Look I don't set the school schedule.
The Nats avoided the sweep and as they get ready to take on Toronto here are the takeaways
- the rotation looked good continuing the trend of last year
- The bullpen looked bad
- the kids weren't alright at the plate
- but the pickups were doing ok
Don't get too excited or sad. It's time to keep watching and see how things go
11 comments:
Post-Philadelphia, most would have bet on a 1-2 record for the Nats -- it was the most likely outcome. Despite the hand-wringing and semi-justified panic about the crappy bullpen performance, the Nats were in all three games.
The starting rotation looked strong, the newly acquired corner infielders performed. Ruiz appears to have turned a corner. Home runs were hit.
Bullpen was crap, yes, and Crews looks foolish (so did Willie Mays).
Until we get owners who want to dish out serious money, I'm okay with an improved and entertaining team.
I mean, almost everything is noise at this point. Even swing decision stuff and bat speed and the like, it feels like you need to wait for 50 PAs, 10 IP or 100 innings of defense before you even look at the numbers. That said, I can't keep myself from believing that Ruiz has improved his pop time.
There have been 3 stolen base attempts and he's gotten off a good throw on all 3, with an average pop time a full .15 seconds faster his previous average. To put that in perspective, lLast year, Ruiz ranked 81st out of 83 qualified catchers. His pop time this year would rank 13th.
Maybe he won't be ale to keep it up as the wear and tear builds up, but he has looked great so far.
In defense of Ruiz, he was ill last year (flu?) and lost 20 pounds. As a professional athlete he may well have been better able to withstand the bodily blow than most of us....but none of us are required to bring ourselves back to the level of a professional athlete afterwards. All of this was in-season!
Not enough games to be sure, but I am willing to believe that he is back to the place where the Nats thought he was worth a long-term contract.
Not only did he lose 20 lbs, but given that he's a professional athlete with (likely) much less body fat than the civilian population, most of that was probably muscle. Losing that much lean mass could PROFOUNDLY affect anyone's job performance, especially when your job is playing sports.
Looking pretty bad so far.
When does the off season start? I hope the Capitals go far in the playoffs so I have something to watch in May.
How dead this blog is is very much reflected on this team. And don’t expect it getting much better with the upcoming schedule.
I certainly think that's fair enough reaction to the disappointing offseason and the lack of financial investment, but I also think it's fairly typical of fan overreactions to read this start as disastrous.
The wins and losses are real, and everyone should be reducing their final win estimates by 2 games, but it's April 4th - almost nothing has a large enough sample size to be signal over noise, and if you force yourself to find narratives in the noise, there's plenty of encouraging ones. I'm not going to list any player-specific stats because I don't think they're real yet but FG has the team bats ranked 14th in wRC+ and 20th in Def and the SPs are 12th in ERA and 5th in FIP (despite having the league-worst BABIP). The bullpen has been awful, but is all that combined so much worse than we all expected?
Everything is fine. Or rather, everything is pretty much as fine as it was a week ago.
Ehhh I don’t necessarily agree. I’m starting to think the Gore start was from the shadows and more of an outlier which is a huge issue because I thought he was breaking out to an ace. Crews is looking like AAA is coming. We will see but I’m a lot less optimistic than a week ago
Again - no individual performances at this point should adjust our priors.
But if you insist on talking specifics - Crews has also been glaringly unlucky. Even with the strikeouts, he has a higher xwOBA than Call, Bell, Rosario and DeJong. He's fine and, unless you're making the case that he's losing confidence or reacting badly to the slump, and I don't see that myself, there's no actual bad news here.
And Gore's results so far are almost comically within preseason expectations. Yes, his OD gem had us all dreaming, and his workmanlike 2nd start didn't live up to those hopes, but every single starter in the league will have days worse than Gore was on Wednesday. If forced to argue a side, I actually think that gutting through 5 innings and keeping his team in it was a step in the right direction for Gore.
But, actually, neither argument really makes sense because everything is so noisy at this point, we literally can't have learned anything new.
I mean I guess. But crews has looked pretty awful. Obviously it’s not surprising that he’s been a bit unlucky to have no hits there’s literally no way he could be lucky. Regarding gore I guess it comes down to if opening day was a legit dominant performance or was aided by the environment, etc.
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