Pence Fouls off a Pitch
courtesy of donjd2

With Brandon Belt on second and Buster Posey on first the line drive off of Hunter Pence’s bat hung in the air. The crowd groaned in anticipation of watching Belt cross the plate tying the game at six, but the line drive hung in the air. Denard Span may not have been the offensive lead-off hitter the Nats wanted, but he has been the defensive outfielder they’ve needed and on several occasions he has saved his pitching staff. The line drive hung in the air, the crowd groaned, and then they cheered as Span out ran the baseball and made a rare diving catch.

The Nats 18-16 record in one run games would lead one to believe they were good in close games or at least not bad. Doing what winning teams do as the narrative squad would have you know. It isn’t the case. This evening’s contest is a drama that has played out far too often for the Washington Nationals. After a solo homer in the second inning tied the game the Nationals exploded in the fourth inning sending ten batters to the plate and scoring five runs to take what appeared to be a commanding 6-1 lead, or so it appeared.

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Adam LaRoche
courtesy of Keith Allison

Want to feel the full weight of time. Attend a baseball game where 20 runners are left on base with a combined six runs scored and an one hour rain delay. However long it took the Nationals came out on top and they did so by scoring runs in the fourth inning on a Wilson Ramos ground out that scored Desmond from third, in the sixth inning on a mammoth Adam LaRoche two run homer, and finally in the eighth on a Kurt Suzuki sac fly.

This was not a game that anyone would call a fine display of baseball. The score was low and the Nats were able to win a tight game, but there were long innings for pitchers all night and base runners in almost every inning. Between the Giants and Nationals there were four 1-2-3 half innings all night. This was a game that wanted the viewer to feel the weight of time. Wanted them to understand how baseball can drag, but in the end the Nationals won.

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courtesy of philliefan99

The Washington Nationals did not end up gaining any ground against the first place Atlanta Braves in the National League East division this week as the Braves ended up completing a three-game sweep of the Nats on Wednesday night. Atlanta beat Washington 6-3.

Washington’s struggles this season continued to be on full display as an inconsistent lineup unable to score runs did just that and a struggling bullpen blew open the game. The Nats held strong through the seventh inning while managing to tie up the game a couple of times throughout the night but a big rally by Atlanta in the eighth ended that.

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Omnia Vanitas
courtesy of LaTur

The words like fight and heart are usually part of a bad narrative when it comes to baseball, but anyone who has watched the 2013 Nationals can’t help but complain about a lack of fight and heart, and they may be on to something. It was thought that once the Nationals line-up got healthy they would be just fine, but since Harper returned it has been as punchless as ever. Harper hasn’t performed up to his standard with a .745 OPS but that is a hug improvement over anything Roger Bernadina has done, and yet the Nationals offense continues to manage nothing.

It is hard to find a reason for why the Nats are so bad in high leverage situations, but according to Fangraphs they are the worst hitting team in the majors in such situations with a team .582 OPS. The next worst are the Cubs at .608. That is an over .020 point difference. It is hard to find a reason for why the Nats are so bad, but look at Adam LaRoche’s seventh inning at bat against Luis Avilan. Avalin had given up a two out single, had Zimmerman reach on an E5, and walked Jayson Werth on five pitches. With a 2-0 count LaRoche swung at a pitch in and off the plate to end the threat. LaRoche is a veteran and should know to make a pitcher suffering from sudden lose of control throw him a strike before swinging.

This is an issue that Nats fans have seen all season. Think back to Jayson Werth swinging at a 3-0 pitch in New York. The Nats can’t say they are still playing tight as they have nothing left to play for, but there is something missing when solid veteran hitters are making mistakes so out of character for them. LaRoche is known as a patient veteran hitter with a solid approach at the plate, and not taking the 2-0 pitch with a high likelihood Avilan would have walked in the tying run is alarming to witness.

If this wasn’t Davey Johnson’s last season this type of play would be grounds for dismissal. It isn’t that the Nats should be fired up for high leverage situations. Quite the opposite. Good baseball players treat every situation the same. The hitting approach is to wait for a pitch up and drive it somewhere. When the Nats are in close games and get runners on they swing at any pitch and end up grounding out weakly, striking out, popping out, or any other harmless thing.

Bryce Harper attempted to drag the corpse of the Nationals back to life when after Teheran hit him he started towards the mound. And while the benches and bullpens did clear the players stood around like they were waiting for a bus. It is hard to say it is a lack of fight as we cannot see into the players mind, but the Nats have all the appearance of a team that has accepted their fate and rolled over to die.

courtesy of aaron.jorbin

The Washington Nationals scrambled to try and catch up to the first place Atlanta Braves on Monday night but lost a close 3-2 game after a quality start pitched by Stephen Strasburg. It seems like a lot of the same story line seen this season as far as Strasburg is concerned, but the only difference being that the loss went to reliever Tyler Clippard instead of Strasburg this time.

Strasburg threw seven innings and 110 pitches, 71 strikes, and gave up five hits, two runs, and one walk while tallying nine strikeouts.

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Nats v Dodgers-7
courtesy of MudflapDC

After a six game losing streak ripped through one and a fifth of the Nats rotation and Jordan Zimmermann got torched for five runs in the first game of a double header on Friday the Nats needed good starting pitching. Who would’ve ever thought that three of the best pitching performances of this home stand would belong to Ross Ohlendorf, Dan Haren, and Taylor Jordan. In the final three games of a four game series against the Mets the Nationals back of the rotation and spot starter allowed three combined runs.

Today’s performance by Taylor Jordan earned him his first MLB win as he started off the game perfect through three innings with three strikeouts and several soft fly outs to the shallow part of the outfield. After the three perfect innings Jordan faced a bit of adversity as he allowed a lead-off single to Mets’ left fielder Eric Young Jr. before striking out Satin and getting Daniel Murphy on a ground ball to LaRoche. He then allowed back to back singles to Marlon Byrd that scored Eric Young Jr. and Ike Davis before striking out John Buck to end the inning.

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When the Nats signed Dan Haren they thought the floor was going to be what he gave the Angels in 2012, 4.33 ERA over 30 starts. Perfectly acceptable for a fifth starter. What they got was much much worse. In his 18 starts coming into today’s game Dan Haren had a 5.79 ERA over 98 innings and worse than that the Nats were 4-14 when he pitched. This was not the Dan Haren they signed up for, but a strange thing happened at the ballpark today. Nats fans saw a ghost.

Instead of the common “keeping the team in the game” start the Nats wanted from Dan Haren on a consistent basis Nats fans were treated to the dominating classic Dan Haren. The pitcher who is fifth all time in career K/BB ratio and has had a borderline Hall of Fame career up to this point. The Dan Haren that has pitched at Nats Park and for the Nationals much of this season is not the real Dan Haren. A seven inning one run on three hits and one walk with six strikeouts is much closer to the pitcher Dan Haren has been for most of his career as a starter with the A’s, Diamondbacks, and Angels.

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Davey Johnson, Dan Haren
courtesy of Keith Allison

If one could coalesce the 2013 Nats season into one player that player would be Dan Haren. Haren in 2013 has a 4.83 K/BB ratio. Higher than his career average of 4.04, and Haren is in the top five all time in that stat along with pitchers like Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez, and Mariano Rivero. Yet Haren has his career worse ERA and has given up a league leading 21 homeruns. At the same time Dan Haren is pitching better than his career numbers, and yet having the worst season of his career. It is oddity one could only find on the 2013 Nats.

Describe the Nats to a stranger in this way. A team with three starting pitchers with a 3.01 ERA or lower, a set-up man and closer with sub-3.00 ERAs, and seven of eight position players with higher than league average OPS and five of those seven higher than .800. Those are real Washington Nationals stats, but the picture painted in ones mind is not of a team three games under .500, or of a team that has lost eight of its last ten and hasn’t won a game since the all-star break.

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To pinpoint exactly what has gone wrong with a roster that was thought to be the best in baseball coming into the season is close to impossible. It can be seen that the Nationals aren’t scoring runs, but that had changed. In nearly a month with Anthony Rendon at second base and a healthy Werth in right field the Nationals were averaging over four runs a game, and then they got Bryce Harper back, and when he homered in his first at bat off the DL it looked like he would provide an even bigger spark.

Since that homerun Harper doesn’t have a single hit, but that isn’t for lack of effort. In the first inning today the Nationals didn’t get a single hit, but it looked like they eventually would. Denard Span drove a ball just shy of the warning track in right followed by Werth driving one deep to center field and again shy of the warning track. Then Harper had the hardest hit ball of the inning and for a moment it looked like he got enough of it. Brewers’ center fielder Carlos Gomez turned to chase the ball and stopped short of the wall in front of the Red Porch and then took a left turn tracking the ball and leaping at the last minute to rob Harper of extra bases.

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Nats v. DBacks – L5-1-1029
courtesy of MudflapDC

For three months Washington Nationals fans have been waiting for something the cheer about. Sure since Werth came off the DL and Anthony Rendon was inserted at second the offense has averaged 4.27 runs a game, but the Nationals offense has still felt sluggish. They get shutout too often and until scoring 13 runs yesterday against the Mets hadn’t had that big offensive outburst. Tonight against the Brewers Nationals fans were given something to cheer, and cheer they did. The first ovation occurred when Bryce Harper was announced in the starting line-up, the second when he stepped to the plate, and the third, longest and loudest of all, when he hit an opposite field homerun in his first at bat off the DL.

At every turn Bryce Harper has written his own story. He wanted to play in the majors, and was finished with high school, and so he got his GED, went to JUCO, and got drafted one year early. Then he wanted to play in the majors as soon as possible. Harper never tore apart the minors but he did put on a show in the Arizona Fall League and Spring Training and soon earned a call-up to the Nationals at the age of 19, and he ended up winning the Rookie of the Year and being one of the best 19 year olds to ever play the game. Then this season he had a list of private goals. Among them was probably to win the MVP. A goal that may have been derailed by the right field wall in Dodger’s stadium.

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When I arrived at Pfitzner Stadium in Woodbridge, Virginia at 5:30 PM I wasn’t expecting the gates to be open. They normally don’t open until an hour before first pitch for minor league games, but there they were standing wide open and welcoming me in. I went to look at the line-ups and was greeted by the familiar names of Burns, Martinson, and Keyes, but batting second for the P-Nats on this night was rehabbing big league phenom Bryce Harper. At 20 years old Harper is young for high A. In fact he is younger than every single member of the P-Nats roster, but there he is a rehabbing big leaguer, a truly rare talent.

That talent was on display early as Harper in his first at bat in the bottom of the first inning hit what was ruled a double. It was more of a pop-up between the short stop and left fielder that was dropped. Harper sprinted around first and went into second standing up. He showed the old Harper hustle on that play and it did not appear that the knee was bothering him one bit.

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This is Rusty, the National Zoo’s Red Panda. He went missing from his enclosure late yesterday or early today and is on the lam here in DC.

Red Pandas, unlike their more famous brethren, are arboreals, which mean they live in the trees, and an escaped panda may be up in some of DC’s famous foliage. The Zoo would, however, like this cute little guy returned. If you see Rusty anywhere, and he’s not hanging out with Vlad Putin and Edward Snowden at the time, please give the Zoo a call at 202.633.4888

DSC_7994
courtesy of MudflapDC

Having used seven relievers in Saturday’s extra innings loss to the Minnesota Twins the Nats needed Jordan Zimmermann to go deep in game one of Sunday’s doubleheader. As he has done all season long Jordan Zimmermann looked like the Ace he was drafted to be pitching seven innings allowing no runs on a measly two hits with seven strikeouts and two walks. It could be said that this was a great start, but most starts by Jordan Zimmermann have been this season. After this afternoon’s contest he is averaging over seven innings a start and has a 2.00 ERA.

The game didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts for the Nationals, a team that has struggled to score runs all season and has been bleed dry by tiny mistakes. The first of the Nats mistakes came in the top of the third inning when Anthony Rendon, not wearing sunglasses, lost a pop-up in the high sky and dropped it allowing Clete Thomas to reach base with Escobar, the previous, batter having walked. With two outs and having retired the last five by strikeout Jordan Zimmermann picked up his teammate and struck out Ryan Doumit to end the inning.

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