The Nationals kick off the second half of the 2017 season tonight on the road against the Reds sitting 9.5 games up in the NL East. While the squad has sat in first place for practically the entire season, it hasn’t been an easy road getting there. Some players have outplayed their expectations while others have been disappointing so far this season.
Continue Reading The Biggest Over- and Under-Performers of the First Half
With 5 All-Stars so far (#VoteRendon), this year’s version of the Nats is Dolly-Parton-like top heavy. The top 6 Nats all have 2 WAR or higher. There are 2 Nats in the top 10 in baseball in both hitting (Anthony Rendon and Bryce Harper) and pitching (Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg). Injuries and the craptastic bullpen have sucked a lot of joy out of this season. Yet the calamities that have befallen the team have allowed a few of scrubs to show their worth.
The Washington Nationals aren’t known for making big free agent signings. Most of their big acquisitions are made via trade or extensions to internal players, with a few notable exceptions. After the latest outstanding start by Max Scherzer, I started to think about the Nats’ best free agent signing to date. There were three obvious candidates: Scherzer, Jayson Werth, and Daniel Murphy. So, I put a poll in the (Twitter) field, and Scherzer was the landslide winner.
I wanted to take some time to breakdown the arguments for and the (few) arguments against each, and then I’ll share my pick for the team’s best free agent signing.
Today is the NHL’s expansion draft. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a quick primer of the NHL expansion rules: each team is allowed to select a certain number of its players to protect. Any others are eligible to be selected by the expansion team, which must select exactly one player from each team.
So, in the spirit of keeping things topical, I decided to take a crack at seeing who the Nationals would protect in an expansion draft. MLB had its own expansion draft 20 years ago when the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays joined, and therefore has its own set of rules.
Continue Reading Who Would the Nationals Protect in an Expansion Draft?
Welcome back to the latest in a series, in which we review the previous week in Nationals baseball and power rank the players according to their performance. This is an extremely unserious exercise; at no point should it ever be confused with actual baseball analysis. Don’t worry, I will do my best to make sure that is obvious. Without further ado: your Washington Nationals, ranked according to power.
The struggles of the Nationals’ bullpen has understandably garnered most of the negative headlines around DC lately. The bullpen isn’t the only facet of the Nationals performing at near league worst levels, though. The combo of Matt Wieters and Jose Lobaton has quietly been undercutting Nationals’ pitchers this season, one pitch at a time.
The Nationals are on a mean streak, and that doesn’t even refer to their 7-1 roadtrip. All it took was Bryce Harper’s retaliation to Hunter Strickland being a giant baby for the Nationals to revv up their fire.
Welcome back to the latest in a series, in which we review the previous week in Nationals baseball and power rank the players according to their performance. This is an extremely unserious exercise; at no point should it ever be confused with actual baseball analysis. Don’t worry, I will do my best to make sure that is obvious. Without further ado: your Washington Nationals, ranked according to power. Continue Reading Nats Power Rankings: June 5
It’s no secret that the bullpen has been a course of chaos all season. The bullpen was blowing leads even if the starters had pitched a great game, and if the starters didn’t do well and didn’t go far, the bullpen didn’t do anything to help them out. But lately, the starters have eliminated the need to go the bullpen by declaring, “We’ll just do all the work ourselves.” And oh my, have the starters been outstanding.
Continue Reading Hot Starting Pitching Ignites the Nationals
Right now, the Nationals are running away with the NL East. They are in the enviable position of not having a real competitor, currently sitting a comfortable 11 games up. The Mets are the closest thing but cannot stay healthy and cannot get out of their own way. In fairness, they won that game, but wow, that was bad. Since Max Scherzer lost to the Braves on May 20, lasting just 5 IP on 106 pitches, the Nats have won nine of 11. Max has pitched 17.2 IP in his last two starts — one out away from consecutive complete games. In fact, just twice has a starter failed to pitch into the seventh inning — Joe Ross, who lasted less than five against the lowly Padres, and Gio Gonzalez, who posted 5 1/3 IP against the Mariners.