has gotten easier to hit, the .400 BABIP is still coming way down.
The Nats have three starters currently averaging more than 11 K/9 (the Astros and the Rays both have two).
I'm with Anon, while they spent a lot of money, if everyone is just a tick worse than their projections than this is a .500 team. Maybe they get some breaks and wind up with 86 wins, maybe they don't and wind up with 76 wins, either way it's not a playoff team as currently constituted.
Starting to feel more and more like an 88-85 win season. The question in my mind is, who pays the price if that happens? Does Rizzo get fired?
If only the Nats had exclusive negotiating rights for a young, team-carrying star that they could have penciled in for right field for the next 12 years for less than $30m a year whose agent they were very familiar with and had made many deals with before.
Forget firing Rizzo, can we fire the Lerners?
Any insight into why Martinez removed Bear Claw in the 9th yesterday, after Bear Claw walked 2 and struck out 2? Even if he gives up a home run to the next batter, the Nats are still winning 5 - 3. It makes me very uncomfortable that Doolittle has to pitch in the 9th (or at a minimum, warm-up) in every Nats' win, regardless of the margin going into the 9th. I suppose Martinez really wanted and needed the win yesterday, but he's going to burn out Doolittle. And then the Nats are really up a creek without even a toy paddle in sight.
@PotomacFan - While I'm no expert, I do spot trends. Do your best to remove all doubt and bring in someone that can pitch.
Doolittle had already warmed yesterday during the top of the inning, when the score was 3-0. Maybe that factored into it. And somes he was already warm I wouldn't be surprised if Dave brought him in to get a save, kind of like he leaves in Max to try to get the Word out to.
*since he was already warm
Thanks Josh. I wasn't watching the game. It makes sense that Doo would be warming up to come in to a 3 - 0 game, and since he was already warmed up, that Martinez would put him on the mound before Bear Claw could throw the game away. So, I'm okay with what Martinez did.
Is Suero the next guy up for the 8th inning role? Given the failure of everyone else, I'd like to see Suero get a shot. Alternatively, how about trying Joe Ross to see if he can pitch the 7th and/or 8th?
Great teams don't complain about anything.
Good teams may bring up complaints from time to time, but they play through it (i.e. the Yankees issue last year with having to play a Sunday Night ESPN game in Baltimore, and having a day-night double header in Detroit the following day, and threatening to boycott ESPN if the time wasn't changed [which I believe it was anyways]).
Bad to average teams make excuses for seemingly everything that doesn't go well.
I vaguely remember back in 2015 another bad Nats year where they had a day off in Colorado after flying in from San Francisco, played 3 straight night games in Denver, landed in DC about 6 AM in the morning and than had to play at home that night, players complaining about why that final game in Colorado couldn't have been a day game. Every freaking team whether you have a Sunday Night game and than have a game in Texas the next night, or play a Sunday game on the East Coast and have to fly across the coast for a game gets the short end of the schedule sometime during the 6 month season, it's the nature of the beast with 30 teams, 162 games, and less than 3 weeks combined worth of off days. If you don't like it, quit and take up ballet or something! Be happy your making millions of dollars to play a game you love, shut the hell up, go play ball, and if your a reliever get a ****ing batter out!!!!!
If Rendon goes on IL we then have holes at every infield position. Great. If this team wants any hope of winning the division I honestly believe we need to sign Kimbrel and call up Kieboom to play SS. Then if he’s playing well when Turner returns Kieboom can be the 2B. Even then who knows. But to have a chance I don’t think the team can tolerate this pen and a hole at SS for another 1-2 months
Do you think Kimbrel will matter with Martinez still there? They were sleep walking through that Miami series. Miami was 4-15 prior to the series. Reminds me of last year prior to the trade deadline. The rumors floating around were if the Nats played well in Miami the front office would trade for reinforcements . The Nats never got off the plane and were blown out in all three games. At some point you either fire all of the players (which is not likely) or replace the manager. Please no more inexperienced managers. - This may point to the root of the problem: the Lerners. They ran off Harper, ran off Dusty Baker and Davey Johnson to replace them with buffoons.
@Jay I don't think this team is good enough for Kimbrel to make a difference. What's Kimbrel worth 1-2 wins? Maybe 3. This is a .500 team and unless Soto learns how to hit sliders soon (I think he will eventually learn), the starting pitching gets a whole lot better, and Rendon miraculously heals they just don't have a good enough team for him to get them over the top.
It could be worse, look at the Yankees.
The doomsayers on this thread are completely insane. I don't mean a little insane. I mean *completely* insane. First of all, the division race is currently quite close and it's likely going to remain quite close. So, obviously, Kimbrel would make a difference.
The Nats are 1.5 games out of first place on April 23. That in and of itself is nothing to get agitated about. The Nats' run differential is plus-8, which suggests that they have played like a slightly-better-than .500 team so far. The Nats' baseruns - looking only at inputs such as K, BB, 1B etc. and projecting runs to take out sequencing luck - says that the Nats should have a run differential of 6, also suggesting they have played slightly better than .500 so far.
What about the rest of the NL East? As of now, it looks like the Mets are pretenders. Their run differential is -15 and baseruns suggests that's mostly not a function of poor sequencing luck. The Phillies have the same run differential as the Nats, but their baseruns is zero, which suggests they've been a bit lucky, but still a .500 team. The Braves, by contrast, have both the best run differential - +11 and the best baseruns - also +11.
If you want to be insane and react to small sample sizes (and not completely insane and react to the WRONG small sample sizes), then you should expect the Braves and the Nats to separate themselves from the pack a bit, the Phillies to be around .500, and the Mets to falter.
I, on the other hand, believe that ~20 games that have occurred so far mostly tell us what we already knew: the top four teams in the division are fairly closely bunched together. Of the three non-Nats teams, I am now slightly more worried about the Braves and slightly less worried about the Mets compared to the beginning of the season. But still, I think any of the four teams could win a close division race. The Nats have done nothing to suggest they won't be in the thick of the race for the foreseeable future. At worst, their mediocre play so far is a lost opportunity to start run away with the division, which wasn't going to happen anyway.
I am more worried about the Mets. They have played ONLY 6 home games this year and they have played only 5 non-division games so far, against the Twins & Cards - not exactly pushovers!! If they can hang around while playing 3/4 of their games so far this year against the division, I think they will be around for the long haul. Their big run differential is due to 2 blowout losses.
Blowout wins and blowout losses always affect run differential. The existence of such wins and losses is meaningful because run differential is meaningful, so we can't reasonably exclude them. Also, saying the Mets' run differential is misleading because it's "only two games," ignores the fact that, at this point in the season, two games is roughly 10% of the total games played. Would you say at the end of the season we should ignore a team's bad run differential because it was caused by "only 16 blowout losses"? Of course not.
I am quite shocked that while losing two series, we actually gained one game on the division lead. I was never expecting us to run away with it nor even to be the NL East leader for most of the season, but just hoping for hanging around within striking distance. I'm hopeful, but not overly so because this season always felt like a "soft reboot" to me, and i'm excited that Corbin looks like the real deal.
@ anon 9:22 have you seen the schedule the rest of April & May?? It’s one NL contender after another after another. Next 27 games after this Rockies series ends are against the Padres, Cardinals, Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Mets & Cubs. By the time that stretch ends I wouldn’t be surprised if they were looking up at the Marlins in the standings. The good news is the schedule opens up a lot after, Turner & Rendon are both hopefully back & healthy, they improve/add bullpen reinforcements, Dozier starts hitting, but even that may not be good enough.
Responding to Anonymous: the stats are misleading. If you remove from consideration the Nats 15 - 1 win over the Mets, you'll find that the Nats have a minus 6 run differential, and the Mets have a minus 1 run differential.
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TBH Jane makes more sense to me than this "let's ignore the games that have happened that don't fit my narrative" business. The games that have been played matter, and sure, the Nats have a 15-2 laugher in the game log, but they also have 4 losses by 6 runs or more. If you think blowouts don't count for some reason, better drop those from consideration. Anon @9:22 specifically gave you the BaseRuns run differentials to take out some of the randomness.
And here's another thing, the Nats are among the league leaders in fraction of runs scored with 2 outs, so the sky is falling narrative about a lack of "clutch hitting" that people love to trot out against run differential doesn't apply. I think it's reasonable to say that Davey is a bad enough manager that the Nats will continue to underperform their peripherals, but that's not Rizzo's fault. He wanted to re-sign Dusty.
PotomacFan: If you ignore games played on Tuesdays, the Nats run differential would probably also look different. There's absolutely no reason to do that, though, for the same reason there's absolutely no reason to ignore the Nats 15-2 victory over the Mets. In some instances, there are statistical reasons to exclude outliers. Those don't apply here (nor do we know enough to consider the 15-2 game an outlier). The Nats have played 21 games. We should consider all of them.
Run differential isn't perfect, but it's a better predictor of future W-L record than current W-L record. The main reason for that is that small things can make a big difference in W-L record, which makes a W-L record look misleading. Baseruns also isn't perfect, but it is a better predictor of future W-L record than run differential and current W-L record.
As for the schedule, the schedule will ALWAYS be tough for teams in the 2019 NL East because there are four good teams, which play each other 19 times a season. And the murderer's row of teams the Nats face in the next 27 games includes three series against teams that currently have negative run differentials AND negative baseruns (Padres, Brewers, Mets). That's 13 of 27 games against teams that have played like below .500 teams!
Jane, I don't know why we should still fear God, umpire Doug Harvey has been dead for over a year now. If he was coming back, I suspect it would have happened already.
Hey look.. sanity has returned to the blog comments. The Nats aren't doomed. Imagine that?!
This is going to be a fight. If you're surprised you haven't been paying attention. It's impossible at this point to predict if we'll win or lose the division. The Nats are a fun team to watch and start the season with a decent chance at playoffs. I'm happy.
Also, Strasburg ain't dead, despite the rumors.
Any thoughts on a Gio reunion?
Re: Davey - I'm not crazy about him thus far either, but I do not agree with the "no more inexperienced managers" mantra. If you want a good manager, you gotta go with an inexperienced one, because with very few exceptions the good ones aren't usually available. Most of the good managers in the league right now are with their first teams. I can only think of two exceptions in the last 20 years of great managers being available in free agency, three if you go back to 96 (Maddon, Francona, and Torre). Maybe I'm missing someone, but even if I am, the point still stands. The problem is *who* the Nats hired as inexperienced managers, not that they went inexperienced (and in the case of Davey, he was highly touted by Madden, so...).
Re: How good/bad are the Nats. I agree with the stats bros that the Nats have been performing "better" than .500 if you remove luck. That doesn't mean it's good enough - still gotta fix that pen. About a week ago I said the Nats gotta fix the pen *now*, because at some point things are gonna go south like they do for every team over a long season, and they will have wanted that cushion. Now the Nats got some bad performance from starters and Rendon is hurt. You *could* say the answer was to add offense depth, or maybe....maaayyybbbeee....nah.
If NL East continues to be as competitive as it has been, 88 wins could take the division (projected by fangraphs). That is all.
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