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| The Nats were absolutely horrible this past weekend |
Hank Aaron was beginning
one Robbie going out, one coming in
Kiner and Midget Gaedel
the Thumper and Mel Parnell
and Ike was the only one winning down in Washington
– Terry Cashman, “Talking Baseball”
WERE I to revisit my horrid baseball predictions from the preseason and attempt to justify why it is that I thought the Washington Nationals would win the World Series this year, I would be one of many writers and columnists and pundits feeling forced to do so – and one of many writers and columnists and pundits who’ve been forced to do so for the past four seasons. It’s a pretty easy choice, picking the Nats to win everything, because on paper, they’ve had more talent than everyone else in the National League, if not in all of baseball.
The Official Wife of In Play Lose has some allegiance to the Nats, having grown up in the D.C. area, and so we usually make it a point to take in a game whenever they come to San Francisco. The Nats rolled in for a 4-game series at Phone Co. Park against the Giants, who’ve been something of a M*A*S*H unit all season – their starting lineup of choice has played together all of three games the entire year – and have a starting rotation held together by duct tape and silly string. The Nats lined up Strasburg/Scherzer/Gonzalez to throw the first three games of the series, all top calibre pitchers matched against a cobbled-together rotation. Pitching and defense rule the roost at Phone Co. Park in San Francisco, where the mists and the cool weather and the winds put a severe dent in the offense. It looked like the Nats had three serious mismatches lined up, and with a little luck on Sunday afternoon against Giants ace Madison Bumgarner, a sweep would be possible.
Well, a sweep was possible, indeed.
We’re having a strange summer here in San Francisco. The last four days saw temps around 90° with no wind, no fog, and still, humid air – and in those sorts of conditions (which don’t happen EVER), Phone Co. Park plays more like the ballparks in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. It becomes a launchpad, with slick grass and a rock hard infield, to boot, and the Giants went about peppering the walls and skidding balls into Triples Alley and singlehandedly shortening the career of Nats CF Michael Taylor, who ran about 10 miles over the weekend chasing balls down. By the time Bumgarner completed his masterful performance on Sunday – a complete game 3-hit shutout with 14 Ks as well as a homer and an RBI double in a 5-0 Giants win – the Nats had been subjected to a 4-game sweep and been outscored 28-12 in the process.
This completed a dreadful West Coast road trip for the Nats, who went 1-6 vs. L.A. and the Giants – a nasty sort of 2-stop road trip even in the best of times – and dropped to 10-20 since the All-Star Break, a slump which has seen them fall from having a healthy lead in the NL East to now being 4½ games behind the suddenly resurgent Mets and 10½ games out of the wild card race. Were it not for the Pittsburgh Pirates sweeping the Mets over the weekend – the ’Mazins somewhat magical second half being momentarily halted when they faced a team that actually knows what it’s doing – the Nats season may already be over. It certainly looked over for the Nats on Friday night when my wife and I attended the game, a Giants win by a score of 8-5 in which Bryce Harper did his Bryce Harper thing, hitting a 3-run RBI and driving in four, and the rest of his teammates seemed to be sleepwalking, as Scherzer got tattooed, the bullpen couldn’t stop the bleeding and the defense looked utterly lost. Quite honestly, that team looked dead.
What the hell is wrong with this team? Certainly, injuries have played a huge part in it. Denard Span really makes that team go from the leadoff spot, and he’s been on the DL for a while now. Anthony Rendon and Jayson Werth also spent large chunks of the season on the DL as well. But consider the Giants again, who are 2½ games out of first in the West and presently have three regulars and two starting pitchers on the DL. Injuries happen to almost everybody, at some point. Indeed, the absence of Rendon and Werth from the starting lineup on Friday night had nothing to do with health and everything to do with the fact that neither of them is hitting their weight in the month of August. I looked at the Nats lineup on the Jumbotron on Friday night and said to KC, “wow, that lineup isn’t any good at all.”
Indeed, the Nats have spent most of the past three seasons failing to live up to lofty expectations. On paper, they always look to be better than they turn out to actually be. This has been especially true on the offensive side of things. Even as Harper has developed into arguably the best player in the National League, he’s only one guy. They just don’t put up enough runs on a regular basis, not even for a starting staff which should – should – be absolutely dominant. The trade for closer Jonathan Papelbon from the Phillies gives the Nats what should – should – be a dominant back end of the bullpen with he and previous Nats closer Drew Storen. But this is where the Nats start running into trouble, of course, seeming like a team that’s far too obsessed with what’s happened in the recent past.
Storen, of course, coughed up the lead in the Nats’ demoralizing Game 5 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2012 playoffs, and also coughed up the lead in the 9th inning of Game 2 against the Giants last year. Storen was having a terrific season this year, and of all the things the Nats could’ve added at the trade deadline to boost their squad, which was in first place at the time, getting a closer shouldn’t have been that high on the list at all. That they did so speaks to a fundamental lack of confidence in their closer Storen to come through when they really, truly need him to – which is fine, I suppose, but you’ve been throwing him out there in the 9th inning for most of the past four years and he’s been pretty good. Two poor games is statistically a small sample size – but they just happen to be the two most important games in the history of the D.C. franchise.
One of the things which I am fond of saying in relation to scrabble is that you must fear metaphor. The reason for this is that the actual mechanics of the game are the same from game to game – but what changes from game to game is the importance that you attach. The fact is that some games do, in fact, mean more than others, and your performance is necessarily going to be judged by how you fare in those situations. The whole “Drew Storen is a choker” motif has been statistically proven to be untrue over time, but you don’t, in the end, get to choose how a game comes to mean. And for a seemingly star-crossed franchise that’s never been to a World Series, that was left to twist in the wind and rot in Montréal for half a decade by the commissioner and MLB, and that had it’s greatest team taken away by the baseball strike of 1994, the failings can seem all the more pointed and painful.
Of course, it’s hard to know just how the Storen-Papelbon combo will work in the bullpen at Washington, since the Nats haven’t been winning any games of late and on two occasions in the pivotal series with the Mets in early August, manager Matt Williams didn’t see fit to put them in the game as the Nats were blowing late-game leads on their way to getting swept at Citi Field – a pivotal series which seems to have changed the entire course of the narrative in the NL East. Williams is in his second year managing the Nats and trying to grow into the job, and his tactical acumen hasn’t been particularly stellar. It’s a lot easier to grow into the job when you have a terrible team to work with, and whatever mistakes you make pale in comparison to the mistakes being made on the field on a regular basis. Instead, Williams got handed the keys to a Ferrari and has been trying to figure out how to drive a stick.
And the second-guessing of everything Matt Williams does was probably inevitable after the trainwreck that was the playoff series last season with San Francisco, beginning with a strange decision in Game 2 of last year’s playoffs: his starter Jordan Zimmerman, having thrown a no-hitter in his last start of the season, was throwing a 2-hit shutout in Game 2 against the Giants and had retired 53 of the 58 previous batters he’d faced when he was yanked with two outs in the 9th in favor of Storen, who promptly coughed up the lead and, nine innings later, the Giants had won a 2-1, 18 inning marathon. The Nats got themselves into a pitching and defense and tactical matchup with the Giants, which pitted Williams in a chess match with Bruce Bochy, whose three World Series titles confirm him as MLB’s grandmaster, and Williams managed to maneuver his way into trying to save the season, in Game 4, using his 6th and 7th best bullpen options. The results were predictable. At the key junctures of the season, Williams seemed out of his depth. In the playoffs, some lateral thinking is necessary, of course – given the hot hand that was Zimmerman, he was sure to get the ball in Game 5, which meant that the Nats’ #1 starter, Stephen Strasburg, should’ve been available for Game 4. To hell with established roles at that point – you’re down 2-1 in a best-of-5 and you have to save the season! Yet there was Strasburg sitting next to Matt Williams, becoming more of a poster child for Washington Nationals ineptitude through inaction than he already was.
Strasburg, of course, was the #1 pick in the draft in the first of back-to-back years where the woful Nats hit the jackpot – drafts which landed them he and then Bryce Harper. He then blew out his arm, and the Nats have been cautious with him ever since. Too cautious. The ace of the staff in 2012, when the Nats had the best record in what was a loaded National League that season, Strasburg was shut down in mid-August under the wishes of the Nats’ front office, who had made the decision at the start of the year to limit his innings count for the season come hell or high water. So there was Strasburg sitting in the dugout watching Game 5 of the playoffs, perfectly healthy but off the roster, watching the Nats face the St. Louis Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter – a guy who, earlier in the year, had a rib removed because it pinching nerves and preventing him from pitching. (Umm, ick.) The juxtaposition of mentalities between the two clubs there is impossible to ignore. Baseball is a game full of voodoo and superstition and faith, of course – “never fuck with a winning streak,” as they say in Bull Durham – and while I don’t subscribe to that sort of hocus-pocus, if there was ever a franchise that deserved to be cursed for trifling with the baseball gods, it would be the one that willingly shut down it’s best pitcher who was perfectly healthy in the throes of what could’ve, and maybe should’ve, been a championship season.
Because guess what, folks, winning championships is hard. It’s really hard. You need great talent, smart management, great timing, good health and also having a little bit of luck doesn’t hurt. As spoiled as we are here in San Francisco, what with the Giants hoisting three new championship banners in the past five years and the Golden State Warriors getting to hoist one here this coming autumn, it’s not lost on people that the Giants went 56 years without winning a World Series, and the Dubs went 40 years without winning an NBA title. And contrary to popular belief among the stathead set, winning championships is why you play the game. It’s how you’re ultimately judged when your career is done, fair or not. It’s why you started playing in the first place, and players go to amazing extremes in order to try and win championships. In last year’s Super Bowl, the Seahawks’ three best defenders – Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Kam Chancellor – were all trying to play with what would otherwise had been season-ending injuries. After the Stanley Cup playoffs are over, players always reveal that they’ve played for the previous two months with broken wrists, broken hands, torn muscles. Questioning the wisdom of doing such a thing is another issue, of course, but the fact is that these are the most competitive people on earth, and capturing that grand prize is all that truly matters in the moment to any of them.
That shutdown of Strasburg coincided with the season that Chipper Jones retired from the Braves and he perhaps explained it best when asked his opinion of the Nats moves. He’d arrived in Atlanta in 1996, the year the Braves won a World Series and in the midst of a 14-year-run of playoff appearances. But the Braves never won another title in his entire career, despite being good and sometimes great. Chipper had come to understand that success was fleeting in sports. When you have the chance to win a championship, you simply have to make the most of it. Jones basically said that the Nats were idiots for doing that. Strasburg held his tongue throughout the season, then voiced his disapproval after he’d been shut down, since he was feeling fine and wanted to pitch and wanted to try to win – which is exactly what the organization should’ve been thinking as well. Sure, the organization has to be mindful of long-term concerns, but the clock is ticking from the moment a player comes up to begin with. You want a guy to have a long career with your franchise, but you don’t always have much of a say in how long that career is going to be. And if you’re Strasburg, and you know that time is short and the opportunities to win titles can be few and far between, are you really going to be that interested in reupping? Sure, money talks, but there’s plenty of money for everyone. Winning, and the chance to do so, often becomes paramount in a free agent’s mind.
I really do feel that 2012 is going to haunt this franchise, if it isn’t already doing so. The 2012 flag that very easily could’ve been flying in Nationals Park is flying over on McCovey Cove. They’ve spent the past three years adding to the core of the roster – Harper, Rendon, Span, Scherzer, Fister – yet they seem to be running in place and perpetually underachieving. That core, meanwhile, is crumbling – Werth is aging, Ryan Zimmerman can’t move, Desmond is costing himself millions in a contract year with a dismal season both offensively and defensively. The Nats were struggling through all of the issues – helped in part by a terrible division – but now the wheels seem to have come off. Something needs to change in a hurry. In the meantime, the clock is ticking and the window continues to close.
There’s still time for the Nats to salvage this season, of course. (For starters, they have a few games coming up with the likes of the hapless Colorado Rockies and the rotting corpse of a franchise that is the Miami Marlins.) 4½ games isn’t an impossible deficit to overcome. The Mets seem a bit slump-proof at the moment, however, given how they pitch. Then again, they just got skunked by the Pirates while the Nats were failing to hit, pitch, field, coach, or even show a pulse for the past weekend. If the Nats somehow rally, they may owe the Pirates a beer or two.
It’s one thing to be awful in perpetuity, and the Nats certainly went that route for a while. That sucks, to be sure. But sports in North America tend to be a boom-and-bust enterprise, and failing to maximizing your opportunities during the good times just makes the bad times seem even worse. Just look at the other team I picked to reach the series – the Mariners won 116 games in 2001, one of the greatest teams in history, but blew their opportunities in the playoffs and haven’t made the playoffs since. The club continues to peddle 2001 nostalgia in lieu of putting a competent product on the field, but the Seattle fans have come to no longer care about such a thing. Waxing nostalgic about glory days that didn’t turn out so glorious only makes the losing more insufferable. The only way you cleanse yourselves of some of those disappointments is to go out and win. John Madden has always been fond of saying that “winning is a great deodorant,” but it’s also a great disinfectant and stain remover as well.
