Nationals Arm Race

Verlander makes his 12th career opening day start, putting him in the clear lead. Photo via sporting News.

Every year I update this long-running XLS for this increasingly anachronistic relic of tracking Opening Day Starter honors for teams.  But it does make for some good trivia questions.

After this year’s opening day, which involved few fans and

• Most Opening Day Starts, Active Leaders:
  • Justin Verlander makes his 12th career Opening day start, double the next closest competitor now.
  • Next closest are two veterans, each of which who has 8 career opening day starts, neither of which made 2020 opening day starts (Clayton Kershaw and Jon Lester).
  • Special mention of Felix Hernandez, who is technically active with the Braves but is not on their 40-man roster.  He has 11 but seems like a longshot to make another.
• Current Leading Consecutive streak:
  • 3; shared by Verlander, Max Scherzer and Aaron Nola
  • Julio Teheran had a streak of 6 broken this year; he signed with the Angels in the off-season
• Number of first-time Opening Day Starters in 2020: 18 of 30
  • Soroka, Alcantara, Hendricks, Woodruff, Musgrove, Flaherty, Marquez, May, Paddock, Milone, Eovaldi, Morton, Giolito, Bieber, Boyd, Heaney, Montas, Lynn
  • This is easily the highest number of 1st time opening day starters since I started tracking this.
• Most surprising opening-day starters in 2020:
  • Tommy Milone getting the opening day start for Baltimore.  Just crazy.
  • Sonny Gray getting his 3rd career opening day start, 5 years after last getting one for Oakland.
  • Johnny Cueto getting his 5th career opening day start, also 5 years after his last.
  • Trevor May, who gets a last minute spot start filling in for the injured Kershaw.  The rich keep getting richer out in LA; he was more than adequate, quite a showing for a guy who would normally be in AAA yet could clearly make nearly every other rotation in the league.

Historically, here’s the all-time record holders:

• Most Ever Opening day Starts: Tom Seaver with 16.  Tied for 2nd place with 14 is Jack Morris, Randy Johnson and Steve Carlton
• Most Consecutive Opening Day Starts: Jack Morris, all of whom’s 14 opening day starts were in a row.

Hope you enjoy this useless trivia!

Well, this is why he got $210M. Photo via sportingnews.com

Here it is.  Its Wild Card Tuesday.

The red-hot Brewers (winners of 22 of their last 30) couldn’t quite catch the Cardinals and thus travel to DC.  Meanwhile, the suddenly hot Nationals (winners of 9 of their last 10) finished the season in destruction mode and should be fired up for the game.

Pitching Match-up: Max Scherzer; 11-7, 2.92 ERA vs Brandon Woodruff, 11-3, 3.62 ERA.

Season Series: 4-2 in favor of Milwaukee, but with a caveat.  The Nats got swept in Milwaukee in early May, when they were awful.  Woodruff pitched the series finale and dominated the Nats lineup of the day, throwing 6 innings of 4-hit, one-run, 9-K ball.  We threw Jeremy Hellickson, he got shelled, and a rare error from Anthony Rendon accounted for 3 unearned runs on the night.

When Milwaukee came to Washingotn, it was in mid August and they faced a different team: Washington took 2 of 3 at home, one game of which was the amazingly odd 15-14 game on August 17th where a tired Sean Doolittle blew a 3-run 9th inning lead and the beleagured bullpen forced the offense to extend the game three different times.  (Woodruff didn’t pitch in this series because he missed two months with an oblique injury starting in July 2019).

Scherzer hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire since his return from the D/L: in his 5 starts in September his seasonal ERA has risen half a point.

Looking at the Brewer’s splits; they walk a lot (2nd most in league), but as a team don’t actually have that great of an wRC+ figure … and that’s playing most of the season with Christian Yelich.  They hit lefties and righties about the same, so no real advantage/disadvantage there.  Their bullpen is supposedly a strength, but their bullpen macro stats (ERA/FIP/fWAR) are all middle of the pack.

Prediction: two weeks ago I would have been more pessimistic about this team.  But with Yelich out and finishing as strong as they did and basically being at full strength, I like the Nats here.  I think they put a couple runs on Woodruff early, they let Max settle in and he goes 7 innings (he’s going to be fired up, lets be honest).  Then you go 8th/9th guys w/o screwing up the LAD rotation.  That’s the hope anyway.