The Washington Nationals are 11-5 (.688) since May 14, and that is the good news. That went a long way to get the Nats to a winning May with a 15-12 record that included that gut-punch 7-game losing streak — a memory we want to erase from our minds as we focus on the positives.
Winning in spans must be sustained for longer periods of time to get the Nats above .500. The Nats will need to win their next 4-series to do that. If the Nats can go a minimum of 8-4 (.667) in that span, the Nats will get above the .500 mark. Just like in 2019, the climb back takes winning series consistently. As of today, Washington is in sole possession of third place in the NL East, trailing the Mets and Phillies.
“We should get used to [winning]. You play this game to win. So ideally you show up every day with a chance to compete and win. Losing is not why we play at all. So I would encourage this group to get used to winning, because that’s what we strive to do every day.”
— Nathaniel Lowe said this weekend
“So I would encourage this group to get used to winning because that’s what we strive to do every day. But we’ll take this month [of May] and obviously keep going into June and look for another winning month.”
While much of the Nats recent success can be seen as a credit to their bullpen, the bats have also come alive at times, and especially in some games when the starting pitching didn’t get the job done.
Yesterday, the starting pitching was decent with Mitchell Parker throwing scoreless 2nd to 5th innings — the issue is Parker had another rough first inning giving up 3-runs. The Nats could only score 1-run in the game even with ace Corbin Burnes departing during the 5th inning with an arm injury. The issue wasn’t necessarily getting on-base — it was getting timely hits in RISP situations.
Today, the Nationals players have a scheduled day-off. The front office staff will be hard at work. Their jobs rarely get much time-off. The MLB Draft is now just six weeks from yesterday. Washington holds the coveted spots to pick at №1 as well as №49. Those picks should be transformative to the Nationals player development system.
The goal going forward for this team has to be to get the starting pitching back to how good they were in the month of April. By matching up the analytics to their starting pitchers, they have to be more effective in controlling overall fatigue. What sometimes seems quite obvious, isn’t in real-time. Yesterday, manager Dave Martinez had a quick hook for Parker. That has not been the norm for Martinez. But his hook wasn’t quick enough on Saturday with starter Michael Soroka who was laboring with a significant drop in fastball velo. Every pitcher is different. Pitch count is just one aspect to focus on. There are many other factors in determining when to pull pitchers.
On April 25, Washington had the 5th best starter’s ERA in all of baseball at 3.41. What changed? Parker and Jake Irvin fell apart after both pitched into the 8th inning of games. This is why you cannot focus on pitch counts. In modern baseball the average starter only pitches into the middle of the 6th inning. When you go beyond the 6th inning, you throw warm-up pitches that are additive to your pitch count unofficially. Modern pitchers throw max effort from Pitch No. 1 of the game. Fifty years ago, pitchers paced themselves, and used a reachback fastball when they needed some extra velo. Old-school pitchers were expected to go deep into games while today’s pitchers are supposed to go two times through the batting order based on analytics.
Since April 26th, the Nationals are the 4th worst in the starter’s ERA at 5.32. Almost the polar opposite in the two-halves of the first 59 games of the season. The reason the Nationals are winning despite that horrific starter’s ERA is because general manager Mike Rizzo fixed his bullpen on the fly this season to go from the worst through May 8th, to go to the 12th best since that point at a 3.77 ERA.
Also in that span, Washington is the 12th best in total runs scored in baseball. A pleasant surprise from early in the season when the Nationals were in the bottom half of offense. Of course it helps to have James Wood and CJ Abrams near the top of baseball in offense.
That leaves the defense as the largest issue on the team. This has been negatively affecting the pitching overall. Poor defense puts extra runners on-base as well as increasing pitch counts. Washington is dead last in team defense for the season, and it has deteriorated with their top four defenders out of the lineup — three due to injuries and one due to benching. Yes, Paul DeJong, Jacob Young, and Dylan Crews are all on the extended IL, and Nasim Nunez is sitting on the bench. We have witnessed Luis Garcia Jr. turn into the worst defensive middle infielder in baseball.
By identifying the issues, the Nationals can improve. Balance is the key to winning.
