On April 27th, the Washington Nationals were not in a good place.
They had just dropped a series opener to the Atlanta Braves 8-4 to extend their losing streak to six games, which included a sweep at the hands of the hapless Miami Marlins. The infield defense was a disaster. The starting rotation that was almost unanimously named the best in baseball before the season wasn’t performing. The team was 7-13, a game worse than even the putrid Phillies.
Then, it all changed. And it started with, of all people, Dan Uggla.
Uggla crushed a go-ahead three-run home run in the top of the ninth inning that propelled the Nationals to a 13-12 win in a game in which they trailed 10-2 at one point. It was the kind of comeback that could change a season.
And by God, it has.
The Nationals have gone 15-4 since that game. Max Scherzer is a world-beater. Bryce Harper is the National League’s best hitter. Washington, like many expected in the preseason, is legitimately terrifying. And they can only get better.
The Nationals weren’t the only team that struggled out of the gate despite getting the postseason attention of the vast majority of the baseball community, but they’ve been the first to recover. The Indians, Mariners and Marlins are all still below .500 after drawing division title and even World Series attention before the season, and the Padres have recently hit a major skid and dipped below .500 as well.
What’s interesting about the Nationals is the fact that the part of their roster that has taken the longest to live up to promise has been the part that was essentially guaranteed to be successful before the year even began.
The offense has four everyday players hitting over .300, leading to the highest-scoring lineup in the NL. That offense has caught its spark from Bryce Harper, who may be the best hitter in all of baseball this season. Pick an offensive category, and he leads the National League in it. Home runs, runs batted in, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, runs scored and wins above replacement all belong to Harper a month and a half into his age-22 season.
The bullpen has been solid, too. Drew Storen has been one of the best closers in the majors this season, holding together a 1.17 ERA while saving 11 of his 12 chances this year. Tanner Roark (2.66 ERA in 13 appearances) and Matt Thornton (2.79 ERA, team-high seven holds) have also put together solid years of work to this point in the season, while the bullpen as a whole has an ERA that sits at 12th best in the majors, and runs right around league-average in most categories.
The defensive woes that this team was famous for during that 7-13 start have improved as well. Washington still commits the fifth-most errors in the majors, but are far behind the Athletics for the worst in baseball, a spot they held for most of April.
Those problems also may have been overblown to begin with. Shortstop Ian Desmond and the team’s pitchers account for 19 of the team’s 30 errors this season. Harper, in addition to his incredible offensive numbers, has also easily been inside baseball’s five best defensive rightfielders all season long, and when you throw in above-average defense by Ryan Zimmerman, Yunel Escobar and Denard Span, this team’s fielders aren’t quite the butchers the statsheets make them out to be.
All of this contributes to what has made the Nationals so dominant in May. But it still leaves out one key area -- that “best in baseball” starting pitching staff.
For starters, Scherzer has been the force Washington signed him on to be this offseason. His ERA, WHIP, innings pitched and strikeout-to-walk ratio all rank in the top five of the NL, proving he’s still got the makeup of a true ace. But this pitching staff was dubbed the best in baseball for more than just Scherzer, and the rest of those reasons have yet to really show themselves.
It isn’t that they’ve been bad, necessarily -- outside of Stephen Strasburg, they haven’t been -- it’s that they just haven’t been good. Jordan Zimmerman has stopped being able to strike batters out (5.69 K/9, down from 8.20 in 2014), and Doug Fister was recently thrown on the 15-day DL, following a beatdown at the hands of the Padres. Zimmerman’s 3.66 ERA would be his worst mark since 2010 if it stuck until the end of the season, while Gio Gonzalez’s 4.25 ERA would be his worst since 2009.
What these cold spots on the starting pitching staff should indicate, at least for the time being, is that these struggles aren’t permanent, which should scare the daylights out of every other team in baseball. This team is five games above .500, second in the NL East, with seven players haunting its disabled list and the 8th ranked starters’ ERA in the NL.
The question likely isn’t if this team’s starting rotation hits its stride, but when. And when it does, how do teams even compete with them? What happens when Zimmerman, armed with the NL’s fourth-best run support, starts missing bats again? What happens when Fister is healthy again? What happens when Gonzalez and Strasburg each begin to right the ship?
The NL East, currently led by the Mets, got to kick around the Nationals quite a bit in April, but is now already staring down a freight train of a team which possesses many components that are among baseball’s best -- almost none of which have involved their starting pitching.
When the starting pitching does become the best aspect of this team, the rest of this division may have nothing else to do but ask: Now what?
@_tonywolfe_
aw987712@ohio.edu
