What We've Learned About the Washington Nationals Near the Halfway Mark
The Washington Nationals' erratic first half of the season has been a learning experience for the fans as they come to grips with a team that may not, after all, be the first-ever 162-game winner, and for the clubhouse staff as they conduct detergent-related science experiments to get chocolate sauce out of jersey fabric.
Baseball rarely ever follows a script, but it looks like the Nationals didn't even attempt to learn their lines. After opening the season as consensus World Series favorites, Washington promptly started said season with a 3-8 record. The team followed that early face-plant with three months' worth of peaks and valleys.
With heroic individual performances serving to balance out inconsistent pitching, the Nationals were one of the hardest teams to predict in the first half of the year. But Washington hasn't been without flashes of dominance on its way to a 37-33 record and a seat atop the NL East.
The Nationals are still finding their identity, and once that process is complete the team's raw talent could overwhelm the rest of baseball. But to hazard any guesses regarding the second half of the season would be just that: guesses.
So while we wait for the team to advance the story for us, here's a look back at the anatomy of the Nationals' first half of the 2015 season.
This Team Isn't Built to Handle Injuries
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Most accepted scientific principles suggest injuries are not, in fact, contagious. The Nationals are out to prove otherwise.
Since Jayson Werth went down with a fractured wrist last month, he's gained the company of Ryan Zimmerman, Aaron Barrett and Stephen Strasburg on the disabled list.
There was a time when injuries to regular contributors like these would be unfortunate, but not unmanageable. In spring training, Washington had utility infielder Kevin Frandsen on the payroll, and fourth outfielder Nate McLouth was on track to return from an August shoulder surgery. But by early April, Frandsen had been granted his release, and it was clear McLouth would be unavailable for a good, long while.
The team also gambled on Zimmerman and Drew Storen in October by letting first baseman Adam LaRoche and closer Rafael Soriano become free agents. And by the time the 2015 season got underway, the Nationals were without a safety net at most positions.
Even in the rotation, where the presence of Tanner Roark could conceivably negate an injury to a starter, Washington has been forced to fly by the seat of its pants. With Doug Fister and Stephen Strasburg on the DL simultaneously at one point, the Nationals had to experiment with their farm system to find spot starters.
Washington's relative ill-preparedness when it comes to injuries has disrupted the team's rhythm on a number of occasions and resigned its record to .500 territory. But it could be far worse if not for the contributions of rookies Joe Ross and Clint Robinson. Ross is 2-1 with a 2.66 ERA and Robinson, in his first full season at 30 years old, is batting .268 and starting at first base in Zimmerman's stead.
General manager Mike Rizzo took a few chances and thinned out the Nationals' bench this offseason. And while Washington's spot atop the division precludes us from labeling those decisions wrong or imprudent, we have seen that a few well-placed injuries can derail the Nationals at any point.
Bryce Harper Can Win the National League MVP
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Following a May 5 loss to the Miami Marlins, Bryce Harper's batting average sat at a comparatively woeful .245. The strong opening month he put together was quickly dissolving, and his legions of cynics were toasting another year of unrealized expectations.
The very next day, Harper went yard three times.
He hasn't checked his rear views since then. Harper's average is up to .345 with an MLB second-best 24 homers and 57 RBI, and he leads baseball in OBP, slugging and OPS.
For the purposes of an MVP discussion, let's compare Harper's season-to-date to that of Andrew McCutchen in 2013—the last time a position player won the award in the NL—and Giancarlo Stanton's 2014 campaign that saw him finish second in the voting behind Clayton Kershaw.
Two years ago, through June, McCutchen was batting .292 with 42 RBI and nine home runs. At that point last season, Stanton's average was .313 with 60 driven in and 21 homers. Harper has seven games left in June to distance himself even further from those benchmarks.
To expect Harper to maintain his ungodly numbers through the remainder of the season would be unreasonable, but much about Washington's right fielder defies reason. Most prominently is his status as a fourth-year MLB veteran and a 22-year-old human being, a point that Nationals principal owner Mark Lerner drove home in a recent interview with local CBS affiliate WUSA9's Holden Kushner (h/t Bill Kistner).
"I think people forget he's 22 years old," Lerner said. "He's younger than Kris Bryant and others that have just come up, that are going to be the next great ones. Bryce is going to continue to get better and better. We just gotta watch the journey because it's going to be an amazing one."
"Journey" is the operative word in that quote. When I say Harper can win the NL MVP, I don't mean just this year. The season he's put together proves he's officially done feeling out professional baseball and he's ready to move from the promise stage to production.
Bryce Harper can win the NL MVP, alright. And he can win it again.
The Nationals Will Go as Far as the Rotation Takes Them
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This headline was generated by the department of redundancy department. But the path we've taken to its salience in late June has been completely original.
Stocked with five pitchers who could conceivably headline a rotation on their own, Washington's starters were supposed to make up the battering ram that obliterated everything in the team's path. Before the season, it was said the Nationals would go as far as their rotation takes them simply because the rest of the team would be sucked into its gravitational pull on the way to a 100-win year.
But the narrative of 2015 has centered more on the shortcomings of the staff rather than its dominance. Last season, Washington's starters combined for the lowest ERA in the NL. Compare that to the rotation's spot at seventh in the league thus far in 2015.
The drop-off is due in part to DL stints from Doug Fister and Stephen Strasburg forcing untested rookies onto the mound, but there's no masking the abysmal collection of ERAs the Nationals' regular starters have put together, aside from one notable, $210 million exception.
Max Scherzer's 1.76 ERA is the best in baseball among qualifiers, but the numbers from Jordan Zimmermann (3.75), Gio Gonzalez (4.41), Fister (4.80) and Strasburg (6.55) are all worse than each pitcher's end-of-June watermark from 2014.
This slide has taken a decidedly negative tone because Washington was finding decidedly negative results until very recently. The Nationals started the month 6-11 before a weekend sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates. But none of this is to say Washington's pitchers won't spearhead a second-half ascendancy.
The team has been called streaky all year, but at the core of that pattern is a rotation that can be the best in baseball one week (see: last week) and an average unit the next.
The Nationals' starters will continue to chart the course for the entire team this season, but according to the Washington Post's Chelsea Janes, they seem to have the ship pointed in the right direction.
"Stephen Strasburg—the real Stephen Strasburg, if what he and his manager are saying is true—is supposed to be back and healthy sometime this week. Max Scherzer...well, you know, and Jordan Zimmermann steadied himself against the Rays after a rough outing last week. Gio Gonzalez threw his best outing of the year on Sunday.
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Max Scherzer Is a Walking Adrenaline Shot
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Max Scherzer has a couple of screws loose.
One loose screw let slip the idea to douse his teammates in chocolate syrup following game-winning performances, as if a personal coating of sticky sludge has ever been an incentive regardless of its flavor.
Another loose screw has partially produced a rap song making light of Werth's reckless driving conviction, for which the outfielder spent five days in jail (found in this story by the Washington Post's James Wagner).
And another loose screw allows him to dial up 97 mph in the eighth inning of a no-hit bid and saunter back on top of the mound with a swagger that suggests the batter just wasted his time by even showing up to the game.
These contributions, both on the field and in the clubhouse, that Scherzer brought to Washington this offseason have been fundamental to the Nationals' success this year.
You can quantify his 123 strikeouts, but you can't quantify the buoying effect he's had on a rotation that has been an undeniable disappointment. And you can quantify the 132 bottles of chocolate syrup Hershey's sent to Washington, but you can't quantify the unity unique traditions like that foster within the confines of a team going through a 162-game marathon.
It's been suggested that Scherzer is undercompensated with his $210 million contract. And while that notion may be a slight exaggeration, it's certainly not as crazy as it sounds when it first hits the ears. And it's certainly not as crazy as Scherzer himself.
*All stats courtesy of MLB.com
Danny Garrison is a Washington Nationals Featured Columnist on Bleacher Report. He's on Twitter @DannyLGarrison, where he live-tweeted every out of Max Scherzer's no-hitter from section 418 of Nationals Park.
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