Can analytics lessen slumps? Some analysts believe so. Every player slumps. Players who slump for long stretches usually find themselves unemployed. Baseball is a game of failure. Whoever fails the least, are usually your All-Stars. If you fail 6.9-of-10 times in a long career as a hitter, they induct you into the Hall of Fame. That would make you a .310 hitter like Derek Jeter, a model of consistency. Sure, Jeter had slumps. But he averaged .306 on April 30 over his career.
Baseball is about being consistently good. Being streaky great is supposed to even out with those small slumps. To repeat, players who slump for long stretches usually find themselves unemployed. Those who bet on the stats on the back of the baseball card is why older free agents fail so much. Age regression is real. Some regress earlier than others as baseball player’s careers seem to age like dog years.
Everyone knows that Josh Bell has been slumping for most of this season. He has zero multi-hit games in this stint with the Nats, and his OPS tumbled to .495, that felt a little like being in a traffic jam on the DMV beltway. With some walks, he has reached first base safely two times per game in a total of six games, then got caught stealing once to net him five times. As of today, Bell has the worst WAR in the entire National League at –0.8.
The Washington Nationals are 14-18 in their 2025 record. If you believe in WAR, an average primary DH should be at a +0.3 and Bell is 1.1 wins under that. Some quick math and logic, Bell has cost his team at least 1-win, and that would have made this team 15-17. Maybe you believe that since Bell is batting in the middle of the lineup, his failures have been exponentially worse than that WAR. Bell has had the second most RISP at-bats on the team behind Nathaniel Lowe. For Lowe, he has converted his 34 chances into 18 RBIs, and Bell has converted his 32 chances into just 8 RBIs. That is a .529 RBI/RISP rate for Lowe compared to only .250 RBI/RISP rate for Bell. That is where it has been felt the most.
How are the Nats trying to get Bell out of this deep funk?
We’ve heard manager Dave Martinez sticking up for his players before, and he has been stumping for Bell over and over again this year. Maybe in the end, Martinez will look prescient. Martinez had said before that Bell is a slow starter in April. That is false. He entered this season as a .235 hitter on April 30, and that number was greatly skewed by his COVID IL move in 2021 and hitting just .113 in just 14 starts that month in a small sample size. Bell hit .365 in April 2022 when he was with the Nats. But he was 29 years old in 2022. But since 2022, sure, Bell has struggled in 2023, 2024, and this year. But his career started in 2017. So this is newer to who Bell is as a player.
“He’s very streaky. When he gets going, he’s going to carry us for a while.”
— Martinez said about Bell
Just as one player should never take the full blame for a loss, since it is a team game, no singular player should get the credit for carrying a team when they are streaky hot. Juan Soto hit two home runs yesterday and his team lost. Eugenio Suárez hit a record-tying four home runs in a game last week and his team lost 8-7.
But don’t fret, Martinez said in the interview embedded in that tweet above that Bell is working diligently — and working with Darnell Coles, the team’s hitting coach. Should that give you extra confidence after we heard the same thing last year with Coles working with Joey Gallo, Eddie Rosario, and Nick Senzel.
Switching the subject to the pitching, the worst parts of the Nats bullpen have cost the team another win if you add Lucas Sims, Colin Poche, and Orlando Ribalta‘s negative WAR together you get a combined -0.8. The Nats should be at 16-16 if they had a better bullpen and a league average DH if you buy the WAR math and logic.
Baseball is all about averages, be it earned run average (ERA), batting average (BA), or OPS which is a conglomeration of BA as part of OBP plus SLG. Larger sample sizes help in assessing players. Still, there is time for players to turn a bad season to good. But what ever happened to the old-school approach of earning your spot back. Baseball has a bench for starting position players who are struggling. The Orioles just moved their most expensive offseason signing, Charlie Morton, from their starting rotation to their bullpen …. in April. The only place to move a struggling bullpen arm is to a DFA or to Triple-A if they have options.
The Nationals made their first non-injury roster move yesterday, May 1, with a DFA of Poche, and the team will have Andrew Chafin in their bullpen. There could be more moves coming if all of the starting pitchers are healthy and Michael Soroka comes off of the IL. The news does not look good for Cade Cavalli who left his last start with ‘fatigue’ and the team will skip his next start or two and re-evaluate.
There are also questions on RHP Jake Irvin‘s decline in velo. Both Irvin and LHP Mitchell Parker had brilliant starts last week where they both went into the 8th inning of games, and Parker completed the 8th inning. Both followed those starts with their worst starts of the season in the past week. We have seen this before that with a questionable bullpen, Martinez has pushed his starters even harder. Look what happened to Irvin last year on July 4 when he pitched 8.0 innings to get his ERA down to 2.80. He fell apart after that with two straight games of giving up 6 earnies and finished the season from that point to the end of the season with a 6.50 ERA. Does that sound familiar? Does Martinez and the analytics crew have a clue? Why push Irvin so hard?
For MacKenzie Gore, they haven’t allowed him to go past 6.0 innings, but he hasn’t pitched less than 93 pitches this season, and has gone 99+ pitches in four of his seven starts so far. We have said that the starting pitching is the reason the team has fared as well as it has. But are they pushing too hard on these starters?
Let’s look at ex-Nats starter, Patrick Corbin. He had miserable years after miserable years with the Nationals for five straight years, then he signs with the Texas Rangers this year, and they have been pulling him at first sign of trouble — even if it is during the 5th inning. They don’t push him “to qualify for the win” like Martinez has said he had tried to do before with pitchers. Does anyone care about pitcher wins? Isn’t it about teams wins?
Through April, Corbin has a 3.79 ERA with Texas, and averaging 4⅔ innings per start. Last year with the Nationals he had a 5.62 ERA and averaged 5⅓ innings. Last year Corbin pitched 23 times into the 6th inning and had a 7.36 ERA in that inning. The 4th inning last year was Corbin’s best at a 3.19 ERA. Another difference is that Corbin has been rescued by his bullpen with runners on-base and has yet to allow an inherited runner to score. That obviously has helped Corbin’s ERA. We saw the same when Gio Gonzalez was traded to the Brewers in 2018. He was analytically programmed to succeed.
Most teams are driven by analytics. Why is Bell batting against left-handed pitching? He is 2-for-25 against southpaws for an .080 batting average. Does this team pay attention to analytics? Clearly not when you look at Keibert Ruiz who has started the most games at catcher at 28 of the Nats 32 games. That is insanity. The next closest is William Contreras at 26 games. The norm is at 21 games or roughly 70 percent of all games.
If you look at insane usage of a catcher, Dusty Baker had Nats’ All-Star catcher, Wilson Ramos, catch 10 straight games in 2016, including day games after night games. He did this in the dog days of the summer in August. Ramos began that stint of 10 straight games with a .923 OPS, and by the end of that 10th game he finished with a .871 OPS. It is called diminishing returns. You would think that Martinez’s boss, general manager Mike Rizzo, would have a clue on this with a recollection of what it did to Ramos. What happened to Ramos that season? He blew out his knee just 6 games before the playoffs on a rainy night in a meaningless game, nearly two weeks after the Nats clinched the NL East crown. His season finished at an .850 OPS, a drop of 73 points from mid-August.
Look at Ruiz’s current season. His first 14-games, he was batting .373 and a .968 OPS. Since then in these past 15-games, he is batting .232 with a .526 OPS. His defense has been really bad too. They have driven him into the ground. But why? Why can’t Riley Adams play, especially against a lefty starter? Again, Ruiz is another perfect example of diminishing returns and a lack of adhering to the basics of analytics.
Why can’t this Washington Nationals team embrace the analytics? Per Martinez when asked why he was playing Ruiz so much he responded to the media, “[Ruiz] was adamant about playing.” Hang on, who is the boss here?
“When a kid comes in your office like that and was real adamant – and wants to play, I’m going to reward him with that.”
— Martinez said that about Keibert Ruiz in 2022 after he was hit hard in the mask the night before
That word ‘adamant’ sure does show up a lot with Ruiz. Most alpha athletes are adamant about wanting to play. That is how an elite athlete is wired, even playing through injuries if you allow them. Someone has to be the boss here because this team has been shooting themselves in the foot for years. Baker repeated his Ramos mistake with Max Scherzer in the game forever known as the ‘fatiguing’ games just before the 2017 NLDS, and Scherzer injured his leg after pitching back-to-back games averaging 114 pitches per game. It wasn’t like the team was in danger of not securing the NL East title. He couldn’t pitch until Game 3 of the NLDS due to that leg injury.
So again, who is the adult in the room?
