Nah over. Probably.
Nice to win a few but as they were the rare interleague games they only help the Nats with wins and not with giving someone else losses. Same for tonight. This week the Nats take on the Braves which also isn't much help given that the Braves are 8.5 games ahead of the Nats. They aren't going to catch them.
But win your games and hope some other things go your way. This week the Phillies are playing the Marlins so the Nats, if they win, will gain ground on someone they can catch.
It was nice to see Max be Max AND not be pushed hard. Streaky Suzuki is having a hot streak now and Brock Holt is doing what he does (win the hearts of short white people who love "real" baseball and imagined scrappy gritty players with a lot of singles then suck but keep their hearts). Luis Garcia and Robles are also hitting better so that's a good sign for now and later. Kieboom however...
Ok quickie for real
11 comments:
I feel like if they make it, it would be surprising but not shocking. My seat of the pans guess is that they have between a 1 and 5% chance of making it, and events with those types of probabilities happen all the time. But of course, they're probably cooked.
I wish they'd dealt the expendable vets for what they could get and were running tryouts / playing for draft position but there's probably a reason I don't manage a big league team...
Coming from behind is always more entertaining than being on top and trying to hold your position.
The pundits have written them off. The "WS defender" target is no longer on their backs. 4 of 5 wins helps help counter a really bad seven game slide and prevent the final nails from being driven into the season's coffin.
Just keep going "1" and "0". Make it interesting.
Not going to lie, the team this past week compared to the rest of the season is night and day. Pitching is on point, offense is clicking, and they were doing it without Soto. It's frustrating to see them do it when they'd have to pull off a miracle in a second straight year to get a playoff berth (though as Matt said, "miracle" is a bit of a stretch). I know Rizzo says his first course of action is to extend Davey, but this is two consecutive years of being really slow out the gate, plus a midseason collapse the first year. Is Davey really extension worthy...?
Yes, the Nats looked better the last 2 nights. But it would take a miracle to make the playoffs -- and they don't have the talent to make that happen. Their big comeback last year was fueled, in large part, by the return of key players, including Rendon. And they had 4 quality starters last year. Without Rendon, Strasburg, and a decent 3rd, 4th or 5th starter, the Nats have no chance this year. But I'll still enjoy watching Max, Trea Turner and Juan Soto, and hope to see something out of Kieboom. I have no idea why Cabrera is still playing.
Never mind extension. Fire Davey. Last year's slow start was the last straw.
Meh, I've never been a huge Davey fan, but he's not the issue. The problem is there team. They are old. There's hardly any offense outside of Soto and Trea. MAT is going to give you a K or a dinger, while Robles will give you a K or HBP. Max has been less Maxy this season and Stras is out.
I am a FIRE DAVEY guy (sorry but you should have read that) but the guy deserves a full normal season at least (He'll run the team into the ground but you gotta do some things because that's how it goes)
I’m of the opposite end of the spectrum. I’m for extending DM. (Sorry can’t bring myself to call him Davey). I get the impression that he’s a player’s manager and the team gets behind him. I don’t believe in the “tactician” manager. That’s what everyone said Joe Maddon is. I don’t see superior tactics. I see the angels be terrible just like the cubbies were. Tactics be damned, those guys aren’t showing up to play. More often than not the Nats were showing up to play. Poor rooster construction, age, and injury was dooming Nats early last year, and is this year is as well. I have always seemed to feel like DM is getting the guys showing up to play, I don’t hear whining, animosity, and other BS from the clubhouse. The players seem to believe in the guy and when healthy it worked. They need better talent on the field, and a bullpen to finally work. DM doesn’t control the roster, but what he does control he does a fair to decent job at. Personally I don’t think a manager impacts each individual game all that much. It’s the preparation that they control. His in-game decision making will improve over time. But his prep and getting his team prepped has been good so far in a very young career at the helm. I say give him a 2-3 year extension running through 2023. Probably won’t find a better manager over that span and you sure as hell could find worse.
@JD
I agree with 90% of what you said, but come to a different conclusion. I think "tactician" managers are useless in the age of sabermetrics, everyone has all the data they need to make the right decision in the moment. But managers are key to preparation, and from what I see, Davey/DM/coach/boss/whatever doesn't get the team prepared. They are slow out of the gate for the season and often look ill-prepared at the plate. We've had the pitch recognition discussion here before, and to me it seems like our players are really bad at anticipating pitches based off the count. That comes down to coaching (whether it's Davey or Kevin Long).
I agree with the sentiment that the manager these days needs to be an emotional leader more than anything that fires the team up and gets them into a winning mindset, but I don't feel like DM does that well enough to warrant much of an extension.
@carefully discouraged
Happily agreed to see things differently. I do see your point about slow outta the gate. However I wonder if the pitch recognition issue is a little bias. I completely agree that pitch recognition is screwy and strike outs are very high. But is this also true across baseball with the exception of a few teams? My point is are the Nats the exception to the rule or are they just indicative of something league-wide and we just more heavily scrutinize the Nats because it’s our team? I don’t have the answer to that, I’ll admit, I watch only a little baseball outside of Nats games in the past few years (just too damn busy), and I have watched desperately little this year (Stupid COVID has my line of work crazy exhausting). If I had a little more thunder to this topic I might try to find some fancy stats.
I dunno. Just a thought. Many times I find I will be extremely critical of something that I feel my particular team does poorly only to find out later that most teams do it poorly as week and I am holding them to an unfair standard. For example, I don’t feel the Nats steal bases enough. They steal only .4 per game. However, this unfair as they are extremely average at this only 11 teams have a better stolen base per game rate.
Just to put it up for discussion.
Great discussion. I miss this community when things are slow on the blog. I agree that the most important role of a manager these days is clubhouse harmony and managing egos around placement in the batting order/pitching roles, playing time, etc. It is great to have a low drama team in these areas and Davey deserves due credit for that.
But he is responsible for the slow starts year after year and he is responsible for those perhaps rare moments when managerial decisionmaking is the difference between a win and a loss. We need base runners but refuse to hit away from the shift. The Braves walk Soto but we give up two HRs to Freeman. We can't get MAT in from second in extra innings and the Phillies bunt a guy over, hit him in and win. There have probably been a half-dozen games where Davey could have engineered a win but didn't and this year that's the difference between making the playoffs and not.
Every win matters. Fire Davey.
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