Well, Mike Rizzo wasn’t joking. At the Washington Nationals’ spring training facility, behind each of the 11 home plates in the bullpen, there are signs posted, and they’re not printed on paper. Somebody in the organization shelled out to have “I don’t care how fast you throw ball four” printed on canvas, in team colors, with a border all around and a logo at the bottom. The grommets at each corner, which allow them to be zip-tied tightly to the fence, probably cost extra. No National will throw a bullpen without seeing those signs for the next month. Whenever the team decides to remove them, somebody is going to have a rough a time cutting through all that thick plastic. It’ll take some doing.

Mike Rizzo was not joking when he said they would have these signs at spring training.

“I don’t care how fast you throw ball four.” pic.twitter.com/tT9x1Pv6yi

— Andrew Golden (@andrewcgolden) February 14, 2024

Rizzo road tested the line at the team’s annual hot stove event in January, and it brought down the house, earning sustained laughter and an applause break. In the absolute most literal sense, he’s right. If a pitch ends up as ball four, who cares how hard it was thrown? You might as well huck it up there underhanded like a cricket bowler. But that’s not really how baseball works. The pitcher doesn’t know beforehand whether the batter is going to swing, so let’s take Rizzo a shade less literally and look at how fastballs perform when they’re thrown in three-ball counts. The graph below shows four-seamers and sinkers, bucketed in one mile per hour increments. I went back and checked the numbers a second time because the line is so straight that the graph looks like it was airbrushed:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, I was surprised to remember that the Washington Nationals were still a going concern, so I wrote an article expressing my befuddlement at the organization’s inaction over the 18 months since the Juan Soto trade. The title of the story: “Let’s Poke the Washington Nationals with a Stick to See if They’re Still Alive.”

The Nats have found a stick and shown signs of life within just four days. And what a stick it is: Joey Gallo, one of the biggest, strongest, most powerful hitters out there. That’s a big stick. A stick fit to make Theodore Roosevelt use his inside voice. Gallo, late of the Minnesota Twins, will make $5 million on a one-year deal.

Signing Gallo won’t turn the Nationals around overnight, or even appreciably accelerate Washington’s rebuild. He’s just a man, after all. A big one, but merely a man. Nevertheless, this is exactly the kind of move the Nationals should be making. Read the rest of this entry »

What did the Nationals do to deserve scrutiny at this juncture? Absolutely nothing. If someone had signed Blake Snell this week, I would not be working myself up to caring about what the Nats have or have not done this offseason. But when Ben Clemens wrote about the Orioles’ sleepy winter (would that we all had the good fortune to sleep through winter), I found myself casting my gaze southwest, to the next stop on the I-95 corridor.

Because the Orioles at least won 100 games last year. They played in the playoffs. Okay, having witnessed the front end of their ALDS loss in person, “played” is probably too strong a word. “Appeared in” is more like it. But still, there’s a thriving — if perilously under-resourced — ballclub in Baltimore. In Washington, there is but the promise of such, and little evidence thus far of life in the primordial slurry that’s taken up residence in Nationals Park. Read the rest of this entry »

Software Engineering Intern

Description:
The Washington Nationals are looking for a software engineering intern to join the Baseball Research & Development team this summer. The Baseball Research & Development group is responsible for deriving insights from our baseball datasets, building proprietary metrics, and building a web application used throughout our baseball organization.

The software engineering intern will join our team of data engineers and web developers and will help build data imports, data pipelines, and add features to an internal web application used by the baseball operations front office, scouts, player development, and coaching staff. You will have the chance to engage in data engineering-focused initiatives, web development tasks, or a blend of both disciplines depending on your preferences and skills.
The internship will be for up to 12 weeks and will be in person in Washington, DC.

The Washington Nationals are committed to creating a diverse environment and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
The responsibilities will be some combination of the following, depending on whether the intern is focused on data engineering or web development.
• Build data imports and data pipelines using Prefect.
• Add functionality to our internal API microservice, implemented in FastAPI.
• Design and build interactive data-driven web pages using VueJS and Ruby on Rails.
• Write documentation.

Education and Experience Requirements:
• Has or is pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree from a four-year college or university, preferably in Computer Science or related field.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities necessary to perform essential functions:
• Experience with modern programming languages (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Ruby) and with SQL.
• Some experience working on the command line in a Linux-like environment.
• Some experience using git for version control.
• Experience with dataframe libraries (e.g. Pandas, Polars), web application frameworks (e.g. FastAPI, Flask, Node/Express, Rails), front-end frameworks (e.g. React, VueJS, Angular), or data orchestration frameworks (e.g Prefect, Dagster, Airflow) is preferred.
• Ability to work both collaboratively and independently with close attention to detail.
• Ability to communicate clearly and effectively.
• Enthusiastic about working in baseball.
• Authorized to work in the United States.

Physical/Environmental Requirements:
• Office: Working conditions are normal for an office environment. Work may require occasional weekend and/or evening work. Occasional long hours may be required during the draft or trade deadline.
• Interns can attend all home games but are not required to. Meals are provided to staff during games.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Washington Nationals.

Last week I covered the American League half of the flurry of transactional activity that occurred as a result of the 40-man roster and non-tender deadlines. Is any one move here as impactful as signing a Yoshinobu Yamamoto or a Matt Chapman? No, but when your favorite team experiences a rash of injuries in June, whether or not they have the depth to scrap and compete is often dictated by the people and processes that surround this day. Below are my thoughts on the National League, with some quick scouting snippets on most of the added players and thoughts about roster construction where I had something to say.

Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks lone addition was lefty Blake Walston, a former $2.5 million high school signee who, despite being young for his class and physically projectable as an amateur, has seen his fastball velocity plateau and slightly decline since he signed. He’s had fits and starts where he’s thrown harder, but for the most part, Walston’s fastball still sits 89-92 mph and his performance peripherals took a nosedive in 2023, though part of that was likely because of the PCL hitting environment. The lanky 22-year-old is still a fair long-term prospect because of his age and what one could reasonably hope will still be late-arriving physicality, but for now, I’d consider him at the very back of Arizona’s 40-man starting pitching depth chart. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Washington Nationals.

Batters

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. One isn’t the loneliest number on this depth chart, which features the most ones you’ll see outside of a singles mixer. CJ Abrams is the only player to get a two-win projection, and as for any threes, fours, or even something spicier (read: higher)? Well, they’re not invited to this party. We can also dispense with the other bit of bad news: ZiPS is actually more optimistic about a lot of these players than Steamer is.

I was thinking about just ending this writeup there, but that’s too cruel even for me. The good news is that even though the Nationals are unlikely to be very good in 2024, they’re not really supposed to be, and much of this roster is made up of players either still at the start of their career or who nobody in the organization expects to be playing an important role by the time the team is good again. Lane Thomas was a great story this year, as was Joey Meneses in 2022, but does anyone really expect either to be a big part of Washington’s 2027 World Series championship, should that come to pass? The Nats are using this time wisely, and it’s better to look at interesting minor league veterans than washed-up 35-year-olds for the spots you don’t have better prospects to fill. Read the rest of this entry »

Reese Olson has a chance to be a top-of-the-rotation starter in Detroit, and it is notable that the Tigers acquired him via trade. On July 30, 2021, then-general manager Al Avila dealt Daniel Norris to the Milwaukee Brewers in exchange for the now-24-year-old right-hander, who at the time had a 4.30 ERA in High-A and was flying below most prospect radar. Talented but raw, he ranked seventh in a system that wasn’t particularly well-regarded.

Olson made his MLB debut this past June, and by season’s end he was showing signs that he could emerge as a No. 1 or a No. 2.on a promising young staff. Over his last six starts, the plain-spoken Gainesville, Georgia native allowed just 18 hits and six earned runs in 35-and-two-thirds innings. On the year, he had a 3.99 ERA and a 4.01 FIP to go with a 24.4% strikeout rate and a .214 BAA. He fanned 102 batters in 103-and-two-thirds innings.

Scott Harris doesn’t believe in labels like No. 1 starter or No. 2 starter. He does believe in the fast-rising righty.

“Reese has three distinct secondary pitches that miss bats,” Detroit’s President of Baseball Operations told me at this week’s GM meetings. “That’s really hard to find. He also has two different fastballs that reach the upper 90s. I also think he did some things this summer that reminded me of what other really good pitchers do in their first year in the big leagues. I’m not going to throw those expectations on him, but his ceiling is as high as anyone’s.” Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, covering candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. For an introduction to the ballot, see here. The eight candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville on December 3, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 21, 2024, along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

Davey Johnson

Like Billy Martin before him, albeit with far less drinking and drama, Davey Johnson was renowned for his ability to turn teams around. He posted a winning record in his first full season at four of his five managerial stops and took four of the five franchises that he managed to the playoffs at least once. But after six-plus seasons managing the Mets, he never lasted even three full seasons in any other job and never replicated the success he had in piloting the 1986 Mets to 108 wins and a World Series victory. Read the rest of this entry »

As the professional baseball career of Nelson Cruz flashes before my eyes, no single image emerges to define his legacy. He served as a leader in the clubhouse, was devoted to off-the-field humanitarian efforts, proudly represented his Dominican homeland, consistently hit the baseball so hard that he earned the nickname Boomstick, and did all of it at a high level for more years than any aging curve would have dared to predict.

Last week, after 19 seasons in majors, Cruz announced his retirement on The Adam Jones Podcast. He also addressed the second-most important topic pertaining to his career: the origin of his nickname. Back in 2009, while playing as himself in a video game for some sort of promo event, Cruz hit a home run and referred to his bat as the Boomstick. The name circulated amongst fans and stuck. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball Research & Development Intern

Location: Nationals Park, Washington, DC
Status: Part-Time

Description
Internships are a key way for us to find future full-time members of our department, with many of our senior department members beginning as interns. While a pathway to a full-time position is not assured, many of our former interns have found full-time opportunities with the Nationals or other MLB clubs. While internships ideally span from Opening Day to November 1st, we’re open to candidates that may not be available for this entire period.

The Washington Nationals are committed to creating a diverse environment and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, genetic information, disability or veteran status.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Use R to build statistical models to answer a primary baseball research question under the direction of a Baseball R&D team member
• Communicate findings through written reports, presentations, and informal conversations
• Design and build informative data visualizations for use in automated reports or internal web applications

Requirements:

Education and Experience Requirements

• Experience analyzing datasets and training statistical models using R, Python, or equivalent
• Has or is pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree from a four-year college or university, preferably in Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field
• Willingness to relocate to Washington, DC
• Authorized to work in the United States

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities necessary to perform essential functions

• Ability to complete statistical modeling projects
• Ability to listen and incorporate feedback
• Enthusiasm for learning new skills related to programming, statistical modeling, and data visualization
• Passion for baseball and desire to work in baseball operations
• Working knowledge of sabermetrics and modern quantitative baseball evaluation concepts

Physical/Environmental Requirements

• Office: Working conditions are normal for an office environment. Work may require occasional weekend and/or evening work. Occasional long hours may be required during draft, trade deadline, or postseason.
• Interns can attend all home games but are not required to. Meals are provided to staff during games.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Washington Nationals.