The Nationals Already Have Another Playoff Letdown

The Nationals are far from the only team to have experienced recent playoff disappointment. Some teams don’t even make the playoffs at all! So you can’t really say the Nationals are necessarily unique. Teams run up against obstacles. A lot of those teams can’t get past. That being said, over the past number of seasons, few teams have looked better than the Nationals, and few teams have wound up more disappointing. A Nationals fan might get the sense that a championship will simply never be in the cards, and that familiar feeling is coming back with gusto, with Wilson Ramos having been diagnosed with a torn ACL.

The truest pain here belongs to Ramos. Most immediately, he is the one literally hurting. But he’s also the one who can’t play anymore, and he’s the one who was looking ahead to free agency after having a big bounceback season. Ramos’ short-term future has been blown up in the blink of an eye, and he might wonder whether he’ll even be able to catch anymore down the line. This is somebody’s life, somebody’s career. That is, and is always, the most important thing.

Secondarily, but of fan interest, is the effect on the team. And that’s the only thing we’re really equipped to write about. So, acknowledging that the real story is Ramos himself, I’d like to set that aside for a moment and talk about the postseason. The Nationals find themselves in trouble at the worst possible time.

The postseason concludes with a World Series, and the World Series is a series, after which one team gets to celebrate. It’s the celebration every fan of every team yearns for, but if you allow yourself to overthink it, you do get to wonder what’s being celebrated. In theory, the winner is the best team. In practice, that can be argued.

Perhaps it’s the best team at the time. What about the preceding six and a half months? The postseason devalues the regular season, and as we all understand, the baseball itself is different between the two tournaments. The postseason is built upon small-sample series. It rewards the team that gets suddenly hottest. And the rosters are just different, with the usage patterns being different. Depth is less of a necessity in the playoffs. And there’s the matter of health. Leaving aside everything else, the playoffs might select for the hottest team, and they might select for the healthiest team.

The Nationals are going to make the playoffs. In the first round, they’re going to face the Dodgers. The Dodgers are good — every team in the playoffs is good. The Nationals, now, won’t have Wilson Ramos, who’s been one of their best players. They’re unlikely to have Stephen Strasburg, who’s been one of their best pitchers. They haven’t been able to play Daniel Murphy in a while, and he’s been one of their best players. Bryce Harper right now seems like one giant Band-Aid, and he’s been one of their best players. There’s still plenty of talent left, of course, but there’s no replacing a star player.

It’s almost an amusing contrast. The Dodgers might’ve been the most banged-up team in baseball all summer. And they will be without some of their players. But, critically, Clayton Kershaw recently became playably healthy. The same could be said of Rich Hill. Now the Dodgers will get to go into the postseason with two of the most effective starters in the game, and they’re going to combine for the easy majority of starts. The Dodgers got their critical health at the right time. The Nationals are experiencing critical injuries at the wrong time.

Very obviously, it should be said the Nationals don’t have a monopoly on inconvenient injuries. Any Mets fan would tell you they’ve had it worse, and they might even be right. That pitching staff is in tatters. So is Cleveland’s — Carlos Carrasco is out, and Danny Salazar is seemingly out, and now even Corey Kluber is having an MRI on his lower body. To say nothing of Michael Brantley, a team MVP who was barely ever able to play. Other teams have injuries of their own, albeit not quite of the same collective magnitude. There are playoff and potential-playoff teams who’ve been suffering.

The Nationals are getting my attention here because Ramos’ injury just happened. It is a massive blow to the roster, with the playoffs beginning in a week. Every team knows every offseason that it needs to assemble sufficient depth. Some teams do end up deeper than others, and that’s a credit to how the rosters are built. But I don’t think you can shrug off an injury like this. A team can’t really prepare for losing a Wilson Ramos, not realistically. You just can’t convince many starting-caliber players to hang out on the bench just in case. Depth is handy, even necessary, but reserves aren’t stars.

None of this is anything new. At least, not the generalities. All that’s new are the specific names of the injured, but players have been getting injured forever. The playoffs have always proceeded anyway, and a championship has never once felt less satisfying because an opponent was missing some player or two. Every team has to overcome some kind of adversity, and I don’t think the average fan wants to overthink a title. It just is; it’s the whole goal. You don’t stare a gift trophy in the mouth.

It’s just, every so often, it is worth wondering about the significance of October. No one wants it to go away. The drama is unmatched. I’ve just become decreasingly clear on the meaning. The rosters are different. The baseball is different. The sample sizes are different. And some teams are healthier than others, even if they weren’t for the months leading up. Looking ahead, the Nationals are going to be somewhat penalized in the playoffs for having lost Wilson Ramos in the season’s last week. From the perspective that the World Series doesn’t crown the best team in baseball, it doesn’t matter. Even though I can’t help but love it, I’m just having trouble identifying what the World Series does.