With no spin on the Washington Nationals defense, it was awful overall in the 2024 season. The Nats ranked as the 5th worst defensive team in baseball, and that includes having the best defender in all of baseball with Jacob Young in center field. Young was named a finalist for the Gold Glove Award, and was robbed in the final vote. By the way, in Nats history, only Ryan Zimmerman in 2009 and Adam LaRoche in 2012 had won Gold Gloves previously.
Suffice it to say that all of this year’s playoff teams had positive defense except for San Diego, and they were just a -8 runs while the Nats were -21 runs per the SIS Fielding Bible. If the Nats pitched to their FIP instead of their actual ERA, they could have possibly made the postseason. The Nats finished the season with the 9th best FIP in baseball at 3.94 while turning in a poor season as a defensive team. FIP is directly affected by defense, and the Nats had the worst left-side defense in baseball in 2024.
With 12-teams making the playoffs, you feel like you would have good odds of going to the postseason with the 9th best pitching staff -or- based on FanGraphs WAR, the the 2nd best pitching staff. All of those numbers include Patrick Corbin who is now a free agent. Imagine how the Nationals could improve the pitching staff with a key addition to the starters and the bullpen while simultaneously improving the defense in the infield.
Sure, an upgrade at starting pitcher would be a good thing this offseason. And upgrades on defense is a must. An analyst might tell you that the Nats don’t need new pitchers — they need better defense to make their pitchers’ better. How’s about both? Said by Don H. before, “one run given up by bad defense has a greater impact than one run not scored by your offense because bad defense also has tangible effects on pitch counts.”
When you deep dive into the FIP numbers for starters, what we found was that the lefty starting pitchers for the Nationals were affected more by the defense than the right-handed starting pitchers. When you consider that opposing managers often stack their lineups with more right-handed batters against southpaw pitchers, the stats back-up the eye test — you saw that the weakest Nats’ fielders were all on the pull-side for those righty batters at shortstop, third base, and left field in the season overall when you look at the OAA chart below.
MacKenzie Gore had a FIP of 3.53, DJ Herz at 3.71, and Mitchell Parker at 3.85. Coincidentally, George Kirby of Seattle had a 3.53 ERA and was ranked 25th in MLB for qualified ERA. If the Nats trio of lefties all had their FIPs as their ERA, they would all be Top-38 pitchers.
Promises, promises. Remember the days when General Manager Mike Rizzo said that he promised a team with better defense? He has to see the stats, and must make defense a priority. So again, improve the defense, and the pitching will improve organically. Add an ace to the top of the rotation, and that is the cherry on top. This could be a very good starting rotation in 2025.
There is good news for the 2025 roster in that Dylan Crews‘ stats, when extrapolated for a full season of defense, has him as a Gold Glove type of player. He would be about 10-11 defensive runs saved for a full season, and probably more when you consider as his first 31-games went through the acclimation period — Crews defense got better and better. Jacob Young is already Gold Glove quality and led all of baseball in defensive runs saved, and in OAA of all players and at every position. He made the difficult look easy. Luis Garcia Jr. was the most improved defender on the team, and Nasim Nunez is quite the fielder if he has a good first baseman to help him with bounced throws. Even James Wood showed improvement in all aspects of his defense except coming in on balls, which is an area for improvement. We just don’t know why CJ Abrams went backwards from 2023 and turned into the worst defender in baseball.
Beside figuring out the issues with CJ Abrams, you can see the rest of the players highlighted in gray and blue that were negative. Most are off the team which is that classic addition by subtraction.
So what do you do with Keibert Ruiz and Abrams and the first base situation? You try to improve your internal players by coaching them up. Externally, you find ways to improve too. There happen to be two 2024 Gold Glove winners in free agency for the corner infield. First base appears to be a clear need for a new replacement, and Christian Walker is a free agent and the best fielding first baseman in the NL. Alex Bregman is a third baseman that the Nats are very familiar with and Bregman has deep ties to the Washington, D.C. area.
Can Juan Soto play a good defensive first base? We don’t know — we just know that he had been practicing at first base defense. Maybe shortstop gets fixed with Abrams getting a position change or other drastic changes to improve his defense. And Ruiz must be coached up. We know Ruiz can do better than what he is showing. Maybe some more rest days will keep him fresher too.
All in all, it doesn’t take a baseball savant to tell you that better defense will make your pitching better. That is fairly obvious. But baseball is all about having the proper balance between defense, pitching, offense, and baserunning — and of course the intangibles of team chemistry and leadership.
