When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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PITTSBURGH – Daniel Murphy spends much of his offseason in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, where he hits in the batting cages of his alma mater, Jacksonville University. He works out there alongside his brother, who is also an alumnus of the program and who is also a local high-school coach. At the university, with his brother’s high-school team, Murphy will often talk about the craft of hitting with amateur players.

Murphy is, of course, one of a number of hitters who has changed his swing, improved his launch angle, and enjoyed significant success and improvement. He was an early adopter along with the usual names mentioned like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez. But as Murphy talks to players at the grassroots level about swing concepts, he notices there are often curious looks when he discusses the idea of hitting fly-balls.

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PITTSBURGH — I entered the visiting Washington Nationals’ clubhouse at PNC Park with a theory in need of vetting earlier this week. I suspected the most likely explanation behind Ryan Zimmerman’s success this season was that he had joined the merry band of fly-ball revolutionaries.

I was suspicious because one of the early adopters, Daniel Murphy, is of course a teammate. I was suspicious that Zimmerman had changed something because he ranks as the game’s ninth-most valuable position player to date — ahead of early-season sensation Eric Thames, for example.

I was convinced that something dramatic had occurred because his setup looks different this season…

… than it did a year ago:

Moreover, his slugging-percentage heat maps (per swing) certainly have changed, as Zimmerman has expanded the area in which he does damage.

2016:

2017:

I felt quite certain Zimmerman would tell me that he made some dramatic change. But when I approached Zimmerman and asked him about his white-hot start to the season, he was nearly apologetic for not having a more interesting story behind his success.

“I feel like my swing is pretty much the same,” Zimmerman said. “Baseball is the game of adjustments, obviously. I make adjustments between every pitch. So to say you haven’t changed anything, I think, I don’t think anyone does not change anything… But it’s not like this offseason I went and completely remade my swing. If you looked at my swing and position, I would think it would be pretty much the same.

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A frequently asked question this spring in FanGraphs chats, and presumably around water coolers inside and outside the Beltway, concerned which Bryce Harper we would see in 2017.

Would we see the 2015, Ted Williams-like, Griffey Jr.-in-his-prime, Hall-of-Fame-trajectory version? Or would we see something closer to the perplexing, if still productive, 2016 version. (Harper must have been restricted by nagging injuries last season, right?)

So far it seems like the answer is more likely the former, but perhaps it is neither. Instead of settling for somewhere between those outcomes, perhaps what Harper has really set out to do is to exceed the extremely high bar he set in 2015.

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Over the winter, the Washington Nationals were interested in a bunch of closers. Most notably, they were the runners-up in the Kenley Jansen bidding, with Jansen publicly stating that the Nationals offered him more money than the Dodgers did. The team was also linked heavily to David Robertson in trade rumors, so it was a fairly surprising development when the team ended up not acquiring anyone to replace Mark Melancon, instead leaning on their internal options to fill the ninth inning void.

So far, it hasn’t gone well, with Shawn Kelley blowing another ninth inning lead yesterday, the third time this year the Nationals have lost a game they led headed into the ninth inning. Kelley’s blown save included his sixth home run allowed this year, a staggering total for a guy who has thrown just 11 1/3 innings so far in 2017. Blake Treinen and Koda Glover haven’t been much better, with Treinen walking too many guys and Glover striking out too few, so while the Nationals maintain a comfortable 7 1/2 game lead in the NL East, it’s becoming more and more obvious that the team will be making a trade for another closer this summer.

But while acquiring an available closer certainly may help, the reality is that the Nationals 2017 bullpen issue doesn’t appear to be as easily fixed as it was in 2016. Last year, the team had a bunch of quality setup guys pitching well in front of Jonathan Papelbon, and was able to solidify an already-strong unit by bringing in Melancon to anchor the squad. This year, though, the problems are running much deeper than just the ninth inning.

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Ryan Zimmerman is off to a great start. We’re only 26 games into the season covering 104 PA, but anytime you’re running a .427/.462/.875 line, it’s worth celebrating. Among qualified hitters entering play on Thursday, Zimmerman led the league with a 241 wRC+. This is particularly noteworthy because, measured by outcomes, Zimmerman had a terrible season in 2016. Zimmerman posted a 67 wRC+ in 467 PA last year after many years as an above-average hitter.

During the offseason, Jeff Sullivan noted that Zimmerman’s 2016 probably didn’t portend doom. Jeff pointed out that Zimmerman was hitting the ball pretty hard in the air, but he simply wasn’t collecting extra-base hits at a rate consistent with that contact quality. Erstwhile FanGrapher Mike Petriello made a related argument, recognizing that Zimmerman was making hard contact, but that he simply wasn’t hitting the ball at a steep enough angle to turn that hard contact into productive contact.

I probably don’t have to tell you where this is going. This season, Zimmerman is hitting the ball a bit harder than last year, 93.6 mph on average vs, 92.5 mph in 2016, but his average launch angle has increased from 9.0 to 11.7 degrees in 2017.

But you don’t need fancy Statcast numbers to notice this difference. His fly-ball and ground-ball rates are plenty clear. Zimmerman has joined the ranks of so many players who are trying to hit more fly balls. And at least so far this season, it’s working quite well for him.

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Yesterday, I wrote about the Nationals’ upcoming decision in the wake of the Adam Eaton injury, talking about the pros and cons of sticking with an inferior option like Michael Taylor or making a big splash for a rental like Lorenzo Cain. In both the comments of the post and at the Pitch Talks show in D.C. last night, a number of people questioned why I focused solely on the potential acquisition of a CF, and didn’t talk about the possibility of acquiring a shortstop and shifting Trea Turner to center field as they did a year ago.

The idea seems to be fairly popular, and would expand the pool of players the Nationals could look at, putting them in a better position to upgrade without having to pay an extreme price due to the lack of quality center field options. But here’s the primary reason I didn’t devote any words to the idea in yesterday’s piece.

In theory, if Taylor doesn’t pan out, Harper could slide over to center field, where he spent most of his rookie season. Alternatively, Turner — who converted to center last year before returning to his native shortstop this season — could head back to the outfield. For the record, Baker doesn’t seem terribly interested in either of those contingency plans.

“No,” said the Nats skipper dismissively when asked on Saturday morning if he was open to the idea of Harper or Turner taking over in center field. “Leave my team alone.”

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In some ways, the Nationals just finished up a great week. In the last seven days, they scored 77 runs, running a team batting line of .355/.423/.649 and a wRC+ of 175. For reference, Mike Trout’s best single-season wRC+ is 176. If you wanted to know what a line-up of nine Mike Trouts would look like, it would look something like the Nationals line-up of last week.

But beyond the results on the field, the Nationals had a terrible week, as on Friday, Adam Eaton’s knee gave out running through a close play at first base, and the postgame diagnosis confirmed the worst; a torn ACL that will sideline him for the rest of the season. The Nationals’ big winter acquisition, and one that cost them a significant chunk of the upper-levels of their farm system, Eaton was off to a strong start at the plate and had helped the team to a commanding early lead in the NL East.

Now, though, the team is roughly back to where they were at the beginning of last winter, with enough talent to see themselves as legitimate contenders, but with enough holes to not necessarily be seen as a favorite when October rolls around. As we noted before the season began, the Nationals have a depth problem, and so with Eaton on the shelf, the team will now turn to Michael Taylor and his career 69 wRC+ to hold down center field for at least the next few months. Taylor’s probably not a guy you want to be starting in October, and having him as the starting CF means he can’t fill in for Jayson Werth, who may remember that he’s 38 at any moment.

Given the team’s current options, it’s entirely possible that they could end up starting not only Taylor, but also Chris Heisey, in some important playoff games, and while the top of the line-up is pretty great, you don’t really want to be starting multiple guys of this ilk in October. And if any of the infielders get hurt, you’re tossing in a Stephen Drew here or a Wilmer Difo there, and a vaunted line-up can quickly start to look pretty thin.

So, the natural reaction to Eaton’s injury would be to make a trade to fill the gap. The team saw center field as a big enough weakness to surrender Lucas Gilioto, Reynaldo Lopez, and Dane Dunning six months ago, so they probably shouldn’t be willing to roll with the pre-Eaton status quo now. But making a deal is now more difficult than it was over the winter, and there’s a rational argument to be made that enough else has change to disincentivize the team from making another big all-in trade.

Let’s tackle that second point first. While it is certainly too early to be hatching any chickens, the Nationals strong start in April, combined with a pretty disastrous first month in New York, has significantly improved the team’s odds of making the postseason. While we saw the Nationals as the likely division winner on Opening Day, the Mets were a strong contender as well, and their presence left enough room for our forecasts to say that there was something like a 1-in-3 chance the Nationals wouldn’t win the NL East. As we stand here on May 1st, however, the 17-8 Nationals are already 6 1/2 games ahead of the 10-14 Mets, and the primary in-division challengers just saw their ace walk off the mound with an arm problem a few days after their best hitter was sent to the DL with a nagging hamstring issue.

So now, even without Eaton, the big early lead and the Mets health issues have combined to push the Nationals division odds up to 88%, so that 1-in-3 chance of not winning the division is now something like 1-in-9. The Nationals have a big enough cushion that they probably can run Taylor out there for the next five months and still win this thing, probably comfortably. So now, the question is more about how much you surrender to get a better player in the line-up in October.

Certainly, you want to put the best team on the field you can in order to give your team the best chance in the postseason, but the randomness of the playoffs can’t be understated. If you make another big trade for a center field upgrade, you’re hoping that the guy you acquire hits well for maybe 50 at-bats, and it can be a tough sell to give up a significant piece of the team’s future for the hope that you get a few good weeks out of a guy at the end of the year.

Which brings us to the difficulty of making a trade to begin with. Put simply, it doesn’t look like the market is teeming with potentially-available center fielders. Several rebuilding or potential sellers signed their center fielders to long-term extensions over the winter, taking Ender Inciarte, Odubel Herrera, and Kevin Kiermaier officially off the market. A few others who will likely be selling at the deadline have big weaknesses in CF too, as you’re not going to be hitting up teams like the White Sox for CF help.

Realistically, it looks like the best CF who is probably a good bet to get moved this summer is Lorenzo Cain. The Royals are off to a lousy 7-16 start, and with a bunch of guys heading into free agency this winter, they can’t afford to keep everyone together for the stretch run and hope a late-season revival makes up for their slow start. Cain wouldn’t replace Eaton at the plate, but he’s a better defender, and would put the the Nationals roughly back where they were in overall talent level before Eaton’s knee gave out.

But to land Cain, Mike Rizzo would have to outbid every other contender looking for a CF, and the Royals aren’t going to just give Cain away, given that he’s one of their best trade chips at the moment. And since the Eaton trade removed most of their high-level arms, you’re now looking at a small group of names that every other team is going to be asking for: Victor Robles, Juan Soto, and Erick Fedde, most likely. Eric ranked Robles as the #8 prospect in baseball before the season, so he should be off limits for a rental, but Soto and Fedde are both Top 100 material, and giving them up for a hoped-for October upgrade could also be a tough pill to swallow.

In the end, Rizzo and his staff will have to decide whether they want to push in as far as possible to try and win in the next two years, while they still have Bryce Harper around, or if they think they are better off trying to build a sustained winner even after Harper likely leaves. After all, it’s not like this a team clearly headed for a cliff where a win-at-all-costs posture is clearly correct. Trea Turner looks like a franchise player, Robles could be as well, and the team has long-term guarantees to Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer. Eaton is still around. They’ll still have Anthony Rendon in 2019. If the Nationals don’t give up a Robles or a Soto this summer, they could reasonably think that their window could extend past Harper’s time in Washington, especially if the money he might otherwise get is reallocated in free agency.

But that puts them right back where they’ve been the last few years; entering the postseason as a good-but-flawed team that probably would need some things to break their way to take down the Cubs or Dodgers in the playoffs. And after going out in the first round in three of the last five years, it’s only natural to want to avoid another early elimination because you gave the other team four easy outs a game by starting Michael Taylor in the postseason.

The May-September Nationals probably don’t need to replace Eaton. The rest of the team is good enough to likely hold on to their division lead, especially with the Mets in a somewhat chaotic state.

The October Nationals, however, could certainly use a guy like Cain, especially if he came along with a bullpen upgrade like Kelvin Herrera. But that’s not going to be a low-cost acquisition, and it’s not an easy call to give up big parts of the remaining farm system for the hope that these guys are significant upgrades in just a handful of games in the postseason. If you give up a Robles or a Soto to land another 2017 upgrade, in addition to what you already gave up to get Eaton, you’re probably setting yourself up for a rebuild after 2018, especially with Philadelphia and Atlanta poised to be contenders at that time.

Maybe it’s best to not worry about the future while you have a generational talent like Harper, and just try to push in on the next two years, accepting that there will be some losing seasons down the line. If you go out in the first round because Lorenzo Cain didn’t hit in October, well, at least you tried. But while a noble feeling, surrendering big parts of a team’s future for a bet on October performance alone remains a risky bet, and could set up the organization to have some long-term pain without any real guarantee of short-term benefit.

With the Eaton trade, the Nationals tried to thread the needle of contending both now and in the future. They gave up a lot to get him, but landed a young player with long-term control who could make them better without feeling like they sacrificed the future. Unless Kevin Pillar’s April power surge is for real, there doesn’t appear to be another Eaton-type out there, so this time, the Nationals will have to make a more clear choice. Do they push in on their Harper window, potentially sacrificing what’s left of the long-term future of the organization in the process, or try to make another playoff run with a good-not-great roster?

It’s not an obvious call. I think either decision could be defended, and since they have a big early lead, the organization can take a few months to see what Taylor can do, and whether he can convince them to not make a big trade for a CF in July. But if he’s just the Michael Taylor we’ve seen the last few years, it’s going to be tough for the team to feel comfortable with their outfield headed into the postseason, and if the Royals sweeten the pot with a guy like Herrera, it might be too tempting to avoid giving the team their best chance to win while Harper is still launching home runs in the nation’s capitol.

It seems Stephen Strasburg is underappreciated.

Maybe it’s because of the hype and expectations that surrounded his draft position and prospect pedigree. It doesn’t help that he’s only been able to reach 200 innings once in his career. His durability and total volume of innings are real issues. But when he’s on the mound he has some of the best stuff in the game, and I’m not sure his reputation matches his actual value. Since his return from Tommy John surgery, he has produced the 12th-most WAR amongst all pitchers (20.1).

As I wrote in our positional power rankings, Strasburg’s teammate Max Scherzer is a pretty good comp for Strasburg — on a per-inning basis, at least. Scherzer posted a 31.5% strikeout rate, 6.2% walk rate, and 33.0% ground-ball rate last season. Strasburg finished with marks of 30.6%, 7.4%, and 39.5%, respectively. They’re each 6-foot-4 right-handers. But while they’re carbon copies in terms of size, handedness, rate stats, and stuff, the principle difference is that Strasburg has failed to reach 150 innings in the last two seasons.

But there’s something else, too: it perpetually seems as though Strasburg fails to get all that he can out of his mid-90s fastball, fall-of-a-cliff curveball, and fading changeup. For three straight seasons, and also over the entirety of his career, Strasburg’s ERA has underperformed his FIP. Scherzer, meanwhile, has outpitched his FIP (if just slightly) as a National. Of course, there are a number of factors out of Strasburg’s control with regard to runs that appear on the scoreboard and within his pitching line, but it speaks perhaps to not maximizing his full run-preventing potential. Strasburg’s 3.60 ERA last season was quite a bit removed from his 2.92 FIP.

To his credit, Strasburg was always been in search of ways to improve. Back in 2014, he added a slider, though he decided to discard it after last season, believing it might have played a role in time missed due to a flexor mass strain last season. (Hitters also produced a .302 average and .500 slugging mark against the pitch.)

The big change this year for Strasburg is his decision to scrap his windup. It’s a move often made by relief pitchers, but less commonly adopted by starting pitchers. And for what it’s worth, Strasburg has been better with no runners on base — allowing a career opponent slash line of .211/.266/.333 — as opposed to when runners are on base (.244/.304/.383).

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You could be forgiven, heading into last season, for thinking that Daniel Murphy would fail to carry over the magic of his 2015 playoff performance into the 2016 campaign. Many teams seem to have had similar suspicions: a free agent, Murphy received just $37.5 million over three years to sign with Washington. The Nationals were immediately rewarded: Murphy recorded nearly six wins for the club, basically providing a full return on Washington’s investment in just the first year of the contract.

Despite the wild success of Murphy’s 2016 campaign, it’s possible you had your doubts going into the current season, as well. Murphy was entering his age-32 season. His success last season was built in part on a very high BABIP. He doesn’t walk a ton. The projections were pegging him for just short of three wins this year. There was plenty of reason to expect some regression.

Early in the 2017 season, however, Daniel Murphy’s play is dispelling whatever doubts remained about the legitimacy of last year’s breakout.

After just eight games, Murphy already has 17 hits, seven for extra bases. He’s gotten at least one hit in every game, gotten at least two hits in six of eight games — including a three-hit game and last night’s four-hit game. With two doubles and a homer yesterday, Murphy is hitting .472/.486/.778 with a wRC+ of 230. It’s easy to say that it’s only eight games, but if Murphy gets another 550 plate appearances on the season and hits “only” his projected 118 wRC+ over the course of it, he’ll still record a 125 wRC+ overall. Over his last 200 games dating back to August 1, 2015, Murphy has a 153 wRC+ and that doesn’t even include another 86 postseason plate appearances where that number was close to 200. Murphy has been a really good hitter for quite some time, and it doesn’t look like he’s slowing down.

If you recall, Murphy did this exact same thing at the beginning of last season, hitting .480/.581/.880 with a 277 wRC+ after eight games. There were still skeptics at that point, and there were still skeptics a month later when Dave Cameron asked everyone to buy into Daniel Murphy. Over the winter, Jeff Sullivan looked at Murphy’s unique skillset, which includes a whole lot of power and a whole lot of contact. Sullivan noted that, in recent history, only Victor Martinez and Nomar Garciaparra have had seasons like Murphy’s 2016. Going further back into the past we find Hall of Famers like George Brett and Tris Speaker.

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