Nationals Arm Race

Welcome to the Majors Nathan Karns. Photo perfectgame.org

Continuing a monthly series of look-backs at our starters (here’s Apr 2013 post), here’s a monthly glance at how our .500 team is doing from a Starting Pitching standpoint.  As with last month, we’ll have “Grades” per outing, the team’s performance per opposing starter sliced and diced a few ways, and other per-starter stuff that I like to track.

MLB Rotation Per-Start Grades for May:

Discussion: Nats Pitcher YTD Stats from Baseball-Reference are here

Strasburg has stepped up his game after his well-documented 4-unearned run meltdown and has dominated his last three starts before straining his Lat on 5/31 (hence the “incomplete” grade).  Gonzalez remains up-and-down, as he was in April/  He’ll be excellent and then less than mediocre start to start.  Zimmermann‘s 6 run 7th in Baltimore is the only blip on an otherwise fantastic month which has put him into Cy Young contendor status.  Haren‘s up and down starts finished off with a heroic effort in Baltimore on 5/30/13, pitching into the 8th and giving up just two runs to one of the more potent offenses in the league.  Detwiler‘s month was cut-short by his injury and subsequent D/L trip.  Lastly the Nats one known glaring weakness heading into this season (Starting pitching depth) has been exposed with the two spot starts we’ve gotten from Duke and Karns.  I know Karns’ grade isn’t that fair considering the circumstances (MLB debut, hot night, tough hitting team), but his stat-line is what it is.

May Performance By Opponent Starting Pitcher Rotation Order Number

A look at the opposing team’s rotation ranked 1-5 in the order they’re appearing from opening day.

Thoughts; as always, not all opposing team #1 starters are the same.  But, the Nats actually fared pretty durn well against opposing #1 and #2 guys in May.  Where they struggled were against the #3 starters in May; you cannot lose to the likes of Scott Feldman, Eric Stults and Chris Tillman.  They also struggled with what I call “5+” starters; guys who were call-ups to replace opening day starters.  Sometimes a 5+ is a rising ace prospect (theoretically a Kevin Gausman or perhaps a Matt Harvey in the end of 2012) and sometimes they’re a 4-A guy (Jonathan Pettibone).  But usually you expect a winning record there.

May Performance By Opponent Starting Pitcher Actual Performance Rank Intra-Rotation

A ranking of opposing teams’ rotations by pure performance at the time of the series, using ERA+ heavily.

On the bright side; going 6-2 against the opposing team’s 2nd best starter isn’t bad.

May Performance By Opponent Starting Pitcher League-wide “Rank”

A team-independent assignment of a league-wide “rank” of what the starter is.  Is he an “Ace?”  Is he a #2?

I like this table the best; It usually shows where a team really is over- or under-performing.  There’s no shame in going 1-3 against the league’s best hurlers.  And its fantastic to see the team going 4-0 against that collection of league-wide #2s.  It is downright awful to see the team go 4-5 against this collection of #5 starters.

May Records by Pitching Advantage

Start-by-start advantages in my own opinion and then looking at the results.

In other words, the team when 9-5 when I thought Washington had the pitching advantage, 2-4 when I thought the pitching matchup was even, and 4-4 when I thought the opposing team had the advantage.  This is about what I expected, perhaps wanting to see a slightly better record in our advantage’d starts.  The Strasburg-Edwin Jackson loss hurt, as did the Zimmermann-Stults loss.

May matchup analysis

Looking at the opposing starter rank that our guys are going up against to see how their competition fares.

Detwiler’s turn now basically matches up with the opposing teams’ best guys, while Haren is getting more and more #5 and #5+ guys but continues to struggle.

Krol fired in some fastballs in his MLB debut. Photo unknown via theviewfromsw.com blog

One of the exciting aspects of the roster shakeup lately is the introduction of two new pitchers to the MLB bullpen that we’ve seen very little of (unless of course you live in Harrisburg, PA and stop by the Senators games all the time).  So lets take first look at newly promoted 22-yr old LHP Ian Krol.

A quick introduction: Krol was the PTBNL in the Michael Morse trade, coming over from the Oakland organization after a relatively tumultuous minor league tenure (he missed the entirety of the 2011 season after an elbow injury and then being suspended for an offensive tweet; ah a sign of the times).  After returning to the fold in 2012 he was relatively awful as a California league starter (not really that surprising; look what happened to A.J. Cole when he went there), then was bumped up to finish the season as a AA reliever with poor numbers in a short sample size in the Texas league.  Even for an organization like Oakland, apparently that was enough; they made him available in trade and he turned into the PTBNL.

He arrived in Washington and has immediately been significantly more effective as a reliver here: his AA numbers have been eye opening; 26IP, 14 hits allowed, only 2 earned runs for an ERA of 0.69, and a K/BB ratio of 29/7.  I thought these numbers would earn him a promotion mid-season; I didn’t think we’d be seeing him in the MLB bullpen in June.

Lets look at his performance in the 6/5/13 debacle loss to the Mets.   He pitched the 6th inning and faced the top of the order.  He gave up a fluke single when Daniel Murphy flailed his bat at an outside fastball and dinked the ball into LF, but otherwise he struck out the side, punching out the 3-4 hitters for New York with relative ease.   He threw 23 pitches, 19 of them fastballs.  Per his Pitch F/X data, his fastball averaged 95.28 and peaked at 96.88 on the night, quite a heavy ball from the left-hand side.  He has a relatively deceptive release point which makes that fastball look even faster.  A lot of the swings he got were very, very late.  With this kind of fastball and short-term effectiveness, he can easily serve as the “Loogy” that many pundits have been saying this bullpen needs.  He has clean mechanics, did not lose velocity pitching from the stretch, and didn’t seem like he was throwing with max effort.

Now, on the downside, the 4 pitches Krol threw that were not his fastball left something to be desired.  He attempted three curveballs and all three of them seemed almost to slip out of his hand and flayed way to the left-hand side of the plate.  In fact he nearly hit Lucas Duda with one attempt.  He also attempted one changeup that he managed to bounce about 5 feet from home plate for a wild pitch (I’m sure that’s going to end up on the weekly “wildest pitches” video on one national baseball blog).   So we now see some evidence of why he has been moved to the bullpen; no decent or trustworthy secondary pitches.

On the bright side, a 95mph left-handed fastball with deception is going to be darn hard to hit even if the hitters know its coming.  In this respect, he’ll make a good short-stint reliever even if he can’t trust his secondary stuff.  On the downside, the scouting reports are going to get out and eventually hitters will know to sit on a FB.  Even if a ball comes in at 100, MLB hitters can hit it.  So Krol is going to have to show he can throw a curve or change with effectiveness and control to stick.

That being said, it was pretty exciting to see a youngster like Krol punch out three pretty good hitters.  The one bright note on a crummy night for the Nats.

Rodriguez DFA long overdue. Photo via humorfeast.blogspot.com

What a great time to have a 30-hour server outage.  Just as soon as the hammer drops on the Nationals Roster my site went kaplunk and I couldn’t post or host comments.  Grrr.  Moving the site next month to some place more stable.

So, focusing on the obvious, the Nats made a series of moves that some argue were overdue by about a couple years.  Some quick thoughts (since by now everyone’s weighed in so my comments are nothing obvious):

1. Henry Rodriguez DFA 16 walks in 18 innings this year in almost entirely low-leverage situations.  Long overdue move; if you can’t rely on a reliever, you need someone else.  I think the team hung on to him for far too long, and I struggled with  the acquisition to begin with as has often been repeated here.  Will he catch on with another team?  Probably; 100mph fastballs don’t grow on trees.    He can go be someone else’s Steve Dalkowski.

2. Zach Duke DFA: you had to see this coming; the Nats are paying the price for not tendering Tom Gorzelanny and thinking they could get by with Duke in that spot.  I did too; he was decent in AAA and great in September 2012.  But he’s been god-awful this year, and it looks like Rizzo is going to start spinning arms through the bullpen to find someone that can stick.  Unlike Davey Johnson, I don’t believe he’s going to get picked up off waivers and he’ll likely take his AAA assignment.

3. Danny Espinosa to the D/L and then (by assumption of his locker being cleaned out) banished to the minors: it was a-coming.  If he was hitting .230 with power and walks, he could have stuck on.  But you just cannot cost a struggling offense the kind of at-bats he was.  He’s got more than 1500 MLB plate appearances now; is this who he is?  I think Espinosa’s 2013 season may end up with him spending the rest of the year in AAA relearning how to hit before the team has to make a hard decision next year.

4. Anthony Rendon back up and at 2b: had to happen.  He’s ready for the MLB.  He had nothing left to prove by slicing up AA.  Can he play second?  Yeah I think he can; it isn’t rocket science.  If Rendon played shortstop in HS, he can make that transition.  Stick him at 6th or 7th in the order and let him play.

5. Ian Krol: this move came out of nowhere for me.  Suddenly mr “we don’t need a left handed reliever” Mike Rizzo has two of them in his bullpen.  He’s also managed to already call up both guys added to the 40-man roster last fall ahead of the rule-5 draft.  I’m sure both Krol and Erik Davis will struggle here and there, but should hold their own in short stints.

Summary: like the moves.  It is almost as if the Nats fanboy blogosphere got to play GM for a day and rid the team of all its issues in one fell swoop.  The timing couldn’t be better; 6 games against non-descript teams and even more non-descript starters.  Lets hope the combination of new blood and bad opponents sparks this team.

The 2013 College World Series is through its Regional weekend, and by and large the selection committee’s work was justified with just 2 non-Regional hosts advancing to this coming weekend’s Super Regional CWS play-in tournaments.

(My original Field-of-64 thoughts are here.  My favorite no-frills just data College Baseball site is d1baseball.com, where I go for all the results).

Regional thoughts, one by one (in order of national seeds).  Note that officially there are no 9-16 seeds, but for convenience they’re listed here based on which of the 1-8 national seeds they’ll play in the Super Regionals.

1. #1 overall seed UNC advances by the absolute skin of their teeth, with Florida Atlantic forcing the monday winner-take-all game and then UNC winning 12-11 in 13 innings.  What an amazing game this final must have been; UNC took a 6-2 lead into the 9th inning only to have Florida Atlantic score six runs to take an 8-6 lead.  UNC then rallies for 2 runs in the bottom of the 9th to force extra innings.  Florida Atlantic then scored THREE runs in the top of the 12th only to have UNC rally to tie it and force a 13th inning.  Holy cow.  Can you imagine being at this game?
2. #2 overall seed Vanderbilt survives a scare from ACC power Georgia Tech, who forced a monday playoff before Vandy won handily to advance.
3. Oregon State held serve by winning a couple of close games and then taking out Texas A&M to advance.
4. LSU beat in-state rival Louisiana-Lafayette to advance.
5. Cal State Fullerton reversed a trend of early tournament upsets and swept two games from Arizona State to advance.
6. UVA won a couple of nail biters before blowing out Elon to advance.
7. Florida State looked the most impressive of any National seed, outscoring its opponents 32-4 en route to its advancing.
8. Oregon couldn’t hold off traditional power Rice and was upset in its own regional.
9. NC State held off a pesky William & Mary to advance.
10. Indiana easily advanced over Austin Peay.
11. Mississippi State held off a surprising Central Arkansas to take its regional.
12. UCLA won a tough regional filled with Southern California heavyweights.
13. Oklahoma upset regional host Virginia Tech, which couldn’t overcome the only 1-4 seed upset we saw on the first day of regionals.
14. Kansas State battered its way to a regional title, beating each of the three teams in its group along the way.
15. Louisville made a statement on its selection as a regional host, mowing down two big-time programs en route.
16. South Carolina won a delayed sunday game to advance over Liberty.

Only two Regional upsets: Rice over #8 Oregon and Oklahoma over #13 Virginia Tech.   And neither of these could really be considered that big of an upset; Rice was ranked 16th in the final USA Today coaches poll and Oklahoma was ranked ahead of Va Tech in that same coaches poll.  The Baseball America guys in their podcast talked about how “Chalk” they were predicting the Regionals to be and they were mostly right.

Surprising/Over achieving Regional losers: You have to start with Central Arkansas, the only 4th seed to make it to the championship game.   A number of #3 seeds beat out their #2 seed bretheren to force their way to the regional finals; Liberty, William & Mary, San Diego, Oklahoma State and Elon.   Connecticut getting a win over nationally ranked Virginia Tech was a surprise.  Columbia’s win over New Mexico was astounding.  And Valparaiso beat a tough Florida team and had a pair of one-run losses in its regional.

Disappointing teams: besides the two Regional hosts which lost (Oregon and Virginia Tech), Clemson under achieved in a regional some thought they’d win.  Ole Miss couldn’t handle CAA upstart William & Mary and it cost them in the tournament.  Alabama couldn’t handle in-state rival Troy when push came to shove.  New Mexico did not live up to its lofty BA ranking, finishing last in its regional.  Coastal Carolina did not live up to its at-large bid, probably exacerbating complaints out of the Campbell camp.  And despite all the howls of protest over the Mercer and South Alabama seedings, neither could overcome tiny Central Arkansas to give a weaker regional host any pressure.

Super Regional Matchups

This coming weekend the “round of 16” or Super Regionals are on tap.  Here’s the schedule; all games are at the higher seed (meaning the only last minute travel change involved NC State being handed a super-regional).

• #1 UNC hosts #16 South Carolina
• #9 NC State hosts Rice
• #5 Cal State Fullerton hosts #12 UCLA
• #4 LSU hosts Oklahoma
• #6 UVA hosts #11 Mississippi State
• #3 Oregon State hosts #14 Kansas State
• #7 Florida State hosts #10 Indiana
• #2 Vanderbilt hosts #15 Louisville

Psuedo Predictions: Its hard to pick against any of the top 4 teams; there’s a distinct gap between them and the 5th ranked teams in the country.  But Vanderbilt looked a bit rattled while Louisville looked confident and I wouldn’t be that shocked at an upset there.  Cal State Fullerton/UCLA matches up frequent competitors on the Regional stage and could go either way.  I like UVA’s chances of advancing to the CWS.  Florida State seems likely to continue bashing its way to the CWS and could be a dangerous lower seed.

Picks: UNC, Rice, UCLA, LSU, UVA, Oregon State, Florida State, Vanderbilt.

So my dad calls me the other day and immediately exclaims, “What’s wrong with this team?!?”

Today, the season is 57 games old.  Two months old.  Almost exactly 1/3 old.  And the Nationals, the supposed power houses, next-coming-of the 1927 Yankees, the possible 110 win Nationals, are a .500 team.  Actually, a game under .500 with the weekend series loss to Atlanta.

We’ve talked about the Nats early schedule (as has Tom Boswell recently), chock full of 2012 playoff contenders.   But 2013 is a new season and in reality the Nats as of two months in have played the 14th ranked schedule of 30 teams (3 days ago it was 19th ranked … so these rankings move fast).   We’ve talked about the injuries, the offense in general, defense, the bench, Drew Storen, Danny Espinosa, and Dan Haren all as contributing factors. A couple of prominent national baseball writers pipped in on 5/31/13 on this topic: Jay Jaffe on si.com and then Rob Neyer on BaseballNation.com, offering some suggestions, possible trades (Ian Kinsler?) and possible call-ups (the obvious Anthony Rendon).

But here’s my scary thought, as proposed to my dad.  What if .500 is exactly what this team is?

The 2011 Nationals finished .500.  The 2012 Nationals surprised us all and won 98 games.  Now the team is back to its 2011 levels.  Is it possible that this was always a .500 team for whom everything went perfectly right in 2012?  All the stars were in alignment in 2012 in terms of hitting, bench play and coming out parties for guys like Ian Desmond and Bryce Harper and Gio Gonzalez.   Now in 2013 are we just seeing all these guys revert to their normal production levels?

Were we just spoiled by the amazing bench production we got last year?  Here’s a quick table (stats as of 5/31/13):

In other words, all four primary bench guys outperformed their career OPS+ values (mostly by a 25-30% factor) in 2012, and now all four guys are hitting so far below replacement level as to be drastically hurting the club.

I think the answer to the above questions goes along the following, topic by topic:

• No, this is better than a .500 team.  The 2013 team is absolutely better than the 2011 team that rallied in September to finish 80-81.  The rotation now is leaps and bounds better than the 2011 rotation.  The offense (on potential anyway) is better.
• This team is by-and-large the exact same team as the 2012 98 win team.  You can quibble about the loss of Michael Morse‘s charisma and power versus the fire-starting abilities of Denard Span at the top of the order, but then you also have to acknowledge the runs-saved so far this season by having an additional plus-plus defender in the outfield.  Haren versus Edwin Jackson?  At least a wash.  Bullpen additions and subtractions?  Perhaps replacing Burnett, Gorzelanny and Gonzalez with just Zach Duke and Rafael Soriano has weakened the bullpen.  Perhaps not, considering Soriano’s pedigree as a closer and its cascading effect on the rest of the bullpen.
• The bench over produced in 2012 and is underproducing thus far in 2013, per career averages.  A bit of expected regression to the mean should indicate rising bench offensive production from here on out.  It almost has to; there’s just no way that these four guys are going to hit THIS badly the rest of the season.

But, the early season damage as been done.  At this point, just for the team to match its 2012 win total they’d have to finish the season 70-35.  That’s a .667 winning percentage.  That’s a 110-win pace for a season.  The NL Central right now has three teams with better records than either Atlanta or Washington, the two pre-season NL favorites, meaning there may not even be a NL Wild-Card to fall back on.  This team needs to focus on winning the division or there may not be an October.

This sounds like something Yogi Berra would say, but here goes: you have to score to win.  For me, if they start scoring runs and out-hitting teams, the issues we have with defense, the bullpen and injured starters will become secondary concerns.  As we speak, these Nationals are hitting .229 AS A TEAM.  That’s unbelievable.   Almost amazingly bad.  They’re 28th in batting average.  They’re dead last in team OBP (on a pace for a modern seasonal low OBP in fact), 27th in team slugging, 29th in wOBA and 28th in wRC+.

They need Werth back in the middle of the order.  They need a healthy Harper, who hasn’t been the same since the LA wall crash but really hasn’t been the same since hitting the wall in Atlanta in late April (from a tweet by Mark Zuckerman: Bryce Harper’s stats before April 29 collision in ATL: .356/.437/.744. His stats since: .183/.315/.350).  They’re finally getting LaRoche back on track, and Zimmerman is hitting well.  They need to stop giving at bats to Espinosa, and they need Ramos back to help spell Suzuki (he’s catching nearly every game and his offense has bottomed out in the last month).

I’m going under the assumption, by the way, that Strasburg misses at most one start and that Detwiler returns straight away.  I don’t think Nathan Karns is ready for the big time and the team needs to find another spot starter in the short term (Stammen?).

June is here; a weak schedule and an opportunity to get some wins.  If we’re still .500 on July 1st, then we’ll probably have run out of excuses and decided that we are who we are.

Strained Oblique is not the same as torn UCL. Photo credit unknown.

It didn’t take the holier-than-thou Jon Paul Morosi 10 minutes after Stephen Strasburg‘s early exit on 5/31/13 to post this “I told you so” missive to remind everyone that he thinks the Nationals 2012 Shutdown decision was stupid (oh, and just to make sure everyone knows how smart he was, he also conveniently posted a link to his own opinion posted at the time).

Of course, the fact that a “Strained Oblique” isn’t the same thing as an “Ulnar Collateral Ligament” didn’t stop him from his highly hypocritical post.  Why hypocritical?  Because teams shut down pitchers on innings limits ALL THE TIME.  When the Cubs shut down Jeff Samardzija at the end of last season, did anyone bat an eye?  No?  Why was that?  Was it because the Nats were in first place and the Cubs in last?  Is that so?  Well if you’re going to have a national debate about one guy and not a word about the other solely based on the team’s position in the standings, then something is wrong.  Because both decisions were made to protect the player, not advance the team’s best short-term interest.

I’m not going to re-hash the whole argument again.  It isn’t worth it.  Nobody’s going to listen, everyone has their opinion already formed and hardened again and again.  The reason the Nats lost the NLCS wasn’t because our bullpen leaked run after run or because our closer coughed up a 2 run lead in the 9th; it was because Mike Rizzo arrogantly shut down Strasburg!  Of course!  Never mind that Strasburg’s replacement on the roster (Ross Detwiler) gave the team its best post season start.  Never mind that the St. Louis Cardinals were a heck of a hitting team and never mind that our offense only really showed up in Game 5 (when, as it turned out, scoring SEVEN runes wasn’t enough to win).

Ok, maybe I did just rehash the issue again.

But to the point of this post; are we going to have to live with this stupid argument every time Strasburg stubs his toe or has any sort of routine strain or injury for the rest of his frigging career?  Pitchers, as a rule of course, get injured.  Throwing a baseball at max effort is hard on the body.  Guys get injured all the time.  Some guys are incredibly durable (think Justin Verlander) and other guys are just not (think about what this franchise went through with John Patterson and Shawn Hill).  Just because Strasburg had a minor injury (and by all accounts it seems to be minor at this point) doesn’t mean Rizzo’s 2012 shutdown decision is to blame.

Are we going to have this discussion every time?  I hope not.

6/3/13 update: found this Tweet from Jon Heyman who acts as the voice of reason, not only shooting down Morosi’s article by pointing out that Oblique/Lat is not the same as Arm, but shouting down Twitter followers who questioned the shutdown.  He had a very, very good point about last year’s shutdown; is it worth a 25-yr old’s career for “1 or 2 more starts?”  A sage question that few people seemed to be asking, even if it was going to probably be 4-5 more starts.  There needs to be more people coming back to the middle on this (as Will Carroll seemed to be doing), saying that we just don’t know if a shutdown helps or not, as opposed to people who vehimently and rudely state that the Nats and Rizzo were so stupid for shutting him down.  It just gets old.

6/10/13: A little late to the game but Thom Loverro of the Washington Examiner calls out specifically Morosi and an Atlanta reporter for their “gutless” criticism of the Strasburg shutdown.  He makes very good points.