I noted somewhere that this stretch - BAL, TEX, PIT, MIA - was probably the last best chance for the Nats to give their fans a long stretch of winning baseball*. So far so good. Starting with a win in the last game of the Phillies series they Nats are 4-2 and could have easily been 5-1**
The Nats pitching has looked good - Fedde, Espino, Gray and Terteault each not giving up more than 2 ER and going at least 5 1/3. But try not to make too much of it for they guys you know. Fedde and Espino didn't overpower their opponents, just had some luck on good days. For the guys you don't know you can read in things and Gray's 1 walk, 9 K, 1 homer performance is the most exciting. This Texas team isn't good but they can hit the longball and play in a hot dry area... that should translate to HRs (the park is too new to say anything). A prime chance for a bad Gray day and it didn't happen.
Tetrault's start was more like Fedde and Espino but we have to figure out if he's a master at doing this or if he's just getting lucky against bad teams. Minor league results suggest the latter but the Nats have to get lucky developing a pitcher at some point
The offensive performances have been underwhelming but that's this team. Bell is hitting, Cruz isn't doing too bad (but still not homering). Thomas is the hot one - someone has to be. If Soto was hitting it might be enough but Soto isn't hitting at least not like Soto so someone else has to step up. No one is. Ruiz is singling. everyone else is in a slump.
This is Nats baseball 2022. Not very good but if one group is performing then able to beat bad teams.
Fun.
*There's a late August stretch of SEA, CIN, OAK coming off a couple Cubs series which might work, but there are Padres series sandwiched in.
** ok yes, they could have also been easily 3-3. But that's still .500
Just an observation, Harper.
ReplyDeleteBut I am struck by how often "luck" or "lucky" crop up here in evaluating and/or determining the fate of the Nats as a team, an organization, or their players.
I don't disagree.
It's just that when I go window peeping at other team sites--Dodgers, Yankees, Astros, Red Sox, to name four--"luck" and "lucky" (except in cases of injury) virtually never show up.
Napoleon said he preferred profoundly stupid generals who were lucky over brilliant generals who were unlucky. I'm guessing the same principle doesn't apply to baseball.
You have a point. When the Yankees win ugly, it's grit. When the Nats do it, they're really a terrible team and just happened to run into a worse one.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, a thing I've often wondered -- is there ANY hope of being a good pitcher without overpowering people? I mean, I guess Espino should be delivering pizzas and that ERA of 2 just means that he's the luckiest shitty pitcher in years.
I mean, if the nats can't hit with RISP, that means they're bad, but if Espino doesn't give up RISP, does that mean he's bad?
Anyway, they're all bad. I guess I'll just watch some other sport.
As @SM points out, the same behavior is gritty performance when it applies to a successful team and lucky performance when it apprlies to a bottom team. In the case of the Nats, this feeds a narrative that we are hopelessly incompetent and could never do anything right. Thus, any success must be lucky.
ReplyDeleteThat's my jumping off spot for accusing the WP of inapproriately feeding the narrative of hopeless incompetence. An entire paragraph is devoted to describing Fedde's pitchig as inefficient because 5 innings took 100 pitches. No credit for holding the Pirates to 2 runs. No mention that 5 innings is a fairly typical start for a pitcher these days. This is not to say he wasn't inefficient, just that it could as easily have been described as a gritty performance by Fedde on a night when he didn't have his best stuff. In the same vein, we are not a good team, but we are capable of good performance that are not dependent on luck. A little more balance--in WP, here, and elsewhere--would provide a better picture of where we stand and what still needs to be done before we become competitive again.
Eh, it's lucky when a winning team does it too.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about the WP, but I'm reasonably confident that Harper doesn't mean lucky in any positively or negatively normative way. He simply means to down-weight its predictive value.
Well, I guess that's the real question: is grittiness* a genuine and replicable skill? Or is a post hoc narrative that has all kinds of shitty biases and should pretty much be laughed out of the room whenever it comes up?
*I mean grittiness as heterogeneously distributed among major league players. Certainly among the total population lots of folks are too lazy to work hard on their baseball skills and don't care enough about winning to really try their hardest during a game. But, like clutchiness, I think there's a lot of evidence that the selection process drastically collapses the distribution.
@Anon - definitely a post hoc narrative. There are some metrics that attempt to measure "clutchness", but even those have SO much noise in them (pretty much as bad as defensive metrics), that pretty much all they're doing is describing the margin of error in the more predictive statistics like wRC+ or WAR or BABIP or whatever you'd like.
ReplyDeleteJust as an example, Fangraphs "clutch" metric (which looks at WPA and adjusts it for leverage index) has Aaron Judge at a negative value, meaning he performs worse in high leverage situations than a "normal" situation. Does that make him not "gritty"? No, of course not. Or Nelson Cruz who's 3rd overall in "clutchness", does that make it a great player this year? Of course not. All we're doing is trying to explain why a player may have more/less RBIs or HRs or whatever than expected. It's a residual calculation essentially
Let the Corbissance begin!!
ReplyDeleteHave to agree with Anonymous here -- I'm pretty confident that when Harper refers to luck, good or bad, he simply means deviation from expected results. When the 4.50 FIP pitcher puts up a 2.00 ERA, there's probably some luck involved. If he does it for three years running, then it probably stops being pure luck and starts being a question of looking for explanations (which might be as simple as "pitcher who gives up a lot of groundball contact in front of a very good infield defense"--which doesn't mean that he's suddenly a better pitcher in a vacuum, just that there's a rational explanation for why his FIP isn't accurately predicting his results).
ReplyDeleteSo when you have players whose underlying stats say they shouldn't be good, and whose past outcomes predict that they shouldn't be good, nonetheless end up with good results, it's not out of line to suggest that they might be getting a little lucky. (Similarly, I'd say that the Yankees are getting lucky, too, to have THIS kind of record, but it's also a record built on being a good team to begin with.)