Photo by Jake Stephens/TalkNats
After a team day-off on Tuesday, the Washington Nationals are back at it tonight for an exhibition game against the Venezuelan team assembled for the World Baseball Classic. This will also be the spring debut for Foster Griffin who has only pitched on the minor league side of camp to this point. Griffin received the largest contract amount of any Nats acquisition during the offseason.
The Nats have had 55 batters step into the box, and improved to 24 of them who have no hits. As the sample sizes get larger, and there is more data to analyze, we can all start to form better judgements. Most of those have only a few at-bats. But there are nine players with 8 or more plate appearances with no hits, and some of the names might surprise you like Daylen Lile and Jose Tena. Some names might not surprise you like Riley Adams, Abimelec Ortiz, and Joey Wiemer. Then you have Yohandy Morales who crushed the game-winner on Monday only to see the ball get blown back. The stats on that ball show how small sample size stats can be an issue.
Process means a lot in small sample size analysis. But we also need to know back-stories of what players are working on. It is not the time to panic yet on Lile or even James Wood who finally got his first hit of Spring Training on Monday.
At this point, we only have 10 Spring Training games in the books, and no batter has more than 16 plate appearances on the Washington Nationals. And for that matter, no pitcher has more than 5.0 innings officially recorded. Many players are still getting work on the backfields, and of course those aren’t shown in the official statistics.
These Spring Training games have also shown the inconsistencies with some players. One day, Griff McGarry looks great then the next he looks like he did at his worst in Triple-A last year. This is before teams are really working the scouting reports.
Washington Nationals vs. Venezuela WBC team
Stadium: CACTI Park of the Palm Beaches, West Palm Beach, Florida
1st Pitch: 6:05 PM EDT
TV: Nationals.TV
Radio: MLB app
