Going Deep with The Nats

As the MLB season progresses, the Nationals are doing everything they can to stay in the race of a highly competitive NL East. Despite their early struggles, the team has shown glimpses of potential that could impact their trajectory as the season unfolds and give them a chance at a postseason berth.

The Current Standings

In the NL East, the Nationals find themselves in third place in the current MLB season, trailing the division-leading Philadelphia Phillies and second-place Atlanta Braves, with the New York Mets close on their heels. With a 17-17 record, they sit 6.5 games out of first, indicating there’s a lot of work to be done to try to catch the Phillies. While the division may be challenging to win, staying in the Wild Card race is essential. Presently, the Nationals are the third and final team in the Wild Card for the final playoff spot. That’s today.

Defense Matters. We cannot say it enough. This Washington Nationals team has to rely on getting the best pitching they can which is enhanced and maximized by the best defense the team can put in place. Today’s defensive assignments did not meet that standard with the team’s worst defensive game of the season to lead to four unearned runs, and a soaring pitch count on starter Jake Irvin. He deserved better just like previous starts.

Remember, not all errors are recorded as such in the box score because the rules allow, not only the judgment of an official scorer, — but also rules like you cannot assume a double play. The Nats lost by a final score of 6-3. That does not tell the whole story. Do the math and the Nats win 3-2 if the errors never happened. But you also have to figure that Irvin would have been able to pitcher deeper into the game past the 5th inning, and manager Dave Martinez probably would have pitched his “A” bullpen.

For Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez, he didn’t mince words when he showed his emotions in discussing the poor plan of some of his batters in the Texas series. Maybe Keibert Ruiz, a notorious first ball swinger, got the message as he put together an 8-pitch at-bat in his first plate appearance in Friday’s game after not swinging at the first three pitches fall to a 1-2 count. Yes, he flew-out on the 8th pitch — but he also ran up Yusei Kikuchi‘s pitch count. We had seen Nats innings recently that went 1-2-3 quicker than an 8-pitch inning.

By pushing Kikuchi early and often, the Nats knocked him out of the game at exactly 100 pitches, and the Nats got into the Blue Jays bullpen earlier than the average of 6.8 innings in the Texas series, and that average would have been much higher if Nathan Eovaldi wasn’t injured in the beginning of the 6th inning on Thursday.

During the Dodgers series, we wrote that the Washington Nationals have a problem. Actually they have a few problems — but the problem with the offense — since we wrote that article has worsened if you remove that Marlins series with scoring 23 runs in two games which was certainly an outlier. Even manager Dave Martinez has seemed to reach his boiling point based on his comments during the recent series in Texas. The sample sizes have a full month in the books and the season is only five full months played. After today’s game, we have officially reached the 20 percent in the season. While baseball minds feel like 50 at-bats is a fair sample, we are way past that point for most of this lineup.

Before the Marlins’ series, the Nats were scoring 3.50 runs per game. Today, the number is higher, skewed by those 23 runs. Take the 119 runs in 31 games and you have 3.84 runs per game officially now — but remove those two extreme outliers and the number drops to an horrific 3.28 runs per game. The team has a few players performing well, but too many are hanging near or under Mendoza. It begs the question, is the problem the teacher or the students?