The Nationals Are Messing up the Symmetry Doctrine

The Nationals aren’t the biggest story of the 2026 season – not yet, anyway. Their record sits at 43-43, which leaves them 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. That’s a pleasant surprise for a team we projected to finish 26 games below .500, but it has not changed the opinion of the Playoff Odds. Our odds project the Nationals to run the second-worst record in the National League the rest of the way, and give them just a 4% chance of snagging that spot. Until yesterday’s loss to the Red Sox, the computers had begrudgingly had to bump Washington’s probability of winning the World Series from 0.0% on Opening Day all the way up to 0.1%. After the loss, the Nats are back down to double zeroes. Regardless of how much regression comes their way in the second half, the Nationals have been one of the most interesting teams in baseball so far.

You’ve almost certainly heard someone say in the last several weeks that the Nationals have the best offense in baseball and the worst pitching. In fact, our dear friend Leo Morgenstern wrote an article for MLB Trade Rumors titled “A Closer Look At The Best Offense In Baseball.” That was six weeks ago now, and although the Nationals have cooled off some, you can still make the argument that they have the best offense. At the time, Leo pointed out that the Nationals were averaging 5.46 runs per game, the highest mark in baseball this year, and ahead of the franchise record of 5.39 set by the 2019 World Series champions. Since that article came out, the Nationals are tied for the sixth-most runs in baseball, dropping their season mark to 5.26 per game. They still had the best mark in baseball until yesterday, when the Dodgers hung nine runs on the A’s. Both teams have now scored 452 runs, but the Dodgers have played 85 games to the Nationals’ 86, bumping them up to 5.32 runs per game. I wrote this article before yesterday’s games, when the Nationals were still first, so please don’t yell at me too much for the anachronisms in the ensuing paragraphs.

We’ll get into the specifics later, but I don’t think anyone needs much convincing that the Nationals have one of the worst pitching staffs in the game. This talking point – best offense and worst defense – has been bouncing around my brain for a while now, and I only recently remembered why. A couple of years ago, I wrote about something that I called the Symmetry Doctrine: Teams with good pitching tend to have good hitting, and teams with bad pitching tend to have bad hitting.

This isn’t necessarily earth-shattering stuff. If you’re building a good club, you just care about making it better however you can. Likewise, if you’re putting together a bad team, you probably don’t care all that much about how they’re bad. Nobody tries to win (or lose) by focusing on only one facet of the game. However, we really do tend to think of teams as being good at one thing or the other. We think about the Murderer’s Row Yankees, the Hitless Wonder White Sox, the Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers, the Bash Brothers A’s, the Scherzlander Tigers, the recent “LOVE this trade for the Rays” perpetual pitching machine, and the pitching conveyor belts in Seattle and Milwaukee. It’s at least worth mentioning that these identities can obscure the fact that offense and defense tend to go to together pretty consistently.

I have data to prove the point. I pulled team offensive and defensive metrics from throughout the expansion era, and there are fairly strong correlations between the two. Even stats as basic as ERA- and wRC+ have a correlation that’s strong enough to see on a graph. Here’s every season since 1962 (excluding short seasons like 2020 and 1994). Good hitting tends to go with good pitching.

That’s a correlation coefficient of -.28. We can double it if we use more advanced metrics. Here’s a similar graph, but instead of using wRC+, we use position player WAR to actually assess the overall talent of the position players. And instead of ERA, we’re going to use xFIP to try to get a handle on the actual skill level of the pitchers. This also requires us to limit our sample to 2002-2026, as 2002 is the first year we have xFIP numbers (because that’s the first year we have fly ball rates). The correlation coefficient jumps all the way up to -0.49. This time we can say it louder. Team performance is usually symmetrical.

Obviously, we’ll always have outliers, and roster construction doesn’t always work in tandem. Plenty of teams try to win by building a championship-level pitching staff first and then getting enough bats to compete, or vice versa, by loading up on mashers, then signing an ace or two and a closer when they think they’re finally ready, like the Nationals did in the mid-2010s. So how are the 2026 Nationals doing this, and how lopsided are they really? Let’s start with the first question. Part of the answer is that it’s a bit of an accident. Washington’s abysmal pitching isn’t exactly a surprise, but its offensive turnaround is a genuine shock. The Nationals ran a wRC+ of 93 last year, eighth worst in baseball. It’s been five years since they put up a mark of 100 or better. They were not supposed to be here, and at this point, I should mention that Leo admitted halfway through his article that the title was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t earned their spot.

A month ago, Spencer Nusbaum of The Athletic wrote a deeply reported story about how so many Washington hitters have turned things around, and it is equal parts inspiring and depressing. It’s inspiring because new president of baseball operations Paul Toboni and his team have quickly found ways to help these players find better versions of themselves. It’s depressing because the efforts that Nusbaum detailed were such low-hanging fruit – weighted-bat training, focusing on bat speed, pulling the ball in the air – stuff we’ve been writing about in these pages for years and years. It makes you realize that Washington’s previous player development program was even further behind than we thought. No wonder the offense turned around so quickly.

I’m sure the Toboni regime is implementing similar changes on the pitching side, but whether it’s because the team had already jettisoned most of its best arms, because the underlying talent level is lower, or because pitching is just more complicated than hitting, the results haven’t followed suit. The Nationals are now bucking my precious Symmetry Doctrine, so let’s get to the second question: How lopsided are they really? Before we dive in, let’s acknowledge that it’s not always easy to decide what constitutes the best offense or worst defense in baseball. If we’re being strict, I think you could argue that the Nationals don’t possess either. There are way too many ways to quantify these things.

Does the best offense mean the team that hits the best, or has the best combined hitting and baserunning, or the best position players (including both offense and defense), or does it simply mean the team that scores the most runs? All would be reasonable interpretations, but the Nationals only qualify on the last count. (Or they did until yesterday. Damn it, Dodgers). However, if you look past run totals, the Dodgers are clearly superior. According to our metrics, they lead baseball with a 119 wRC+ and a combined 72 offensive runs. Not only is that the highest mark in baseball, it’s 28.9 runs ahead of the Pirates in second place. That’s a gargantuan lead; only three other teams have even accrued 28 runs! The Nationals rank fifth with 25.1 runs and tied for sixth with a 105 wRC+. They’re definitely great, but their gaudy run total has been helped by one of the highest clutch scores in baseball, and that’s more about random variance than underlying skill.

I think you can make a decent argument that Washington does have the worst pitching in baseball. The table below shows where the Nats rank in several major pitching metrics. For fun, I’ve done some color coding. If they rank anywhere from 25th to 29th in a category, I’ve marked those cells as blue, because they’re ice cold. Where they’re better than 25th, the cells are red, because they’re basically on fire. And I’ve marked cells where they’re dead-last in black.

So, uh, that’s a lot of blue and black. Nobody gets hit harder than the Nationals. Nobody misses fewer bats. About the only thing they’ve got going for them is that they’re running an average walk rate. Not a good walk rate, just an average one. Most importantly, both the WAR and RA9 WAR cells are black. According to our flagship metrics, the Nationals staff has put up the least value in baseball, and it’s not close. As a whole, Nationals pitchers have a WAR of 0.6. Not only is that the worst mark in baseball, but they’re the only team below 2.4. They’re not just in the cellar, they’re in some sort of 1950s sub-cellar bomb shelter full of Fiestaware and asbestos. Only the Rockies have allowed more runs, and the Rockies play half their games in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon gravity.

So that’s where the Nationals actually lead and trail the entire league. They’re first in runs scored (or they were yesterday), and they’re last in pitcher WAR by a whole lot. Let’s go to the graphs! The graph below shows each team’s pitcher WAR, prorated to a 162-game season, along with their runs per game, normalized to that year’s league average.

The correlation here isn’t quite as strong, likely because runs scored isn’t as accurate a measure of offensive skill. It’s not park adjusted, and it can rely on sequencing luck. The correlation coefficient is .32, and if we go all the way back to 1961, it drops to .23. All the same, let me show you where the Nationals appear on that graph of the entire expansion era.

They’re the red dot on the bottom right, and they are the second-most extreme team on this entire graph. The Nationals’ pitching staff ranks fourth from the bottom in WAR, while their offense ranks 30th in runs. Who’s more extreme? The Dodgers, of course. Not this year’s Dodgers, though. This year’s Dodgers are way off near the top right corner in light blue. They’re really, really good. The Nationals find themselves in the company of the 2003 Dodgers, all the way on the top left, who were almost their complete opposite. Those 2003 Dodgers rank eighth from the top in pitching thanks to big years from Kevin Brown, Hideo Nomo, and peak Eric Gagne. Their offense ranks fourth from the bottom in runs, which will happen when you somehow give more than a thousand combined plate appearances to Alex Cora (66 wRC+) and César Izturis (56). Of the six players who led those Dodgers in plate appearances, only one, Shawn Green, put up a wRC+ above 92.

Now just to be clear, I designed this graph specifically to highlight the ways that the Nationals stand out the most this season. They are extreme, but I had to cherrypick these exact stats to make them one of the most asymmetrical teams we’ve ever seen. If we were to plop them onto the earlier graphs, the one that plotted wRC+ against ERA- and the one that plotted position player WAR against xFIP, they’d be out near the corner, but they wouldn’t have it all to themselves like they do on this graph. So the Nationals are definitely one of the more asymmetrical teams we’ve seen in the expansion era, but they’re not in danger of breaking any records. (That was not the case in the second week of April, when Matt Martell wrote that the Nats had the worst pitching staff since 1974 — as far back as our data would go — through a team’s first 12 games.)

Moreover, there’s no guarantee that they’ll keep going this way. In fact, I’m pretty sure they won’t end up this asymmetrical. Both selling at the deadline and going for it at the deadline are at least conceivable for the Nationals this season, and either path would make them more balanced. If they should continue bucking the projections and end up with a fighting chance at a Wild Card spot, maybe they’ll decide to add. They will obviously be focused on improving their pitching. And the good news when you have a staff this bad is that any upgrade at all is going to be a huge upgrade. Honestly, the Nationals are so bad on the mound that it would be hard to find many pitchers who would make them worse.

On the other hand, this is the first year of the Paul Toboni era, and he’s got a lot of work ahead of him to put this franchise in a better place. Toboni came to Washington because of his experience in player development, and it’s hard to imagine that he’d deplete an already-iffy farm system this early in the game. He’s here to build this team back into a consistent competitor, and that usually involves some short-term pain. And if he’s not going for it this season, then he may well decide to sell, and if he’s selling, pretty much the only thing he has to sell is offense. And even if the Nationals neither buy nor sell at the deadline, they’ll still probably balance out at least a little bit due to simple regression to the mean. Enjoy the asymmetry while you can.