Photo by Sol Tucker/TalkNats
The Washington Nationals struggles at their home field continued on Saturday. The team dropped to a 3-11 record at Nationals Park.
Yesterday, the Nats got 6.0 innings of zeroes in the earned run category from starter Foster Griffin. Unfortunately the Nats once again fell due to mistakes. Three runs scored due to an error, and the Nats lost 4-1. This has become a theme for a team that leads MLB in errors (32) and unearned runs (27). The Nats have 28 percent more errors than the next closest team. These are just some of the mistakes we wrote about earlier in the week.
This is more than what is ruled by an error. Passed balls aren’t ruled as errors. Drew Millas has 4 passed balls which is the 2nd worst in MLB but he only plays half the time. The mistakes are also about plays that are not made. And mental mistakes aren’t ruled as errors. Brady House has a .902 fielding percentage. Basically that means he is making one error every 10 times a ball is hit to him. But that is also at the discretion of the official scorers. Some more difficult plays that are not made can be ruled a “hit” if the official scorer deems it that way. The fielding issues aren’t just about House, shortstop CJ Abrams has the worst OAA defense on the team due to his struggles coming in on balls.
When President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, was hired, he knew about the Nats defensive and fundamentals issues. He promised that it would be fixed. Manager Blake Butera has worked extensively in pregames on defense. Overall, the outfield defense has improved, but the infield defense has worsened.
Finally, Butera was asked about the defensive woes and mistakes. Here is what he had to say after Saturday’s game:
❝We can’t lead the league in errors and expect to win.❞
❝We want to play winning baseball. We want to win a lot of games, and in order to do that — we can’t make this many mistakes.❞
❝We can do all the work we want to pregame, but if we’re not looking at what that work is — and not making adjustments to it, then we’re not doing our job.❞
❝We are going to adjust our pregame work and try something a little bit different to clean up these mistakes.❞
Can we expect positive change going forward? We will have to see. This could take time. But you also have to consider that part of the issue is that some of the players are not good defenders.
Let’s get back to today’s game, right now Zack Littell is listed as the starting pitcher. Both Mitchell Parker and Brad Lord have pitched multiple innings in the past three days, what is Butera’s plan with the pitching staff? The good news is that tomorrow is a day-off for the team.
The FanGraphs WAR chart is accumulating data. This will start to give us a clearer picture in a few more weeks when the sample sizes get larger. The OAA defense stat is now giving us a picture of what the Nats have — and don’t have. We will start adding more statistics as the sample sizes get larger.
Milwaukee Brewers vs. Washington Nationals
Stadium: Nationals Park, Washington, D.C.
1st Pitch: 1:35 PM EDT
TV: Nationals.TV
Radio: 106.7 The Fan radio and via the MLB app. On Sirius/XM, tune to Channel 178 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.
