Nationals Baseball: Lucky or Unlucky : 2021

Monday, October 18, 2021

Lucky or Unlucky : 2021

After a one year COVID hiatus, Lucky or Unlucky is back. This is where I go over the performances in the Nats season looking for where the Nats... well got lucky or unlucky. Mainly I do this because I think this is what drives a successful season as much as talent. 

UNLUCKY

Strasburg is hurt and barely pitches.  The second part of that statement is necessary because "Strasburg is hurt" is not unlucky. It's expected. The man has pitched in 12 seasons and had a full healthy season twice. You expect him to throw anywhere from 22 to 28 games (re: miss two months or miss a month). Outside of that is where luck comes in. Yes Strasburg was hurt in 2020 but all indications is he was a go for 2021. He really wasn't. He only had two starts before going on the IL and then three more starts before needing surgery.  Now he could be really hurt, like dunzo hurt. But that's for unlucky 2022. 

Corbin was terrible. Again something hinted at in 2020 but a performance like 2020, where he probably deserved an ERA closer to 4.00, was never out of the question. 2018/2019 could be a peak and the rest of his Nationals time could be spent eating innings as a 3/4.  If only.  Corbin lost the ability to locate the fastball, making it useless setting up the slider. Worst yet he'd lose it more over the plate and that meant a lot more homers at a time homers were coming back down. It was a unexpectedly terrible year. 

Robles crash.  The last of the "we saw this coming in 2020" Victor hit terribly last year but that seemed like an aberration. He may not be good, but historically he's around average and with better than average fielding and speed you take that.  You can't take .203 / .310 /.295.  It wouldn't have been so bad if not for the fact the Nats really wanted him to leadoff which accentuated the failure.

Castro is a ass who is out of baseball now. There was some indication of this in his past but almost a decade had passed with no public incident. It was fair to think of that as something he had learned from and thankfully moved past. Nope. Bye jerk.  On a less important but relevant for this discussion baseball level the Nats had to fill an unexpected hole.  

Brad Hand hit the wall.  The Nats finally spent on very good relief pitching. A guy who had pitched to an under 3.00 ERA in 4 of the previous 5 seasons and deserved those numbers. But something broke and he couldn't K anyone anymore, especially as the season wore on. The Nats were super lucky that they were able to get something for this guy but also super unlucky that he broke on their watch because a Hand at the level he should have been could have kept the Nats in the hunt and then who knows what they do down the stretch and how the season ends?*


LUCKY

Schwarber refound his star stroke.  You know back around 2016 Schwarber was so coveted the Yanks wanted him for Chapman? And the Cubs said no? He rewarded the Cubs confidence in him by mucking around for a few years hitting homers, walking some but looking like he was half-trying.  Maybe FA lit a fire under him but he once again looked like a player you'd want to build a team around. A pure 40+ homer slugger who could hit and walk enough otherwise to be a star.

Nats veteran bats do well. Harrison? Bell? Escobar? Avila? Yes even Jordy Mercer had seasons at the plate for the Nats that ranged from a little better to a lot better than they did the previous year.  Hell even 5 game stop gap Jon Lucroy did too.  And the one that didn't? Parra? Well he didn't perform much worse than expected. This is important to remember when looking at the Nats offense and projecting it out to next year. They really did hit on pick-ups over and over again, even if for someone like Mercer that was getting a usable month from a guy that should have retired in 2019. 

Lane Thomas and Riley Adams Superstars?  No, they aren't. But for their brief Nats tenures so far they hit like it. So when the original vet pick-ups were traded away guys like this kept it going. Along with Soto of course.

Hudson quietly was very good... for the Nats.  In 2020 Hudson looked bad. That kind of made karmic sense as in 2019 he got real lucky. He's a 4-5 ERA guy, except for another half-season he wasn't for the Nats letting them trade him off for something. Then he fell apart. Thanks for the memories and the timing.  


AS EXPECTED

Max was Max... and Ross was Ross and Fedde was Fedde (and Lester didn't have one more good year in him).  The rest of the rotation went as expected. Two pitchers failing and none overperforming is bad enough. That it was your 1A and your 2? Yeah that was a problem 

Soto was Soto.  Well to be fair he wasn't Soto early and then we was SOTO late, but that's sometimes how seasons are.  Soto is one of the best hitters in baseball, and quite possibly THE best hitter of his generation and he's in his prime. 

Yan Gomes did well. Trea Turner was a star. Zimm hit. All these had a spread of possible outcomes. Gomes was at the top of his, Turner near the top, Zimm about on target. Almost everything good, but also not too far out of line. The Nats didn't build a bad team on offense it just started SO slow and then the pitching was so bad we didn't notice when it got back to normal. 

Homegrown strikes out Stevenson? Bad. Kieboom? Worse. Garcia? Not there yet. There were some decent performances. Tres Barrera, Yadiel Hernandez late, but there was also AAA replacements like Adrian Sanchez and Hernan Perez giving nothing and taking something away.  Overall the Nats internal replacements were not good. But this isn't a surprise. The Nats system was ranked low. It's not good. This is what you get. 

Other trades were in line Adams and Thomas overshot their expectations, but Ruiz didn't (although he looked good in that last week) and Gray and Thompson struggled. It happens. 

The rest of the relief pitching stunk But yeah look at it, that isn't a shock. I guess that  Rainey was so bad and Harris wasn't usable was a little on the unlucky side but you could have seen it coming. They put together a 2 man pen, hoped the rest would come together. One man failed and everything else fell apart. Maybe it was a domino effect of the starting pitching and Davey's tendency to overwarm? I don't know but I'm not going to claim this garbage pen was a surprise even if it was the literal worst.


Overall one can argue the Nats were almost as lucky and they were unlucky but the quality matters as much as the quantity.  The Nats hitting was mostly a bunch of little victories. Guys overall doing better than expected but only one having a star run, and the one that had a star run was for a limited time with a slow start and a a mid-season injury. It arguably was almost countered by the crash of another bat. Meanwhile while the bulk of pitching - back end of the rotation, back of the pen - mirror imaged the bats with a bunch of minor failures. Except there were big failures here, too and no big positives to match these big crashes. 

To put it another way - the veteran bats and the couple trade surprises matched the Ross/Fedde/bulk of pen disappointments. The Schwarber run and Hudson performance was mostly matched by the Robles crash and Hand's issue  But there was no matching for the Strasburg and Corbin issues and those were HUGE issues. Like -6 game issues at the time of the trade deadline. Add in a little general baseball season bad luck and a 55-49 team is 48-56. A 55 win team at that point is an 85-86 win team in general. 

It's probably not enough to get the Nats back in, even under the best of circumstances. The Strasburg and Corbin issues didn't resolve, a lot of those veteran bats who hit better for the Nats didn't as the season winded down and without luck this is only an 87+ win team to start with. The Nats system wasn't good enough to add impact players (no way I see Rizzo trading ANYone with actual talent) so they probably fall a game or two short even adding a couple guys. Even if they do sneak in and win that WC game with Max on the mound - There is just no way to see this rotation and bullpen winning anything beyond that. This was a team that needed to be lucky to get in and win, and got unlucky instead which lead to the teardown. Probably necessary. Still painful I bet


*presumably they trade no one, add a little and end up falling short of the hard charging Braves to end the year with a win total in the low-mid 80s.

6 comments:

DezoPenguin said...

Seems pretty much on point, except that I really think the bullpen belongs in Unlucky instead of As Expected. It's one thing that a collection of bad pitchers pitches poorly, but it's another thing entirely when literally only Hudson (when we had him) and Finnegan (who was "a useful guy" instead of anything resembling an ace reliever) are even usable.

Looking at our bullpen on Fangraphs (I know, not perfect, but it's a good overview), we see that Hudson was worth 1 WAR. The next eight pitchers--all of the remaining positive performances--combined for 1.1 fWAR, and two of THOSE were Espino and Ross! So Hudson, in half a season, was worth literally half of the positive performance out of the pen.

We then had 6 0.0 fWAR pitchers--guys who pitched to literal replacement level. Of those, two were starters (Fedde and Nolin) and one was Hernan Perez. A POSITION PLAYER pitching in blowouts was, according to Fangraphs, our tenth-most-productive relief pitcher.

And then there were eleven guys putting up negative fWAR. Guys like Harper, Voth, Rainey, and Suero that we were counting on to be useful parts of the bullpen. Prospects like Thompson and Baldonado that hypothetically should have been worth something.

The bullpen as a whole was worth -0.2 fWAR. That's right, the aggregate 'pen was actually hurting the team more than it was helping. (Somehow, it wasn't the worst 'pen in the majors. That was Arizona, not company we want to keep.)

Meanwhile, the worst playoff team 'pen was Milwaukee, 15th at 3.2. Our bullpen wasn't just poor, it was utterly execrable. Virtually everything not Hudson-shaped hit its worst-case scenario, being hurt, awful, or both.

Harper said...

I see what your saying but the problem is that in the entire bullpen beyond Hand and Hudson I think only Suero and Rainey had pitched two "full" seasons of relief (I'm counting 2020 here) before this year, and I think they only had two. So these are non-prospect bad pitchers with no experience. I think bad years are basically expected. Is it crazy that they threw out 14 say... 5.00 ERA type guys and didn't luck into 1 true decent performance? I guess? But that's a stretch to me, basically everyone pitched as they should and they got a mix of ERAs out of that.

To me if I had 14 PROSPECT bad pitchers with no experience... I'd expect a couple good years. Or a 14 non-prospect pitchers who had good years last year... I'd expect a couple good years (at least). Or 14 non-prospect seemingly bad pitchers with experience (meaning they were probably good in the past)... I'd expect a couple of good years.

Really what it comes down to is if you think it's unlucky that Rainey, Suero, and Finnegan all didn't come through. I say no. Maybe going 1 for 11 on the rest was a surprise but I would have bet on 0 before 2.

billyhacker said...

Espino was a nice find. A number 5 pitcher from the couch cushions! You might say that those grow on trees, but the Cardinals traded an actual player for Jon Lester! Espino's 4.41 xFIP says to me it wasn't all luck. He obviously ran out of gas or maybe diesel despite just 109 innings, but pencil that man in as our #6!

DezoPenguin said...

You've got some pretty pessimistic expectations for the bullpen guys if you think it's unlucky that apart from Hudson literally every other pitcher out there produced AT BEST a "meh."

I mean, yeah, the parade of Justin Millers, Javy Guerras, and Kyle McGowins pitching like what they are is kind of to be expected. You'd think that one of them would turn in a half-decent performance, but I agree, going 0-fer on those doesn't raise an eyebrow. These are innings-eater types, designed to be thrown into blowouts and rotate through the 7-8 slots in the pen as the season goes, hoping somebody sticks to the wall.

Then there are the prospects. Finnegan, Clay, Thompson, Machado, Baldonado, Klobosits, Romero, Murphy a little bit Rainey. And out of that they get one guy about whom you'd say, "eh, not bad." One. And none of them actually good.

And then there are the guys with recent histories of being competent MLB relievers (and by "recent" I mean "2019 or later"): Suero, Avilan, Harper, Rainey, Harris, Hand. And every single one of them was awful (plus Harris was hurt). Hand averaged out to "meh," maybe, and the rest of the bunch were hot garbage.

I mean, heck--even Arizona, they of the bullpen an aggregate one win somehow worse than ours, still managed to have four separate guys put up half-win seasons. (Plus good ol' Tyler Clippard, whose results were somehow fine despite his underlying metrics being horrid--as opposed to the Nats pitchers, whose on-field results were just as bad as their metrics.)

Nattydread said...

What Albert King said: "If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all."

If the Nats had streaked on a bit of good luck, dealt at the deadline, and fell into a wildcard, that would have been it. With no pitching and no pen, October would have been over.

We'd be looking at a 2022 rebuild from the ground up. With nada in the minors.

So call the streak that made Rizzo decide to sell off GOOD luck. Corbin and Strasburg with Gray could (with luck!) be the core of a decent rotation. Soto and Bell and Ruiz are one third of a killer line-up. There are a few other pieces in place to start off an off-season of deals and FA acquisitions.

Glad that we got a kick in the pants to finally get serious about a make-over that any one with vision could see coming as far back as 2019.

Cautiously Pessimistic said...

Yes, collapsing when they did was the best luck of the season. This team was top-heavy and on shaky ground if any injuries occurred. Well you had Stras go down, Soto missing time, and then of course Corbin going off a cliff. All of a sudden, the lack of depth was FINALLY exposed. This team needed a rebuild, which would have been a lot easier to start last offseason, but at least they got a headstart at the trade deadline ahead of this offseason.