Under the lights
courtesy of BrianMKA

This is the moment Redskins fans have been waiting for since the trade for the number two overall pick was announced. The home debut of RGIII. In the first two weeks of the season Robert Griffin III has been everything that has been advertised and more. He has gotten it done with both his arm and his legs and has shown off tremendous poise for a rookie playing the most important position in the NFL. The Redskins lost last week because the defense had no answer for the the Rams passing attack and Josh Morgan lost his cool and drew an unsportsmanlike penalty after RGIII had led the Redskins into at position to tie the game.

It is a little confusing as to how poorly the Redskins defense has performed. The answer could be as simple as they were an easy mystery to solve. The Redskins defense is built around the pass rush. Given time and any quarterback in the NFL is going to pick apart their weak secondary, and now with Orakpo and Carriker done for the season that pass rush is going to suffer a bit putting even more pressure on the secondary. Meriweather is expected to return this weekend and having a true safety on the field could be an added benefit.

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In the seven years since Washington returned to organized baseball, there hasn’t been a single season better than .500. This season’s 91-58 Nationals have claimed at bare minimum a Wild Card berth in the playoffs this season, and with it a share of DC history.

Words are inadequate to the raw emotion of relief and triumph that seemed to overtake the fans in the 9th inning as Drew Storen retired the heart of the Dodgers lineup on strikes. 30,359 roared as one to celebrate the win, but the Nationals were low-key in post game interviews, quick to point out that the Division was still up for grabs, and that they won’t rest as long as they’re in pursuit of something no DC baseball team has claimed since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House: the World Series trophy.

Congratulations to the Washington Nationals, on behalf of a grateful city, on restoring respectability to our baseball chops. Bravo Zulu, and may the sub horn sound.

Most of the talk from yesterday’s 31-28 lose to the Rams will focus on the Josh Morgan penalty that cost the Redskins a chance to tie the game with a late field goal, but more of the talk should be on the coaching staff. Mike Shanahan has not done a good job since he has become coach of the Redskins. The roster has been nothing special, but yesterday is a great example of how coaching can lose games.

After the Josh Morgan penalty that pushed the Redskins out of field goal range the Redskins tried a field goal. At that point in time there were just under 2:00 minutes left and RGIII had led the Redskins into field goal range before the penalty to begin with. The question is why try a play with a close to 0% chance of working instead of going for it on fourth and sixteen. With an offensive weapon like RGIII that is a higher percentage play than trying for a 62 yard field goal.

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Feature:
Edward Jones Dome
courtesy of ChrisYunker

Last season the Redskins played the Rams in St. Louis in week four, and the Redskins won to move to 3-1 on the season. If you remember that game at all the Redskins won because their defense was about to sack Sam Bradford seven times and limit Stephen Jackson to 45 yards rushing. In week one this season the Rams played the Lions and Sam Bradford ended up being sacked three times. The Rams were not a good team last season, and aren’t likely to be that much better this season. It is in many ways puzzling that after beating a Saints team that didn’t lose a home game all last season at home that many are still picking the Redskins to lose to a Rams team that only won two games total.

With the Redskins front seven matched up against the Rams offensive line this game should go much the same way as last season’s did defensively. Orakpo, Kerrigan, Bowen, and Carriker might as well go ahead and set up residence in the Rams backfield. The Rams should struggle to get going offensively. Their only hope is for Stephen Jackson to have a good game in order to keep the Redskins defense off balance enough to give Bradford time to pick apart the Redskins weak secondary, but if the Redskins were able to handle Drew Brees and the Saints offense then their is no chance they should struggle against the Rams.

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Robert Griffin III
courtesy of Keith Allison

Last season if the Redskins defense allowed 32 points they would have lost. Looking back at seasons before that and if the Redskins defense didn’t shutdown the opponents offense they lost. The most points scored by the Redskins in 2011 were the 28 they scored against the Giants in their first game of the season. This is a different year and a different team. Robert Griffin III showed exactly why he is trusted above the veteran presence of Rex Grossman and why his talent isn’t the most impressive thing about him.

Early on in the first quarter there was a muffed exchange between Robert Griffin and Alfred Morris. RGIII didn’t panic or try and do too much. He simply picked up the ball, looked down field, and when he found no one he protected himself as much as possible and took the tackle. It goes down as a fumble and a rush for no gain in the score book, but keeping possession of the football is something that the Redskins struggled with last season. Robert Griffin was able to hold onto the ball and while the Redskins gained nothing on the play they lost nothing either. In total the Redskins turned the ball over zero times and forced the Saints to turn it over three times.

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Last night’s 3-inning outing isn’t the one Nats fans, or Strasburg himself, will want to remember as his last start of the 2012 season, but as of this morning, Davey Johnson announced that would be his last start of the year.  Trouble with fastball location was a problem last night, and when he was getting his heater over the plate, the Marlins were wrecking them. 

The final totals for Strasburg read as follows: 159.1 innings pitched, 15 wins, 6 losses, a 3.16 ERA, 197 strikeouts, 48 walks. 1.09 WHIP, 2.4 BB/9, 11.2 SO/9. He’s 4th in wins, 11th in ERA, 7th in Win-Loss ratio, and 1st in Strikeout per 9 innings, and 2nd in strikeouts. By all stretch of the imagination, it’s been a phenomenal season for the young pitcher, especially when you consider he’s still recovering from Tommy John surgery.

The shutdown has been contentious throughout the sports media, with many national sports media figures calling on the Nationals to ignore the doctors’ advice, pitch him through the limit set by his surgeon and doctor, and keep plowing right through.  Young pitchers don’t burn out, they say; they explode, they say. You only get one shot at the World Series, they say.

These are the striking voices of those who would ignore Stephen Strasburg’s future in exchange for a shot at a world series title. They are the myopic who can only see the next few games, the next month, instead of the future ahead.

Some would say that the Nationals were foolish to charge Strasburg out of the gate, instead looking to Atlanta for an alternative method of rehabbing from the difficult surgery. The Braves have said this week that hurler Kris Medlen will be available through the end of the year and into the playoffs.  Medlen and Strasburg were both operated on in August of 2010, but the Braves opted to prolong and slow his spring training period at the beginning of the year instead of putting him in the rotation out of the gate in April.

This should hardly mark the end of the effective season for the rest of the club, who only benefitted from Strasburg’s excellence every fifth game. The Nationals’s staff leads the NL in ERA (3.30), is third in strikeouts (1140), and has allowed the fewest number of earned runs (460), the fewest walks & hits per inning pitched (1.20 WHIP), and hits per 9 (7.8).  

If you need a defense of the Nationals’ incredible pitching staff, I point you to the Dean of DC Baseball writers Tom Boswell’s column from Labor Day: 

Look at the pitching hegemony the Nats would have brought to bear in the postseason when all teams use four starters. They’d have four of the top 15 in ERA among all starters in the NL. Only one NL team has more than one such pitcher (the Giants).

Also, the Nats would send out four of the top 15 NL starters in WHIP (walks and hits per inning), as well as four of the top 21 in lowest OPS (on-base-percentage plus slugging).

Finally, the Nats would have an overpowering staff with four of the top nine average-fastball-velocities in the NL. That’s almost insane.

…

Oh, I’m sorry. I seem to have made a minor mistake in my calculations. The team I have just described is the Nationals without Strasburg.

It will be frustrating, I’m sure, for the Nationals to be without their most dominant pitcher in the final road to the playoffs and to the World Series, but this will not be the death sentence that so many of the national media have made this into. It ignores incredible contributions from Edwin Jackson and Ross Detwiler, as well as two solid starts from the new fifth starter John Lannan in key positions this year.

This is just the start of a long career for Strasburg, and this shutdown will be good for his arm in the future, but I worry about the effect that this might have on the psyche of the pitcher. Davey Johnson indicated last night that he thought the shutdown might have been weighing heavy on the young pitcher, and that ended with him talking with Strasburg this morning and ending his season.

Instant analysis is hard in a business where the future is so unclear, and made cloudier by the sheer number of different variables facing the entirety of the situation. We shall see in the coming years if this handling of the future of the franchise’s pitching ace will have been the correct choice, or if the Atlanta model that they’ve chosen for Kris Medlen will have better results. I suspect this will be something that causes Nationals’ GM Mike Rizzo a few sleepless nights in the weeks to come. But Rizzo is playing the long game, taking the risks designed to make the franchise a contender for years to come, not win a quick title and ruin some arms along the way. \

Here’s hoping he’s right.

Cowboys10
courtesy of Homer McFanboy

Reading through the season previews for the Redskins and I am struck by something. They are all over the place. There are writers like SI’s Peter King saying he wouldn’t be surprised if the Redskins win a playoff game, and then there are others like ESPN magazine predicting the Redskins to be worse than last season. The latter is as hard to envision as the former. The Redskins made monumental upgrades in the offense. Pierre Garcon and Josh Morgan add a depth to the receiving unit that wasn’t there in 2011, and while RGIII is a rookie he has so much more talent the Rex Grossman or John Beck that he would have to try to be worse than those two.

The big question with the Redskins is if the better level of talent will translate to on-field success. The Redskins in 2011 lost five games by seven points or less. With the improvements made to the receiving core and at the quaterback position they should be able to turn one or two of those close losses into wins. Make no mistake the Redskins are still a flawed team, and no unit has more issues than the secondary. Brandon Meriweather was supposed to step in and take the place of LaRon Landry, but he will start the season hurt. Reed Doughty is a gamer and a solid back-up, but has struggled in a starting role. Especially with the lack of talent the Redskins have across the secondary.

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After a 4-game sweep that had the Nationals embarrassing the Cubs by a collective 31-9, Davey Johnson had a message for the Cubs and the whole of baseball after tonight’s game: “If they’re getting mad at my guys in the 5th inning [for] swinging 3-0 or running, they better get used to it.”

And mad the Cubs were in the third base dugout, as two separate benches-and-bullpen clearing incidents occurred in the 5th and 6th inning that lead to three Cubs ejections (Bench Coach Jamie Quirk, Catcher Steve Clevenger and Pitcher Manny Corpas) and the ejection of Nationals pitcher Michael Gonzalez. What began with words between Nationals third base coach Bo Porter and the Cubs’ Jamie Quirk in the fifth quickly escalated into a fracas that cleared the pens and resulted in blows.

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If Cooley had a Vineyard?
courtesy of Tony DeFilippo

The news broke on Twitter, as these things do nowadays, late yesterday: Chris Cooley was released by the Redskins. Reactions were almost universally negative, and some were pretty despondent. I must say, loathe the Redskins though I do, I always had a soft spot for Cooley.

He was the kind of hard-working player you could only love. His eight seasons with the Redskins have him atop the leader board with 428 receptions as a tight end, and fifth overall in franchise history, and he’s on the all-time depth chart in touchdowns and yards. He has been a solid presence at tight end, a leader on and off the field, and if I had to pick one player that epitomizes the good that remains at the heart of the Redskins while surrounded by Dan Snyder and Mike Shanahan and the rest of the less-than-likable 

His goodbye press conference yesterday is the sort of gut-punch you never want to see in sports, not to anyone, but especially not to someone as special as Cooley. Cooley deserves better than to be cut in pre-season by the team he’s never done anything but love, from draft day all the way forward to his last practice. His goofball routine was charming, especially when contrasted with his serious-as-nails play on the gridiron. His 3-touchdown game against the Cowboys in 2005 sealed the Redskins’ last post-season appearance.

But more than that, he was the kind of human being you’d want to hang around with. This wasn’t the sort of pro-athlete always in the news for the wrong reasons – except once, where an honest mistake resulted in pictures of his wang on the Internet – but rather this was the sort of guy you loved to watch.  Dan Steinberg of the Post cataloged his seven favorite Cooley moments, and all of them are the sort of laid back goofballism you would expect from Captain Chaos.

Here’s to you, Chris Cooley, who could make this die-hard NFC West/49ers fan cheer on the Redskins, just a little bit. Godspeed, and don’t stay gone too long.

[Clark Griffith, Cincinnati, NL (baseball)] (LOC)
courtesy of The Library of Congress

In order to earn a nickname like, “The Old Fox,” one cannot be anything close to what a prototypical pitcher is thought to be, and that is what Clark Griffith was as a player. He amassed 453 wins to 372 losses with a 3.31 ERA over 20 seasons. Clark Griffith lived up to his nickname using deception instead of speed to get players out, and after his playing career was over it would be slightly ironic that one of the greatest finesse pitchers would own the team that was home to one of the games greatest power pitchers.

Clark Griffith as a player has only a small role in Washington baseball history, but it is an important role. It was Griffith who while representing the players in a salary dispute with the NL had worked out a deal with Ban Johnson and Charles Comiskey to turn the American League into a major league with Washington being one of 8 charter cities. The city of Washington had had a professional franchise for a brief period of time when the NL Washington Nationals called Washington home from 1886-1889 before being folded due to poor attendance and overall mismanagement. When the leaders of the NL turned down Griffith’s and the players request for more money Griffith quickly wired Johnson and Comiskey to let them know the players were on their side.

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2010 Topps Tribute 02 walter johnson
courtesy of jp3sketch

On August 2, 1907, I encountered the most threatening sight I ever saw in the ball field. He was a rookie, and we licked our lips as we warmed up for the first game of a doubleheader in Washington. Evidently, manager Pongo Joe Cantillon of the Nats had picked a rube out of the cornfields of the deepest bushes to pitch against us… He was a tall, shambling galoot of about twenty, with arms so long they hung far out of his sleeves, and with a sidearm delivery that looked unimpressive at first glance… One of the Tigers imitated a cow mooing, and we hollered at Cantillon: ‘Get the pitchfork ready, Joe– your hayseed’s on his way back to the barn.’…The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup. And then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn’t touch him… every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park. –Ty Cobb

Born November 6, 1887 in Humboldt Kansas Walter “Big Train” Johnson would grow up to become one of the greatest and most unhittable forces ever unleashed on a baseball diamond. With a wind-up that was all flailing body parts and an easy side arm delivery it must have looked to batters as if Johnson’s high 90’s fastball was coming out of his hip pocket, but there were no tricks to Walter Johnson. For most of his career his fastball was the only pitch he used. Shirley Povich of the Washington Post describes Walter Johnson’s pitching mechanics as, “sidearm, almost underhand, with a long sweeping delivery, and no great snap of the wrist.”

How Johnson came to be with the Senators sounds like a story out of a tall tale. A traveling salesman and fan of the Washington Senators would send letters to the manager Joe Cantillon telling him of the pitcher with the fastest fastball he had ever seen. Walter Johnson pitched 75 innings in the Idaho State League before being signed by the Senators and didn’t allow a run in any of them.

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