What a goddman joke end of the season.
Shut up and enjoy your rebuild fans! Buy your season tickets for next year because we swear we will try then!
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SECOND MOST POPULAR BLOG OF THE LAST SEASON PLAYED WITHOUT THE STUPID EXTRA-INNING GHOST RUNNER WORLD CHAMPION WASHINGTON NATIONALS
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Has anybody kept track of which pitchers (gone, on the roster, IR) have blown saves? My impression is that many of those pitchers have had some good appearances, as well....that a weak relief staff PLUS needing to use 4+ relievers every night is creating a dynamic where every night someone is going to have their bad night.
It's been a big mix because they are also threatening the "most relievers to blow a save on one team in one season" mark
A list can be found here
https://www.reddit.com/r/mlb/comments/1wa2t30/from_rnats_every_nats_blown_save_of_2026_so_far/#lightbox
If we are trying to be fair the pen has been better lately, but that does mean "maybe the worst bullpen in baseball" to "not the worst but still maybe in the worst 5". The blown saves record almost became inevitable after they blew 6 saves in 7 games in late June.
But Harper haven't you been advocating for the endless nested rebuild scenario? With half as many blown saves we'd be a top team. Coulda added some arms instead of ditching everyone that was performing.
But hey, I hope these prospects turn into high value players we can trade for more prospects during the next layer of rebuild
I still see this season as a success from a long-term perspective. The big questions were answered, like can Wood and Abrams perform for a whole season? (mostly) Is the C situation as dire as it seemed last year? (no) Will Cavalli be good and will any other pitchers step up? (yes and yes but then they traded the one that did) Can Nuñez and Young bring the bats at least to okay? (no; mostly yes) Can any of their subpar starters work in the bullpen? (no times infinity billion)
Now they know where they need reinforcements in the offseason.
A blown save is the most frustrating way to lose, but I get why they did what they did. Evaluating if any of the guys they already had were worth keeping in a season where they weren't expecting to have a lot of leads to protect makes sense. As the first Anon notes, a lot of the time the starters get rocked badly, and nobody has enough good relievers to handle the bullpen needing to go 4-6 innings nearly every game.
There was no excuse for underfunding the team this extremely. And it's not shocking that the most under-resourced bullpen in history is really bad. (I didn't actually look up whether they're the most under-resourced, but they have to be right? It's all pre-arb, aside from Lovelady getting $1M and Perez getting pro-rated $1.9M. And it's not like any of the pre-arb guys are hotshot prospects who just aren't getting paid yet. It's just waiver claims and MiFAs and fringe prospects all the way down.)
But that mistake happened during the offseason, and that's why I'm not actually as bothered by the blown saves record as others seem to be. Like, look, maybe Toboni and the Lerners will learn from that mistake / change their priorities and put together a legitimate team going forward, and maybe they won't. But the bullpen disaster being so stark only puts more pressure on them. It's honestly been my favorite way to lose this season, which is such a change from how it feels in seasons where I have playoff hopes and bullpen collapses are gut wrenching.
I want to win every game but, if we're going to lose, I hope it's blown save.
and they're still better than last year
The blogger and the commenters know 100 times more about baseball than I ever will, and so I don't really know the answer to this: what major, expensive changes to the bullpen were possible during the season?
I think I pretty much agree with Dougherty's take here: It's frustrating, but a lot of the frustration exists because the offense very unexpectedly put the team into a situation where they had leads, and the conscious offseason decision to not construct a bullpen that cost $$ meant that a high percentage of those leads were going to be squandered. Dougherty points out that at least by one measure, ERA, the 'pen is slightly better than last year, but it hasn't helped in the high-leverage situations the team has found itself in. As Dougherty and others here have noted, a problem created by unforeseen expectations could feel qualitatively different than one you knew was coming.
https://washingtonsun.com/sports/nationals-blown-saves-record
We've been through this, but the problem with being so forgiving is that "team quality" is not a static quantity where a team is definitively "good" or "bad". It's probabilistic and exists on a spectrum.
So the mistake that Toboni and the Lerners made was not failing to correctly predict that the team would hit what we thought of as its 90th percentile outcome. That would be an impossible standard to hold them too.
The mistake was not constructing a roster that could be competitive if they hit that 90th percentile outcome. That should pretty much never happen, and it should absolutely never happen with a payroll that could add $50M and be below average.
But, yes, I agree. The mistake happened during the offseason. Once the season began, not much could be done. That's exactly why Toboni should have handled the offseason differently.
Agree with SMS that we should have seen this coming. Waiver claims, MiFA, and cast off projects for a bullpen is less than “patchwork.” It’s just plain bad. Those mediocre arms are also overused because our manager loves his matchups and refuses to let any starter (including Cavalli until the ASB) go three times through the order. Even on the rare occasion where a starter is cruising through 4 innings and twice through the lineup, he’s making a call to the pen with a start at 60-75 pitches sometimes. If you jump on a broken trampoline one time, you moght be okay. But if you bounce on it repeatedly as hard as you can, well… play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Butera and Mathew’s like that game so to each their own, I guess.
My theory on the lack of investment in the offseason (and why they didn’t go as far as to trade Abrams then or at the trade deadline) is because they’re trying to make this a lean organization so they can sell it. Ted opened the wallet and wanted to win at all costs, often spending outside their means (deferrals). The Lerner children don’t want to pay a fortune for their dead father’s toy any more. They needed to for all the bad contracts to start coming off the books (Corbin, Stras). We thought perhaps now they’ll spend, right? Wrong. We thought maybe if they had a future MVP caliber talent (heck, two of them!) that maybe then they’ll invest in some complimentary pieces, right? Wrong. We thought that once they show signs of life and play competitive baseball, they’ll start to spend right? Wrong.
They are free of the bad contracts, free of the MASN nightmare, free of Rizzo and Davey. They brought Butera and his staff in because they never pay top dollar for a manager (no offense, Blake). Same goes for a GM. It’s a low-budget, cheapness disguised as a “youth movement” to get fans excited for tomorrow while we ignore and tolerate today.
I firmly believe the Lerner’s have no intention of investing in the on-field product. The proof is in the pudding.
Agreed. A #2 starter, a reasonably certain #3-4 starter, and a stopper would go a long way. (I'm not saying that Cavalli is an ace, but he is at least a deuce. A pair of deuces isn't a bad hand in this game, especially if the goal is to get into the playoffs, but not necessarily through the playoffs.)
If Seaver King is ready to be a ML SS, you have a respectable team. This would still not be a championship team, but it would have a reasonable chance of hitting the playoffs. We'd still be a proven 1B/DH short, but you can find these guys as reasonably-priced free agents.
Totally
The representative from the Nationals' season ticket sales called me today. Bad timing. I wouldn't want to have his job. I'll paraphrase (without the expletives) what I told him: tell management to sign some quality free agent pitchers in the off-season, and call me back then.
Yes but this assumes that the Lerners give a crap. Is there anything to suggest they care about the performance of the team?
Dumpster diving actually does pay off once in a while. But there's a big difference between waiver-wire hitters and waiver-wire pitchers. The hitters flame out (i.e. Weimer) and are quietly DFA'd once the experiment has failed. Nobody remembers. Putting bull pen guys out there exposes sub-MLB talent badly -- and the pitchers get tagged with walks, home runs and blown saves. Everybody remembers.
After a while, it seemed as if Toboni and Butera had an agreement. Put the guys out there in high leverage situations. If he can handle it, he stays. If not, on to the next one. Since they didn't have anyone serious, they just threw guys out there, one after another, hoping that some lefty-righty sabermetric matchup would work out. It didn't. The pitchers were out matched.
When I was a kid on holiday in the Smoky Mountains, we stopped at an old ruby mine where you could buy a pan and a bucket of crushed rock and dirt, Once in a while, a lucky tourist got a ruby or two -- but most of us just got covered in mud. This is akin to the Nats search for relievers.
Unfortunately, this has caused Butera to over-use and ruin the one or two capable arms that they had found. Hate to say it, but half the people in this blog could have done a better job than the new brain trust. Sad thing is, after 230 games, we don't seem to have a better pen than what we started with.
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