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The Nationals have created quite a mess — or, at the very least, exhibited a failure to communicate.

As you’re probably aware, Stephen Strasburg was originally not scheduled to pitch Game 4 of the NLDS. Following the postponement of Tuesday’s game to Wednesday, however, circumstances appeared to change for the Nationals. Facing elimination, they could throw Strasburg — who’s been pitching as well as anyone on the planet — on his normal rest.

Strasburg appeared at the ballpark and played catch on Tuesday. He wasn’t 100%, though. He was feeling “under the weather,” according to manager Dusty Baker. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell reported on the situation:

The Nats, knowing that Game 4 might be rained out, asked Strasburg whether he could pitch Wednesday.

“I’ll give you what I’ve got,” Strasburg said, according to General Manager Mike Rizzo, who was in the meeting.

Those are the words you want to hear, in one sense, because it means your $175 million star will suck it up and perform. On the other hand, they’re exactly the words you don’t want to hear because Strasburg has, in recent years, shown such a high tolerance for pain that he has touched [sic] it out until he ended up on the disabled list. So, “I’ll give you what I’ve got” means the guy is sick as a dog.

Perhaps unconvinced that they’d get the best version of Strasburg on Wednesday, the Nationals’ decided to save him for a potential Game 5 on Thursday and let Tanner Roark take Game 4.

Still, other Washington Post columnist Barry Svrluga articulated thoughts that many seemed to share inside and outside the Beltway on Wednesday morning.

If Strasburg is truly sick and if he actually wanted to pitch, let’s make sure the public gets some details about this illness. What was his temperature? What are his symptoms? How are the Nationals treating him? He threw a bullpen session Monday, was in the dugout for Game 3 that night, returned to the ballpark Tuesday. It’s nothing for a pitcher — never mind a pitcher who wouldn’t pitch Monday or Tuesday — to remain back at the hotel to recuperate. Why wasn’t Strasburg, so ill he can’t pitch, recuperating?

That leads to another possibility: Strasburg had been preparing all along to take the ball in a Game 5 on Thursday. When the weather altered the schedule for all of baseball, Strasburg declined to alter his own schedule. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that Strasburg refused to pitch Wednesday. The Nationals deny that report.

Baker even mentioned something about mold affecting players in Chicago:

And then this breaking news from Jon Morosi appeared late Wednesday morning:

Quite a turn of events! This author even had to re-write the current post.

And a number of questions remain unanswered. Like, is Strasburg feeling better? And: are the Nationals and Strasburg wilting before public opinion?

Whatever’s going on, the Nationals could have communicated this much more clearly and offered much more transparency — unless, in fact, there’s actually something to hide. Baker couldn’t even get the day right when Strasburg threw his bullpen, which was cut short. (It was Monday, not Tuesday.)

Svrluga shared some insights offered by two former major-league players on Tuesday evening. Said Mark Teixeira via ESPN: “Unless this guy is in the hospital and getting fluids and can’t even go to the ballpark, he’s gotta be on the mound.” Said David Ross during the ESPN tonight telecast: “If I’m his teammate… I can’t look him in the eye.”

Strasburg has developed a reputation, fairly or unfairly, as something like a high-maintenance, high-performance automobile.

There was, of course, the infamous innings limit of 2012, when the Nationals publicly revealed they had set a hard cap on Strasburg’s playing time for the season following Tommy John surgery late in 2010. They didn’t permit him to pitch in the postseason. While the intent was to protect Strasburg, we really have no idea if pitch and innings limits are doing much good with regard to injury prevention. Moreover, by refusing to play Strasburg, the Nationals failed to give themselves their best chance of succeeding in the playoffs. (And perhaps there was a way not to cross that innings mark and have Strasburg available later in the season.)

Strasburg has made a number of trips to the disabled list. His competitive zeal has been questioned. He’s also perhaps misunderstood as one of the game’s less outspoken of players.

Wrote Svrluga on Wednesday morning:

“So whatever Strasburg says now, his rep is in flames… Mike Rizzo, the Nationals’ general manager, has said out loud that it’s the time of year for heroes.

‘Be John Wayne,’ Rizzo said Sunday at Wrigley, in between Games 2 and 3.”

The American public likes to see their stars perform even if ill, and perform well even if dealing with illness. It can lend a legendary quality to already talented performers. Michael Jordan’s excellence in the NBA Finals with the flu, Willis Reed’s dramatic return to the court after suffering a torn muscle, Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run with zero healthy legs: these are career-defining moments.

If he’s healthy, if Strasburg is feeling much better, that’s one thing. But if he’s not, if he’s ill, if this is about trying to prove bravery and and play hero ball… is that a good idea?

Should the Nats really want him pitching Wednesday afternoon? (And if Strasburg isn’t sick — why would he have wanted to take a PR hit like this?)

Because this piece has required a quick turnaround, I haven’t had time to perform an exhaustive study of pitchers working through illness in 2017.

Thankfully, Ben Lindbergh did such a study back in 2012 for Baseball Prospectus. Lindbergh found 10 starts made by nine pitchers — Matt Harrison, Vance Worley, Chris Tillman, Jeremy Hellickson, Derek Holland, (twice and left to toil for 14.1 innings), Josh Beckett, Anthony Swarzak, Jon Niese and Clayton Kershaw — who were known, publicly, to have performed despite illness.

Of those 10 starts, seven produced box-score lines worse than their individual seasonal performance — and only two met the criteria for a “quality start”

They combined for a 5.84 ERA over 42.1 innings, allowing 68 hits and 18 walks against 50 strikeouts. While we should perhaps revisit this with a more exhaustive study, it would make sense that pitchers don’t perform as well when feeling sick (or on short rest). Think about trying to complete a work day, or to parent effectively, or just get up to go the refrigerator when feeling ill.

Assuming Strasburg really is sick — and is ill in such a way that it impacts his ability to perform — he should be saved for Game 5. It’s a smart, tactical retreat. After all, the Nationals still have to win two consecutive games. Their best bet to win one of those two is to have an ace-level pitcher at, or nearer to, 100%.

If he’s feeling better, if he’s prepared, he ought to pitch. He should be adaptable enough to change routines if relatively healthy to help a team facing elimination. But if he’s sick? The precedent isn’t great.

Consider the start by Matt Harrison (flu-like symptoms) included in Lindbergh’s research. He allowed five runs, four earned in 4.2 innings. Said then-Rangers manager Ron Washington:

“He’s under the weather a little bit, but he still went out there and left it all on the mound. He gave us everything he had. He took the ball and battled.”

Said Worley (four runs, 3.2 innings) of the appearance he made while dealing with a stomach ailment:

“I felt like I was going to see Earl* a few times today. You know, I just couldn’t get it out. And then I went out there, and it seemed like every time I tried to let loose today, it didn’t go where I wanted. And neither did my stomach. Everything arm-wise felt fine. I came out with good action. It just wasn’t going where I wanted because I couldn’t control my stomach.”

Said Tillman (five runs allowed in five innings):

“I was kind of out there fighting stuff on the mound, just trying to get through.”

Strasburg is a more talented pitcher than those cited above, but Kershaw couldn’t get through the fourth inning on April 5, 2012, and his fastball velocity sat at 89.3 mph, well below his seasonal average. On Wednesday evening, is Strasburg going to talk to reporters about hoping to have performed better but not having been at 100%?

Discretion is the better part of valor. Bravery can be misguided.

In July, the Yankees sent a significant package of talent to the Oakland A’s in order to acquire Sonny Gray, hoping to improve their rotation for both the stretch run and the postseason. But now that they’re in the postseason, and their season is on the line, Joe Girardi has chosen to hand the ball to CC Sabathia instead.

On the surface, this looks like another example of one of Girardi’s primary weaknesses; overreacting to recent performances. We saw him do this with Luis Severino, bumping him to Game 4 of the ALDS after he was bombed in the Wild Card game, despite Severino being pretty clearly the Yankees best starter right now. And while Gray has a clear edge over Sabathia in track record, he didn’t finish the season very well, allowing a season-worst .330 wOBA in September, and he wasn’t good in his first outing in this series either.

Despite his struggles of late, though, Gray is pretty clearly a better pitcher than Sabathia at this point. I’d generally suggest that a team is better off relying on projections than on what-have-you-done-for-me-lately reactions, and so from a process standpoint, I don’t think picking Sabathia over Gray is a great choice.

But Girardi’s recency bias aside, there’s actually a pretty good case to be made for starting Sabathia tonight.

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The last time I saw Dan Haren in the clubhouse, I wanted to hug him. He was a part of a young Cubs team that was about to enter the postseason ahead of schedule. He was also about to retire, though, and I didn’t peg him for one who’d work in the game after he was done. I didn’t know when I’d see him next, and he’d been a go-to source for many of my pieces. This happens more often than we might imagine, this bit of deflation right in the middle of so much elation. For many players, their last appearance in a major-league game also represents their last day in baseball.

The effort to be here now, to be fully present in the moment, is an ongoing one — and a difficult one when it comes to baseball. For example: as much as I’m in love with the present version of Bartolo Colon, I sometimes remember fondly the days when he threw gas — and threw something other than a fastball. I’ve had the opposite experience with Rafael Devers recently: as impressed as I am by his abilities right now, I can’t help but think of his future whenever I watch him.

Contemplating CC Sabathia in this context yields a slightly different experience. The left-hander debuted as a 20-year-old and began producing above-average numbers right away. Over the course of his age-35 and -36 seasons, meanwhile, he’s recorded nearly seven wins. In terms of his capacity to prevent runs, the Sabathia of 2017 isn’t much different than the Sabathia of 2001. As such, Sabathia offers a unique means by which to experience nostalgia for yesterday, the immediacy of today, and the hope for tomorrow all at once.

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The Yankees gave us a glimpse of the future on Monday night, demonstrating how a game of ever-increasing extremes is only likely to continue trending in that direction.

No, this isn’t about bullpenning, a strategy that the club almost accidentally employed in the Wild Card game against Minnesota and that they ought to use again in Game 5 tonight. Rather, this is about fastball velocity.

The Yankees’ average fastball in Game 4 against Cleveland traveled at 98 mph. Ninety-eight! New York pitchers failed to throw a single fastball under 96 mph.

That’s kind of terrifying.

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I have to admit to a bias. I’ve been aware of Tanner Roark since he entered the major leagues a few years ago, but my evaluation failed to evolve. In my head, Roark was still the guy he was when he made his first impression, as a strike-throwing and hittable sort who seemed to pitch with the intent of beating his peripherals. It is my job to try to know as much as I can, and I concede that this is my own failing, but in my partial defense, Roark hasn’t been close to the most interesting member of the Nationals’ pitching staff. Why would I choose to concentrate on Roark, when I could focus instead on Max Scherzer or Stephen Strasburg?

I have to admit to another bias. I find it tempting to believe that the larger population perceives things in the same way that I do. I haven’t kept up with Roark; therefore, I bet no one has kept up with Roark. Sometimes this gut feeling is correct. Sometimes, I’m just out of the loop. In any case, I’m about to put you all to the test. This isn’t going to be about me anymore.

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Yesterday, the Nationals lost Game 3 of their division series to the Cubs 2-1, and now trail by the same margin in the series. Despite a brilliant outing from Max Scherzer, the Cubs managed to plate a couple of runs against the team’s bullpen, putting the team on the brink of elimination in the first round once again. And because the Cubs got their runs with Sammy Solis and Oliver Perez on the mound, with Max Scherzer, Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle all watching, Dusty Baker has come under fire for his bullpen management once again.

But on this one, I have to say that the criticism feels a bit unfair. If we look at the circumstances and what actually happened, it seems like Baker mostly made reasonable decisions.

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This past Sunday’s Notes column led with Alex Bregman talking about how hitting the ball in the air became a priority once he’d signed with the Astros. That approach paid off in spades yesterday. With his team down a run, the 2015 draft pick took a Chris Sale pitch over Fenway Park’s Green Monster to tie the game in the eighth inning. Houston went on to win 5-4 and advance to the ALCS.

When I approached Bregman after the game, his first words were, “How was the launch angle on that?” (I hadn’t looked it up yet, but it was 32 degrees.) Asked if he liked whatever the launch angle was, he smiled and said that he loved it.

Needless to say, the youngster was in seventh heaven.

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In Monday’s pivotal Game 3, the Cubs beat the Nationals because Anthony Rizzo hit a stupid little doink. The inning before, the game was tied up when Albert Almora came off the bench to rip an RBI single. Almora hit for Kyle Schwarber, who had opened the door for the Nationals in the top of the sixth when two errors on the same play gave Daniel Murphy three bases. Almora hit for Schwarber because Dusty Baker relieved Max Scherzer with Sammy Solis for some reason. Scherzer was relieved immediately after allowing his first hit of his entire game, which was 19 outs old.

For a game that had only seven hits and three runs, there’s an awful lot there for people to talk about. The Cubs now find themselves in a commanding position, after coming uncomfortably close to getting shut out. There’s resiliency to discuss. Baseball luck. Managerial second-guessing. There’s almost everything you could possibly want. I’d like to discuss a called ball in the top of the fifth inning that didn’t matter for beans.

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In the wild and remote southeast corner of Oregon, tucked near to the eastern side of the Owyhee River, there’s a canyon that used to be known as Dugout Gulch. It was renamed Leslie Gulch in remembrance of Hiram E. Leslie, an area rancher who, in 1882, was struck by lightning. It wouldn’t be fair to say that getting struck by lightning was a habit of Leslie’s. He was no more likely to get struck than any other rancher in the region. Yet get struck by lightning, Leslie did. Well past a century later, it’s how we recall him today.

Josh Reddick has spent a career being unclutch. Greatly unclutch, incredibly unclutch, almost unfathomably unclutch. Ben Lindbergh wrote about it at the end of June. We have a win-expectancy-based Clutch metric on our leaderboards, and, since Reddick debuted, no hitter has a lower Clutch score. We actually have this stuff going back to 1974, and, since then, on a per-600-plate-appearance basis, Reddick currently stands as the least-clutch hitter out of everyone. He just edges out Ron Kittle and Richard Hidalgo. If you think that this is somehow misleading, it’s not. When Reddick has batted with the leverage low, he’s posted a 121 wRC+. When he’s batted with medium leverage, he’s posted a 99 wRC+. When he’s batted with the leverage high, his wRC+ has been 70. The history is all right there, inarguable. Josh Reddick has not exactly risen to the occasion.

This always seems to lead to the same conversation, about how clutch performance isn’t predictive. That’s true — it’s not. Or at least, it’s not easy to spot when it is. Possibly, or even probably, Reddick isn’t an unclutch hitter. But Hiram E. Leslie probably wasn’t lightning-prone. At some point, you’re just defined by what’s happened. It’s not easy for Reddick to erase his own record.

Yet days like Monday can help. Monday, in Boston, Reddick drove in the go-ahead run in the top of the eighth. The Astros went ahead by one, and the Astros finished ahead by one, having eliminated the Red Sox in four games. A number of different players all helped the cause, but in the eighth, with baseball’s most unhittable pitcher on the mound with two outs, the least-clutch hitter in decades knocked an RBI single the other way. The Astros found themselves on the verge of advance.

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The Dodgers have had one of the weirdest seasons I’ve ever seen. Through August 25th, they were 91-36. And then, out of nowhere, they proceeded to lose 16 of 17, looking like one of the worst teams in baseball for almost three weeks. Their spot in the postseason was already secure, but their late-season collapse created an easy narrative that the Dodgers were headed for another playoff disappointment.

And when they drew the Diamondbacks — a club that had beaten them 11 of 19 times during the regular season, including six losses late in the year — in the first round, the narrative got even easier. The upstart team that wasn’t supposed to be here, the one that made the big left-field upgrade in July, would take down their division rival. The Dodgers might have been the better team in the first half of the year, but the Diamondbacks were ready to prove by way of their stronger finish that they were more equipped for October.

Well, so much for all that. Last night, the Dodgers completed a three-game sweep of the team that supposedly had their number. Once again, they look like the hottest team in baseball.

With these three victories, the Dodgers have now won nine of their last 10 — or 11 of their last 13, if that sounds more impressive to you. For the last two weeks, the Dodgers have again looked like the juggernaut that was in pursuit of the all-time win record at one point. And thanks to a few key changes, they look like a very scary NLCS or potential World Series opponent.

When the Dodgers acquired Yu Darvish at the deadline, there were some legitimate concerns about his season to that point. His strikeout rate was trending down, and in July, he posted his worst monthly totals of his career. After a dominant debut in Dodger blue and a decent follow-up, his next four starts were even worse than the end of his Rangers run.

Over the course of four starts from August 16th through September 8th, opposing batters hit .346/.414/.679 against Darvish. That’s a .450 wOBA allowed; Mike Trout’s career wOBA is .412, for reference. Darvish’s walks were up, his strikeouts were down, and his home-run rate was through the roof. He looked nothing like the second ace for which the Dodgers were hoping.

But as quickly as he turned into a batting-practice machine, Darvish has snapped out of his slump, and last night was the culmination of a four-start run that has basically been the exact opposite of the stretch that preceded it.

In his final three starts of the regular season, Darvish allowed just two runs in 19.1 innings pitched, running a nifty 21/1 K/BB ratio in the process. He didn’t allow a single home run in any of those three starts after allowing at least one in each of his five previous starts.

Darvish did finally give up another home run last night — to Daniel Descalso of all people — but he was otherwise completely dominant, striking out seven of 18 batters. Though his night ended with a scary hit-by-pitch, he pushed his K/BB ratio over his last four starts up to 28/1. Opposing batters have hit .132/.163/.181 against Darvish over that stretch.

This Darvish looks like the guy the Dodgers thought they were acquiring. And having another dominant starter like Darvish makes this the scariest rotation left.

One of the main reasons for their late-season losing streak was the inability to hold a lead, as nearly every pitcher tasked with getting the ball to Kenley Jansen failed. If you watched the Dodgers in September only, you’d think Dave Roberts would be forced again to use Kenley Jansen in the seventh inning throughout the playoffs, lacking trust in any of his middle relievers to bridge the gap after the starters were pulled.

This group, though, not only looks like they can be trusted; they actually look like a strength.

The big addition for October was Kenta Maeda’s move to the bullpen, since the team decided they’d be better off with him there than potentially just starting Game 4. And he couldn’t have looked better in the NLDS. In two outings, he faced six batters, retiring them on four strikeouts and two ground outs. A guy who averaged 91.5 mph with his fastball as a starter sat at 94 and topped out at 96 in his inning of relief, and his swing-and-miss slider rolled through the heart of the Diamondbacks order in his first outing.

This entire postseason, we’ve seen what good starters can do in shorter relief outings, and adding Maeda as a hard-throwing strikeout guy gives the team a quality bullpen option it didn’t have in the regular season. And paired with Brandon Morrow’s 100 mph fastball and an apparently fixed Tony Cingrani, the Dodgers now have three reliable middle relievers to get the ball to Jansen.

For all the talk of the dominance of the Yankee relievers this week, it’s actually LA’s relievers who’ve posted the lowest OPS allowed of any relief corps in the postseason so far, having held the Diamondbacks to just a .507 OPS in their 11.2 innings of work.

Pedro Baez might be on the roster, but the NLDS made it clear how Roberts is going to manage his bullpen when he has a lead. And with Morrow, Cingrani, Maeda, and Jansen, the Dodgers look like they have enough bullpen arms to keep it from being just the Kershaw and Jansen show again.

The Dodgers won their division series last year, too, but to do it, they required 101 pitches from Clayton Kershaw in Game 1, 110 pitches on three days’ rest in Game 4, and then a memorable bullpen appearance in Game 5. Jansen’s totals are almost as absurd; he went 27 pitches in Game 1, 16 in Game 3, 13 in Game 4, and then 51 more pitches in Game 5, on his third consecutive day of work.

By the time the NLCS started, the Dodgers were running on fumes. They just couldn’t match a deeper Cubs team that had finished off the Giants in four games and got to rest before the showdown for the pennant. While no one can say definitively why Kershaw got lit up in the series clinching defeat in Game 6, it was unreasonable to expect Kershaw and Jansen to carry the team by themselves indefinitely. And if Kershaw just ran out of gas after handling a ridiculous workload, who could blame him?

That won’t be an issue this year. The first-round sweep means the Dodgers will get four days off before they play again, and Kershaw will have gone eight days between his Game 1 starts in the NLDS and NLCS. Jansen did pitch in all three games against Arizona, but he threw just 16, 18, and 16 pitches in those outings, and now he’ll get a nice break before being asked to take the mound again.

Alex Wood, Ross Stripling, and Pedro Baez didn’t even appear in the LDS, while Josh Fields faced two batters and threw all of eight pitches, so if the Dodgers run into a scenario where they have an early deficit in an NLCS game and just need to eat some innings while saving their best arms, they’ll have plenty of well-rested pitchers from which to choose.

For once, fatigue shouldn’t be an issue for the Dodgers in the NLCS. If either the Cubs or Nationals are going to get through them to advance to the World Series, they’re going to have to beat a fresh, rested group that is again firing on all cylinders.

As this weird season has shown, things can turn in a moment’s notice, and we should never assume that what just happened will continue going forward. But the idea that a big September slump showed that LA was going to be an easy elimination once the playoffs began? The Dodgers just put that idea in the ground, and once again, they look like the team to beat in the National League.