4 Biggest Takeaways from the 1st Month of the Washington Nationals' Season
The Washington Nationals have managed to pack as much frustration into one month as they were supposed to experience all season.
The saviors of the 100-win season, everyone's pick to win the National League and the greatest rotation in baseball history have cashed in all of that hyperbole for a 12-14 record and a seat at fourth place in the division.
And if things don't change soon, "too early to panic" can morph into "too late to contend" in a heartbeat.
Washington has scratched and clawed its way within arm's length of .500, but the team is one familiar losing streak away from going back to square one. Even the predictable, like Bryce Harper and Max Scherzer's early-season conquests, has yielded unpredictable results in the win-loss column.
This exercise is designed to hash out those factors contributing to the Nationals' success, or lack thereof, and assign significance to them. The following takeaways are ranked in order of overall impact on the team, positive or negative.
Let's see if we can't make sense of this nonsensical first month of Nationals baseball.
Honorable Mention
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The bullpen actually isn't that bad
The Nationals bullpen was supposed to be in a state of disrepair after the team parted ways with Tyler Clippard, Rafael Soriano and Jerry Blevins in the offseason. The long-term loss of newly acquired veteran Casey Janssen to a shoulder injury should have been an insurance nail in the unit's coffin.
But, while no one is picking Washington's 'pen as the best in baseball, it's developed into a surprisingly serviceable group. Nationals relievers have combined for the 12th-best ERA in the bigs, and only nine bullpens have issued fewer walks than Washington's.
The group's success comes thanks in large part to the emergence of Good Drew Storen—1.64 ERA and seven saves in eight opportunities this season—as opposed to Bad Drew Storen, who could still emerge on schedule in the postseason.
Jayson Werth is off to a painfully slow start
Jayson Werth has played 18 games since missing the first week of the season while recovering from shoulder surgery. In that sample size, he's cobbled together a .159 batting average and 19 strikeouts.
It's reasonable to blame Werth's underwhelming stats on his very limited spring training. But for the sake of comparison, Denard Span also missed a sizable chunk of the early season, and he's hitting .302 through 10 games.
4. Max Scherzer Can't Catch a Break
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This is why we can't have nice things.
In Max Scherzer's first season with the Nationals, he's been the team's best starter. It's not even worth debating. But his dominance has earned him an ugly 1-3 record in five starts.
Scherzer leads the rotation in ERA (1.26), innings pitched (35.2), strikeouts (39) and WHIP (0.84), all while walking the least batters of any staff member. But the lineup and the defense behind him inexplicably choose to take the day off whenever Washington sends its ace to the mound.
In the three losses attributed to Scherzer, the offense has backed him up with two runs combined, while he's allowed a total of three earned and gone at least seven innings in each outing.
Through five starts, this is a massive departure from the success Scherzer is used to finding. In each of the last two years, he earned at least a tie for the most wins in the American League. And he hasn't won fewer than 15 games in a season since 2010.
But according to teammate Dan Uggla, via MLB.com's Bill Ladson, Scherzer's attitude hasn't suffered.
"He is the last person who wants you to feel sorry for him," Uggla said. "He is about the team. He is about winning and getting things going. It's not about his personal stats. He is out there fighting, we are [all] out there fighting."
This observation is less of a pressing concern than it is a freak trend in a small sample size. That's why it finds itself near the bottom of the list. But, contrary to what Scherzer's numbers would tell you, he is human. And if this pattern persists, the sustained losing could have a negative impact on a man playing a position as mentally involved as that of the pitcher.
3. Bryce Harper Is Playing Like the Face of the Franchise
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In a preseason feature by Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, Bryce Harper said his "favorite" at-bat of the year was a seven-pitch walk in Washington's final game of the season, an NLDS loss to San Francisco.
He earned the free base after battling back from a 0-2 count. The at-bat was a milestone in his maturation, and he hasn't regressed at all between that moment in October and the start of this season.
Harper's 24 walks this year are the most in baseball, and he leads the Nationals in both OBP and OPS. He's also hit the most home runs on the team, collected the second-most RBI and picked up the fourth-most hits.
Charging out of the gates in April is something Harper seems to do every year, but his heightened sophistication at the plate is an element of his game that could sustain these numbers throughout an entire season.
In an article by the Washington Post's James Wagner, Harper touched on his modified role as the high-OBP player within the Nationals lineup.
"It's a little hard because you want to make contact. You want to be the guy that gets those RBI and runs on the board. But I have so much confidence in [Ryan Zimmerman] and [Ian Desmond] and [Jayson Werth], or whoever is hitting behind me that night, that they're going to get that job done. It's just having the confidence and ability in the other guys on my team. Of course, if I get a pitch in my zone, hopefully I can do some damage with it.
"
Two consecutive one-run performances notwithstanding, Washington's offense has hit its stride after toiling near the bottom of every offensive category to start the season. That's thanks in large part to Harper's contribution.
But, as instrumental as Harper's bat has been to the Nationals' success, the focus of the next item on the list has the potential to vault Washington to the top of the standings. That is, if he ever rejoins the team.
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2. Anthony Rendon's Knee Injury Was Much Worse Than Originally Advertised
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Let's try to establish a timeline here.
In early March, Anthony Rendon tweaked his knee in a spring training game. The collective attitude toward the injury couldn't have been more casual, bordering on dismissive.
Two weeks after that, Rendon's availability for Opening Day was "in jeopardy." I don't think I need to tell you that he did, in fact, miss the start of the season.
Now, almost two months removed from the original injury, Rendon is finally on a rehab assignment in Double-A Harrisburg. But he continues to be an on-and-off scratch from the lineup.
"Anthony is day to day," manager Matt Williams said, according to The Washington Post's James Wagner.
But he's been day to day for about 50 days now, so it's impossible to say when Washington's best offensive player from a year ago could realistically return to the lineup. Rendon, a Silver Slugger Award winner in 2014, could add a measure of consistency to a Nationals offense that is lacking exactly that.
The absence of Rendon's bat has been instrumental to the "yeah, but" technique, deployed as a barrier against the reality of Washington's entirely unacceptable record.
Yeah, the team hasn't looked like it's supposed to, but the whole team isn't actually there.
The Nationals won't truly have an identity until Rendon is back in the lineup or, if he is forced to miss even more time, the promise of his return is no longer hanging over the team's head. The only thing more salient to Washington's slow start than the games it could have won with Rendon in the mix is the manner in which the Nats are winning games without him.
1. We're Going Streaking
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| Dates | Record in That Timespan |
|---|---|
| April 6 - April 14 | 2-6 |
| April 15 - April 21 | 5-1 |
| April 22 - April 27 | 0-6 |
| April 28 - May 3 | 5-1 |
*Records courtesy of MLB.com
On April 28, when Dan Uggla's three-run homer capped off the largest comeback in Nationals history, it was almost obvious that Washington would follow that game with a long string of wins despite the six-game losing streak it brought into the contest.
You knew it, I knew it, the Nationals knew it, and The Washington Post's Chelsea Janes wrote it down.
Washington's impending winning streak was so apparent because we'd seen it before, and we'd seen it in reverse, several times already this season. That victory has materialized into a 5-1 record in the Nats' last six games, an identical mark to the run they went on in mid-April.
The Nationals have become a team that lives and dies by its momentum. And even though Washington took three out of four games from the division-leading Mets this weekend, the next bout with mediocrity is always one game away.
That's why this takeaway is No. 1 on the list, because every loss has become a slippery slope.
The .500 record the Nationals are trending toward won't qualify them for the playoffs, let alone the runaway division crown and World Series title they were supposed to sleepwalk into.
All stats courtesy of MLB.com, unless otherwise noted
Danny Garrison is a Washington Nationals Featured Columnist on Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @DannyLGarrison, where he's a very streaky tweeter.
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