Photo by Jeffery Salter
When a club captures four division titles in six years, it is not lucky. Yes, luck is involved day-to-day, but that big-picture result is profound. It can only happen as the result of intentional, structured, programmatic choices; a deep personal and financial commitment to a process. This machinery takes a long time to build and must be fine-tuned and constantly re-evaluated. Process is an abstraction–it’s paperwork and moving names around on a draft-board. And it’s also completely intimate, personal and idiosyncratic. In 2017 the Nationals have seen processes flourish at both macro and micro levels and it has been extraordinary–and frankly deeply inspiring–for this fan to observe.
Stephen Strasburg–in the midst of one of the more incredible stretches of his fantastic career–came to mind almost immediately as I sat down to write this. I thought about “Stras” in one of his more recent outings–a complete game dismantling of our rival Marlins, who were blast-furnace-hot at the time, and who fielded as explosive a lineup as exists in the National League. The meat of the order: speedster Dee Gordon, the home run-crushing Giancarlo Stanton, the all-star Yelich, the masher and RBI machine Marcell Ozuna, and then the hyper-athletic J.T. Realmuto, have a habit of obliterating baseballs. They essentially alternate lefty and righty and do it all: they run, they hit for contact, they hit for power, they draw walks, they work counts–take your pick.
On this day, Stras had simply carved through them like a fork through perfectly cooked short ribs; the flesh just flaking apart, not even bothering to mount resistance. Of those five monster bats, only Realmuto managed to get anything accomplished, going three for four on the day, including a nobody-on, nobody-out triple–which Stras then dismissed, striking out the next two batters, walking the number eight hitter and getting the pitcher, Adam Conley, to lob a gentle pop-up into shallow left. Stras battered them with fastballs and ghosted them with change-ups and had ball-darts leaving his right hand and then evaporating before their very eyes.
In his post-game comments, he was asked whether he had a complete game on his mind after the first inning, and the answer was, basically: “this game is too hard, I just pitch until they take the ball out of my hand.” After another eight inning, 10-strikeout gem, a week or two later, he offered up this nugget:
“I just trust my stuff and give it what I’ve got and go to sleep well that night.”
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