Monday Quickie - A Tale of Two Nationals Teams

For the Wild Card Nats the weekend went well. These guys ignore the Braves as a direct competitor and see this stretch as simply a tough 16 games they have to survive. With the majority of games at home, 9-7 would be great, but 8-8 would be fine. It's not the pace the Nats want, but playing .500 ball when you are playing this many straight including 10 games against division leaders would reinforce the Nats are continuing to play at a high level. It would probably put them just outside of the WC when it's over but with the toughest stretch of the season likely over they'd be a good bet to pick up a few games on the rest of the field.

For the NL East Division Hopeful Nats the weekend was a failure. These guys see the Braves as the team they have to catch and they already had dug themselves a 6.5 game hole. It's a tough ask to expect the Nats to make up that many games over the course of the rest of the season. They just played the best baseball in the majors for 44 games and only made up 3.5 games. The saving grace though was 14 head to head games remaining in which the Nats could control their destiny. The more they make up on the Braves head to head, the more reasonable how much better they need to play better than Atlanta in the non head to head games. But to do that, to go say 9-5 at least in those games, the Nats need to win series against Atlanta. Instead 4 games have passed and the Nats made up no ground. Now they have to go 7-3 in the remaining 10 to make up the 4 games

Now it's on to the Rockies and the hope of a 3-1 series win or better because anything else puts pressure on winning the Dodgers series.

The Rockies have been a roller coaster ride this season. 3-12 to start the year, then a climb featuring runs of 10-2 and 11-2 to get them into the WC hunt before a recent 2-13 swing took them right back out. It's a hard team to read because of course the Rockies hit well and pitch poorly, but the Nats are catching them in DC so we can see how these guys hit/pitch away from home which is the flip. They have an ERA of 4.21 which would be Top 3 in NL and an OPS of .658 which would be dead last.

Offensively Arenando can hit, Story is pretty good too and away from home the catcher tandem (Wolters/Ianetta) does better. Maybe catching in Coors is a bit of a mind-sucking experience.  Murphy and Desmond aren't particularly good on the road, while Dahl and Blackmon suffer real dropoffs. McMahon and Tapia are not good anywhere.  I'd say it's a pretty ineffectual lineup where you have one star hitter in Arenando who's having an off year and one star hitter in Blackmon who's only a star at Coors. That isn't enough to balance the rest. Story is a decent bat. Murphy, Dahl, and Desmond aren't awful. The rest are. It's sort of a lineup I'd expect to fall as "worst of the teams who aren't truly terrible" if they had a regular home field. Like a Reds/Giants/Padres are now.

Relief pitching is a biog strength away from home. Davis and McGee have ERAs under 1.00. Oberg is at 1.71. Diaz, Dunn, and Estevez under 3.00.  It's actually a real solid group that can hold a lead given to them when you aren't dealing with this superball and playing on the moon. The Nats will catch the following pitchers.

Lambert - (3.00 ERA on road - 2 starts) rookie that's hard to read as he's only had two starts away from Coors, but pretty good numbers in those two and it was against the Cubs and Dodgers. Then they it's Jon Gray (4.29 - 11) who has figured out how to pitch in Coors but that's made him middling outside of it. After that is Kyle Freland who got beat up in NY and hasn't had an impressive season home or away. Game 4 would have been Senzatela but he's been demoted.  Hoffman will likely pitch and he's not been good. The Nats luckily miss German Marquez who is honestly a good starter.So in short they get Lambert - an interesting control-heavy prospect, Jon Gray -  perfectly solid middle rotation guy, Kyle Freeland - last year's hotness who is struggling in 2019, and likely Hoffman - a one time big time prospect who now seems like rotation filler (why didn't he match up with Fedde?)

The Nats counter with Fedde, Stras, Corbin and then hopefully Max.  The pitching match-ups would probably favor Rockies, Nats, Nats, and almost certainly Nats again even if they run out Ross or Voth. I like the Nats to take 3 of 4 in a lower scoring set then you'd probably expect. However, if the Nats find themselves behind going into the later innings things could get ugly. They need to jump on the beatable starters then let the bullpen hold off a less than impressive Rockies away lineup.