When you win a World Series in your second year, you build-up a lot of goodwill as a coach. For Dave Martinez, manager of the Washington Nationals, he of the ‘Go 1-0 today’ daily mantra, is a positive thinker. April feels like Groundhog Day in NatsTown, and consistently so in the fact that Martinez’s teams have never had a winning record on April 30 in the previous seven years — and truth be told, this could be the eighth year -unless- something drastically changes for his 2025 team with a 1-5 record.
Does it surprise you that even in the good years, Martinez‘s Nats never had a winning record on April 30? Yes, never is a long time. In 2018, with a stacked roster, the team was 13-16, and you all remember 2019’s 12-16 record on April 30 en route to 19-31 in mid-May and the subsequent ‘IMPROBABLE’ run to the World Series. Of course there was no April baseball in 2020. In 2021, the team was 10-12 at the end of April, and in 2022 Martinez’s team was a poor 7-16 when the team was headed towards a full rebuild — even though Juan Soto was still on that roster. Obviously you know that 2023 was 10-17. What might surprise many is Martinez’s best record at April 30 was last year at 14-15. That team was actually over .500 on May 7th. All combined, the Martinez record on April 30 is 56-80.
So yes, even with the tough schedule to start 2025, we hoped that Martinez’s team would be off to a good start. Nope, it’s the opposite. They came up short on Opening Day and had a chance for a walk-off, but lost in extra innings. There are good signs and trends inside of the team. Defense and starting pitching has been solid. Power is up. It is not hard to see the good.
Even though there was no fast start this year, like we hoped, the tough schedule to start the season was certainly going to be a factor. This was a Nats’ roster that had 25-of-26 players projected in mid-March to make the team except Derek Law from the bullpen. The revamped roster was a whole lot of addition by subtraction with Patrick Corbin, Joey Gallo, Eddie Rosario, Nick Senzel, Tanner Rainey, Matt Barnes and Joey Meneses were all gone. Not counting Corbin, a total of -5.6 WAR was gone. So yes, we expect this team to still win more games than last year’s final tally of 71 Curly W’s.
If general manager Mike Rizzo made no moves in the offseason, the team should have been technically better — but in need of depth of course. So Rizzo does what Rizzo does and spent his budget of $50+ million on his normal archetype of players who had former success and All-Star pedigree like Michael Soroka, Josh Bell, and yes, even Kyle Finnegan. But each were coming off of up/down seasons with plenty of question marks. The bullpen included re-acquiring Finn along with adding in Lucas Sims, Colin Poche, and Jorge Lopez as new free agents.
Please understand my point, I still think this team, just by the addition by subtraction, is going to be a better team than last year. But my hope was taking that $50+ million that was spent and go for less “bounceback” and more proven recent track records. Of course my hope is that Rizzo hits on every move, or the vast majority.
My trepidation is that there is a track record of the decision makers that keep doing the same thing from re-upping the coaching staff to typecasting the players they acquire. High risk / high reward players have littered the roster, even in the good years. Sometimes you do well going that route. Players like Jeimer Candelario and Jesse Winker are examples of that. You could even throw in Jon Lester who was flipped for Lane Thomas in an absolute fleecing of the Cardinals back in 2021.
When you fail with high priced player acquisitions, it hurts worse like with a Nelson Cruz signing and five tough years of Corbin. At least Corbin was a contributor towards the team’s World Series in 2019. But these short-term failed deals of a year or two are nothing new. The 2019 roster had a bunch of them from Trevor Rosenthal and Kyle Barraclough to Hunter Strickland and Roenis Elias. In 2018, it was Moises Sierra, Kelvin Herrera, Jimmy Cordero, and Carlos Torres.
What’s interesting is that prior to 2018, there wasn’t as many high risk / high reward players, and we all know that former manager Dusty Baker wasn’t going to allow that. He demanded high quality players and with a few exceptions got them. Yes, he got stuck with Matt Wieters in 2017 which was not a bargain basement signing — just a terrible signing. In 2016, Baker was able to get Jonathan Papelbon off of his roster after he was pitched the closer in three consecutive days and a combined 58 pitches — and that was days before the 2016 trade deadline. Coincidence? Papelbon was DFA’d on August 13, 2016 and never pitched again in the Majors. Ask Danny Espinosa what happened to his time in Washington after the 2016 season.
“Who else do I have?” said Baker, exasperation evident in his tone. “That’s my answer. I mean, you can give me somebody better, then I can play somebody instead of him. You know, certain times you have certain people on your team, and that’s what you’ve got. My job is to hopefully get the most out of them and make them better.”
— a paragraph written by Chelsea Janes in the Washington Post during the failed 2016 NLDS in response to a question of why Espinosa was in the lineup
So Martinez has said that he has input into the acquisitions that Rizzo makes. As Baker said that “hopefully get the most out of” the players on your roster “and make them better.” But too many of these rebound players can take up too many resources in trying to fix them. You need quality in for quality out too. No roster will be perfect. But the Dodgers have shown time and again that you don’t settle for poor players. Sure, they spend triple of what the Nats spend making that a luxury. But it can be done.
Last year, the Dodgers had no players at -0.2 WAR or worse. Not one. They had three pitchers who got short looks and all less than 10-innings that each had -0.1 WAR and only one position player, Taylor Trammell got six plate appearances and was gone with his -0.1 WAR in April. Look at their April 2024 transaction log. You don’t get much rope with the Dodgers.
On the other hand, you get a lot of rope with the Washington Nationals. Second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth chances are a norm in the nine lives of Nationals players. If Espinosa wasn’t thrown under the bus, he probably would have been back for the 2017 season.
This is a coaching staff that fortunately has Sean Doolittle doing miraculous work to transform these pitchers into productive pieces. While there was no hope of fixing Corbin who was broken long before Doolittle took over the assistant pitching coach duties last year, there were other pitchers who Doolittle fixed. He now has his hands full to fix Sims and Poche with tweaks for the other 11 pitchers on the staff. That is an ongoing process.
But the defensive positioning on this team, the offensive approaches, and the same type of in-game decisions from the lineup to strategic moves just seem to point to same ole same ole. Some can be somewhat shown statistically.
Let’s take a look at first basemen across baseball. Nathaniel Lowe has been positioned to only be successful 50 percent of the time. League average is 77 percent. That means that 27 percent of the balls hit towards first base are not even within the range of Lowe. His estimated success rate is the lowest in baseball. The positioning is a problem at each infield position except for shortstop where the Nats rank 6th in positioning. They are in the bottom half all of the other infield positioning spots. This explains why so many groundballs are getting through this Nationals infield.
On offensive approaches, it is early in the season with small sample sizes. But what we see is too many issues. The Nats are 5th from the bottom in taking walks at just 16 and the Nats are 2nd worst in K% at 31 percent. The problem lies deep in the analytics at the team’s O-Swing that measures swings outside of the strike zone at 36 percent which ranks 2nd worst in MLB. You can see the batters expanding the zone especially in hitter’s counts with aggressive swings. In 2-0, 2-1, and 3-1 counts, the Nats have a .000 batting average (small sample size alert). You would think from a 2-1 count the Nats batters would have success — but from a 2-1 count, the at-bat (33 ABs) ends with only a .121 batting average. Where the Nats excel are in 0-0 and 1-0 counts, and they are 16-38 batting .421. But clearly, that isn’t working the pitch count. That is the double-edged sword.
Again, and we can’t say this enough — these are all small sample size results. Two balls lined right to an outfielder could sway the numbers negatively. As the sample sizes grow, we will revisit this. Let’s see what the coaches can do in the continual improvement process.
A fair question to ask is why did Davey Martinez part ways with his World Series’ bench coach, Chip Hale? We know from rumors that they were opposites, but isn’t that what you want to have in the dugout? A different voice can help because baseball strategy is not an exact science. You want that dugout chatter. Tim Bogar was the World Series first base coach for the Nationals, and he would become the bench coach after Hale. But that did not last long, and Bogar was replaced by Miguel Cairo. Also, in 2019, Derek Lilliquist was fired as the pitching coach on May 2, 2019, and was replaced by Nationals minor league pitching coordinator Paul Menhart. Could there be changes coming in-season for this coaching staff? This is way too early to consider at this point — but since people are asking, it deserved a mention.
The real secret sauce here is still the youthful core of this team and what could be a very good starting rotation if they can just pitch to their 2024 FIP stats. When you have CJ Abrams, James Wood, Dylan Crews, Jacob Young, Luis Garcia Jr. and Keibert Ruiz along with the new corner infielders and a bench led by Alex Call, and this young starting rotation, that alone should get you the wins.
But the game really is about doing the little things. You could see mistakes made, and when you make the same mistake twice — that’s a problem. Many teams can afford to make these mistakes because they have the margin-for-error, but the Nats do not. They almost have to play mistake-free baseball — and so far, they have not. But baseball also has a luck factor in how the ball bounces, and if the ball bounces in the Nats’ favor — maybe just maybe this team could steal some wins and get a winning record at April 30. A kid can dream, right?!?
