The Nationals would not be here today without Patrick Corbin.

In a season with many ups and downs — really, just one “down” and then one much larger “up” — Corbin was a consistent arm in the Nationals’ rotation, especially as the ace of the staff, Max Scherzer, dealt with injuries in the second half and relative (by his standards) ineffectiveness upon his return. He was not the only rock — Stephen Strasburg was also superb — but he was the new rock, the highlight of the Nationals’ offseason, their prized signing.

On December 4, the Nationals inked Corbin to a six-year, $140 million deal, the largest contract given to any starting pitcher the entire offseason. With one full season in the books, it’s clear that Corbin has come to Washington exactly as advertised. As their third ace, Corbin’s presence in the rotation helped put them over the top. A team with three of the best 13 pitchers in baseball likely won’t stay defeated for long, and the Nationals overcame a horrid 19-31 start to win 93 games and clinch the top NL Wild Card spot.

Of course, this turnaround is not solely due to Corbin’s contributions, but having him in the rotation certainly didn’t hurt. He pitched 202 innings this year to the tune of a 3.25 ERA, 3.49 FIP, and 4.8 WAR. He outpitched both Steamer’s (3.3 WAR) and ZiPS’ (3.5) preseason projections. As a result, the Nationals had the best rotation in baseball, and they hope that their top three starters will be the difference here in October: Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Playoffs begin Tuesday evening as the Milwaukee Brewers (89-73) head to the nation’s capital to face the Washington Nationals (93-69). After a season during which most of the National League was in the playoff picture until very late in the season, both teams finished their respective campaigns in surprisingly convincing fashion, managing to clinch postseason appearances with time to spare. Both squads also fell short in their improbable runs for a division title late in the season, but making the Wild Card is still good enough to earn a bit of bubbly.

For the Washington Nationals, the end of the Bryce Harper era didn’t spell the end of their contending years. As it turns out, there is a foolproof way to replace a Bryce Harper: make a new one. Juan Soto only needed 121 minor league games to prepare for instant stardom in the majors had a fantastic 2018 run, hitting .292/.406/.517 with 22 homers and 3.7 WAR in 116 games for Washington. But Harper was still the Big Name on the team, and it wasn’t until his lucrative departure to Philadelphia that Soto could define Washington’s outfield.

Anything can happen in one game — the Detroit Tigers beat better teams on 47 occasions this season — but if I’m one of the other NL playoff teams, the Nationals aren’t the team I’d be pulling for to win. When considering the playoff construction of the teams — with less of an emphasis on depth and more on the top of the rotation — ZiPS projects the Nationals as the second-best squad in the National League. Second-in-the-National-League means they even edge out the Atlanta Braves by the slenderest of threads.

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This is the fourth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

The final weekend of the 2019 season is upon us, and while five of the divisions and all of the super-complicated tiebreaker scenarios are off the table, with three games to play, each league has multiple scenarios that could result in at least one tiebreaker game. Seven hundred or so words is worth a picture, so first, behold this:

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The Nationals haven’t simply been building a franchise since 2005, they’ve been building traditions. Traditions like the running of the presidents, or whatever #Natitude was. These days, the fans cheer “N-A-T-S, NATS, NATS, NATS!” when something good happens, which is, yes, entirely co-opted from the NFL’s New York Jets.

But the most enduring tradition of the Nationals’ brief history is what has happened after each time they’ve reached the playoffs: They lose, sometimes horribly, and always crushingly.

This year, having clinched a spot in the NL Wild Card game, the Nationals are preparing to do it again.

But this time, oh ho boy, it’ll be different.

Maybe.

Before we get to why, here’s how it’s gone down the last four times:

2012
98-64 (Best in MLB), 23.7 WAR (6th in NL), 101 wRC+ (T-3rd in NL), 194 HR (2nd in NL), 105 SB (T-5th in NL)

Top pitcher: Jordan Zimmerman (5.5 WAR)
Top position player: Bryce Harper (5.2 WAR)

When the team with the best record in baseball is up 6-0 in a deciding NLDS game 5, you’re probably okay to keep the plastic up in the clubhouse. “Not so fast,” said noted slugger Pete Kozma. Read the rest of this entry »

In a way, it’s a surprise Howie Kendrick is still playing in the majors. Last year, at 35 years old, he ruptured his Achilles tendon in a May 19 game against the Dodgers, ending his season after just 40 games. It was the second straight season in which Kendrick failed to play 100 games and the third straight year in which he came up short of 2 WAR. The Washington Nationals, meanwhile, had a fairly deep group of position players and had their eyes set on yet another postseason appearance. It would have made sense for both parties to agree to part ways. I’m not sure either foresaw a bounce-back season like the one Kendrick has put together in 2019.

Kendrick is hitting .343/.393/.577 with 16 homers in 113 games, good for a wRC+ of 146. His 2.8 WAR is the highest total he’s posted in any season since leaving the Angels after 2014. Nearly every other category is either a career-best or very close to it.

That’s only the beginning of the story of how good Kendrick has been. Statcast places him in the 94th percentile in baseball in exit velocity, the 100th percentile in xBA, and the 98th percentile in hard hit percentage, xwOBA, and xSLG. He is the only player in the majors with at least 50 batted ball events who ranks in the top 10 in xBA, xSLG, xwOBA, and hard hit percentage. By those metrics, Kendrick has actually underperformed his expected outcomes this season, with his .604 xSLG soundly outpacing his .577 SLG and his .422 xwOBA well in front of his actual wOBA of .406. Read the rest of this entry »

Over in the American League, there’s a pretty clear top tier of Cy Young contenders in Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole, followed by a solid group of candidates likely to garner down-ballot support. In the National League, there looks to be a top tier of Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom followed by a cascading set of secondary candidates, but that first look doesn’t quite tell the entire story.

To provide some idea of the statistical disparities voters must contend with when making their decision, I looked at our FIP-based WAR as well as the RA9-WAR also available here at FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference’s WAR, and Baseball Prospectus’ WARP. I included for consideration any player in the top five of any of those lists. That search returned nine pitchers for the potential five slots on a Cy Young ballot. Those players are listed below, with a mix of traditional and advanced statistics:

We have Scherzer and deGrom in first and second by about a win over the next-best candidate, with deGrom pitching tonight. After those two, we have a lot of innings from Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin, and fewer innings, but better peripherals, from Walker Buehler. After those three, we have four candidates who haven’t thrown a ton of innings, but all have much lower ERA’s than FIPs. As for how these candidates came to be considered, here are their WAR totals:

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Sean Doolittle threw 10 pitches to Billy Hamilton on Saturday. Every one of them was a fastball, and all but one of them were in the upper third of the strike zone or higher. That’s what Doolittle does. No one in baseball throws a higher rate of fastballs than Doolittle’s 89.2%, and no one throws a higher rate of them in the upper third of the zone or higher than his 54.2%. He wears hitters out there, and that’s what he did to Hamilton. After a lengthy battle, the Braves’ new speedster didn’t have enough in the tank to get a piece of this last pitch.

That was a good outing for Doolittle. He retired all three hitters he faced, two of them on strikeouts. Even though Washington failed to rally in the top of the ninth, losing 5-4 to Atlanta, that kind of inning might have left a few Nationals fans feeling a bit more encouraged about their team’s overall outlook than they did before the game. That’s because recently, a dominant inning of work from Doolittle has no longer been the near-guarantee it used to be.

From 2017-18, Doolittle was incomprehensibly great. He threw 96.1 innings between Oakland and Washington and held a 2.24 ERA with a 2.27 FIP. He struck out 122 batters while walking 16. In terms of the game’s elite relievers, Doolittle was practically without equal. But this season, he hasn’t packed nearly the same punch. His ERA is 4.09, and his FIP is 4.23. His xFIP, which was a jaw-dropping 2.68 just last year, is now 5.05. He’s striking out two fewer batters per nine innings and issuing walks at his highest rate since 2015. After allowing just eight homers over the previous two seasons combined, he’s surrendered 10 this season. Read the rest of this entry »

When the All-Star break arrived, Max Scherzer appeared to be making a pretty strong case to win a fourth Cy Young award. Nearly two months and two stints on the injured list later, however, he’s trying to recover his dominant form and to restart his campaign for the hardware, one that will be difficult in light of recent voting history. In a performance that was largely lost amid Tuesday night’s late-inning drama in Washington — the Nationals allowed five ninth-inning runs to fall behind 10-4, then scored seven in the bottom of the frame, capped by Kurt Suzuki’s walk-off homer — Scherzer did show some semblance of his usual self. Unfortunately for the 35-year-old righty, the other inning he threw, a four-run fourth during which the Mets teed off on his first pitches, was his undoing.

Making just his fourth start since the All-Star break, Scherzer wasn’t at his sharpest against the Mets, but he did retire nine of the first 10 batters he faced, with a seven-pitch second inning walk by Brandon Nimmo the only blemish. While he did strike out four in that span, the Mets made him work for those shutout innings, as he needed 46 pitches. The Mets changed their approach in the fourth, attacking Scherzer’s first pitch even if it was outside the zone during a three-pitch sequence to start the frame, Pete Alonso and Michael Conforto both singled, and then Wilson Ramos doubled, plating one run. Nimmo went four pitches deep before hitting a sacrifice fly to put the Mets up 2-1, and then Joe Panik pounced on the next pitch, a 91.9-mph cutter high in the zone, for a two-run homer to left field, expanding the lead to 4-1. Scherzer didn’t allow another run amid that 21-pitch slog of an inning, but he did give up one more hit, a double down the line by light-hitting Luis Guillorme.

Scherzer recovered to retire the final six Mets he faced. Outside of the fourth inning, he didn’t surrender a hit, and allowed just one walk. With opposite pitcher Jacob deGrom also wobbly — after allowing two runs through his first seven innings, he served up a two-run homer to Juan Soto in the eighth — the Nationals remained in the game and ultimately produced a comeback of a type that hadn’t been seen in 58 years. It was the first time Scherzer had gone six innings or thrown at least 90 pitches in a start since July 6. Read the rest of this entry »

September call-ups, both high-profile and totally innocuous, have been trickling in over the transaction wire for the last several days. As always, there are some that will have real impact on the playoff race, some that are interesting for the purposes of player evaluation, such your usual spare lefty reliever and catcher (by far the most common types of September additions), and some teams with no new names at all. Below I’ve compiled notes on every player brought up by National League teams since the start of the month, no matter how inconsequential, and I slip some rehabbers and August 31st acquisitions in here, too. It’s a primer for you to get (re)acquainted with players who might impact the playoff race or seasons to come.

Contenders’ Reinforcements

Atlanta Braves — INF Johan Camargo, RHP Chad Sobotka, RHP Jeremy Walker, LHP A.J. Minter, RHP Bryse Wilson

Camargo didn’t hit with the big club at all this year, not even in late July or all of August when he was handed pretty regular at-bats filling in for an injured Dansby Swanson. But he hit .483 over the few weeks he was down in Gwinnett after Swanson returned and Camargo was optioned. He’ll be a versatile, switch-hitting bench piece for the stretch run, and he projects as that sort of premium bench player long-term.

Sobotka and Walker were optioned to make room for the multiple relievers Atlanta acquired at the deadline. Sobotka, who sits 94-98 with life and has a plus, 2900-rpm slider, posted a 16-to-2 strikeout to walk ratio at Triple-A since being sent down. You may see him pitching big innings this month. Walker has been throwing 25-pitch, 2-inning outings with three days of rest in between. He may be on mop-up or long relief duty. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first few months of this baseball season, everything had been coming up “Belli vs. Yeli.” Of course, this was for good reason.

Since the two sluggers got off to scorching starts, the race for the National League Most Valuable Player award has centered entirely around Cody Bellinger and Christian Yelich. Major League Baseball itself basically even recognized that these two candidates had lapped the field, releasing a commercial prior to the All-Star break featuring Bellinger and Yelich playing a comical game of M-V-P.

But baseball is a long season, and even the surest things are never a given. We might just be witnessing that right now. Nationals third baseman Anthony Rendon is one of baseball’s most underrated players. Despite ranking ninth in WAR since his debut season in 2013, Rendon was finally voted in to his first All-Star game in 2019, though he did not attend. He is a player who Sam Fortier of The Washington Post described as “infamously attention-averse,” and he is also a player who just completed the third-best offensive month of his career. Anthony Rendon demands attention, and in a big way. With his excellent play last month, he might have thrust himself into the mix for the league’s highest individual player honor. Read the rest of this entry »