28 More Starts, Who Pitches?

The Nationals have exactly 28 games left to play this season and according to their website, the rotation is:

• Livan Hernandez
• John Lannan
• Jason Marquis
• Jordan Zimmermann
• Scott Olsen

That means, assuming the rotations stays the same, Livan, Lannan and Marquis will get 6 more starts each, the other 2 get 5. Of course, we know, that this isn’t the case. For one thing, Yunesky Maya will be getting some starts. So how should the rotation actually go? Here’s my take on each guy, and whether they should remain a starter for September.

Livo – Re-signed for next year, he is the elder statesmen of the group, and has been the best pitcher on the team this year. His 3.7 WAR (according to Baseball Reference) is not only the best by a pitcher on this year’s team, it’s the best since John Patterson’s 4.9 and Esteban Loiza’s 3.8 in 2005. He won’t catch Patterson, but he has the opportunity to go past Loiza this month. Regardless, he will and should continue to start, if only to bring some stability. STARTER

Get Ready for Your Short Term Team

You expect changes with a young team. You expect changes with a bad team. You expect changes with a team that has a talented, ready for prime time prospect in the minors. So the Nats, who are all of those teams, should see some changes real soon. But just how many changes? Well some of them are obvious, like the rotation, but there is still possibilities for changes throughout the lineup, and of the course the bullpen is a work in progress. Changes are afoot, so if you don’t like the way this team looks right now, you’ll be happy to know it won’t look the same in short order.

I listed the team’s alleged lineup going in to the season, and then put out some possibilities that may be coming by the end of the year. This isn’t necessarily my prediction for April’s team and September’s team, just more a demonstration of a possibility. Now that all that caveating is out of the way…

Rotation

Firstly, the rotation has the potential to change big time by as soon as June or July.

2010 NL East Rankings Part 2: The Pitchers

Yesterday, I went over the the starting lineups for each team, and I was happy to give out 5 points for each position winner, 1 point for the bottom guys, and the logical points for those in between. Here’s the score as it stands before looking at the pitching staffs:

SCORE: Phillies (30), Mets (24), Braves (22), Marlins (22), Nationals (22)

So if we used the ol’ permanent pitcher for both teams methodology, I’d be picking the Phillies. But clearly there’s more to baseball than just hitting and fielding, there’s a whole slew of hurlers. Less clear is what starter is in what position. Normally it wouldn’t matter, but when we’re comparing each pitcher in an individual part of the rotation, it does. I used my best judgement here, and tried to go with rotations according to BP and other sources. Forgive me if you disagree:

#1 Starter

1. Phillies – Roy Halladay
2. Mets – Johan Santana
3. Marlins – Josh Johnson
4. Braves – Jair Jurrjens
5. Nationals – John Lannan

Halladay has been arguably the best pitcher in baseball the last few years, and that was playing in the AL, facing the Boston and New York juggernauts there on the regular. Throw in the league change and Santana’s recent injury, I’m giving him the top spot. Josh Johnson stayed healthy all last year and continued to look great, and Jurrjens may regress a bit, but is still a very effective young pitcher. The unfortunately thing is that with Lannan the apparent opening day starter, I have to put him here, at the bottom of the list…

SCORE: Phillies (35), Mets (28), Marlins (25), Braves (24), Nationals (23)

10 Things That 10 Games of Spring Training Have Shown

Since I’ve been somewhat cynical mentioning the meaninglessness of individual games in spring training, and the overall deceptiveness that stats can give you from this month, I wanted to show that I do think a few things can be learned from the month. It’s more than just a tuneup, it can give managers a very good idea of what to expect. I just believe that a month of games when people don’t care shouldn’t override several years of evidence. Anyway, here are a few things I’ve noticed in the first half of the spring:

1. Strasburg has looked very good – his second start wasn’t as well-covered or noticed, but it was just as good as the first. He’s pretty impressive so far
2. Elijah Dukes hasn’t looked very good – hitting .174/.263/.294 so far probably won’t make him lose his job, but it will significantly shorten his leash in April. He’s gotta start hitting, although at least he still can walk
3. Ian Desmond has alot of good news surrounding him – he’s hitting the hell out of the ball (.455/.580/.815, if you must know – whatever I’m sure that’s real sustainable) but Rizzo has also said he’s definitely NOT coming on the club as a utility man. This was assumed, but there were rumors to the contrary – like when Riggleman went on XM-Sirius last week and said he might be a utility man. He’s gonna start in Washington or Syracuse at SS – my guess is in Syracuse until they figure out whether they could get anything for Guzman
   

Not Livan Us Alone

If it was anyone else with his numbers, I’d be surprised the Nats signed him. What do the Nats need from a 35 year old starting pitcher who had a 5.44 ERA last year, a 6.05 ERA the year before? It’s not like he’s a recovery-from-injury project, someone with upside to do something much better. Those numbers are probably around what you’re gonna get from him, so why? Because the person we’re talking about is Livan Hernandez, and he apparently signed a lifetime contract with the Expos that this franchise still can’t get out of. Whenever he’s out of a job, someone here brings him back.

The problem with bringing Livo in to round out the rotation, in every sense of that phrase, is that he’s completely unnecessary. I know that people will say his numbers are a bit deceiving. His 5.28 ERA over the last 4 years doesn’t reflect the number of quality starts he had. The combination of very good games and very bad games inflate his numbers. To them I say, if he had enough good games, it would balance out. Instead, the last few years have been just plain bad:

Jumping on the Optimism Bandwagon

Pitchers and catchers are in, position players are starting to show up. Meanwhile, some young prospect threw down in Viera this weekend. Teammates were calling him Jesus, people were talking about how he’s the best thing they’ve ever seen, and there was a general feeling of optimism for the future. So let’s get on the train to positivityland and figure out what is the ideal scenario for this team. Not record-wise. If everything goes right they probably won’t be very good. And I’m talking about the big boy team right now, so I’ll avoid talking about development of guys that won’t see the pros this year.  I’m talking about what would help set up a winning season in 2011 – a complete list of things that would be good for this team, but trying to keep them all realistic. So, no, I’m not going to say that it would be awesome of Craig Stammen struck out 250 hitters and won a Cy Young, or if Josh Willingham became a gold glove outfielder.

Instead, here’s a list of the good things I’d hope to see, that actually have a chance to happen

Questions Going into Spring Training 2010

It’s almost upon us. Pitcher and catchers report in a matter of days rather weeks, although many are down there now already. Spring training games begin in a few weeks, and the Nats are semi-set at many places to begin the season. But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t many many questions that need to be answered. Here are a few I have going in to the season…

Who are the 5 starters?

That’s kind of a big one, so I put it first. You know, the guys that start the games? We’ve got two for sure! John Lannan is the only guy I have real confidence in as of Feb. Marquis is fine, he’s not great, but you can expect a close-to-league-average ERA and near 30 starts. On this team, that put you at the top. But that’s IT. There is nobody else guaranteed a spot. Three empty rotation spots is a ton, and I’m not sure they’re planning on bring Strasburg up any time soon. 2011 looks promising when you add him and Zimmermann, but until then? Here’s a quick rundown of the candidates:

• Scott Olsen – Was once pretty good, once threw in the mid-90s. He’s coming back from shoulder surgery, so he’s very risky BUT, if that heat is there, he’s gonna be decent. The problem is that it hasn’t been there for years.
• Garrett Mock – Lots of Ks but too many walks. Good stuff, but hasn’t put it together and is now 27.
• J.D. Martin – Had some success last year, but doesn’t miss many bats. Also turning 27.

Who Added the Most Wins?

Time for more season recapping… A simple but important question, right? Who, in the course of the season, contributed the most to the Nationals 59 wins? One way to look at this is through the statistic known as WARP. WARP, wins above replacement player, is an interesting stat that shows how many wins the player contributes over a replacement level player. Here is a post on what it all means, if you forgot or never knew.

There are some obvious ones on the list, and a few surprises as well. Here’s the top 10:

1. Ryan Zimmerman: 6.9
2. John Lannan: 4.1
3. Adam Dunn: 4.1
4. Josh Willingham: 3.2
5. Nyjer Morgan: 2.9

Zim Hits #27, Mock Keeps Pitching

First, I’ve got to get something out of the way. On Thursday, I left town for a long weekend and Zimmerman hit his 27th HR. I never got the chance to post, so here, a few days late, I’m laying out the next pics in the Zimmerman March to 30 HRs uniform number gallery:

Mock Continues

Now, back to the team. Actually, to Garrett Mock, who was last night the “hard luck loser” as they like to say. Well, maybe not that hard luck, he only went 6 IP and did give up 2 runs. So it’s not like he dominated, but he pitched pretty good once again.

Blogger Day 2 Roundup

As mentioned in an earlier post, Sunday was Blogger Day II at Nats Park, and we were there. We got there around 11AM and were quickly brought in by Nats Director of Baseball Media Relations, Mike Gadza. We all squished inside the elevator and made our way to the press room, where manager Jim Riggleman had just finished his press conference with the real media folks. With us on the way was Bob Cohn of the Washington Times. You better believe I was quoted! As Kasten later said, it was a reporter doing a story on bloggers doing a story on baseball, and someone should write a blog about it.

We were given the opportunity to ask Riggleman some questions and without getting in to trying to quote, here were a few highlights:

• He has been really happy with the hitting, their job is to establish consistent pitching now.
• Hitting is great, it was hard to manage against the Rangers of the last few years. But those teams never sniffed the playoffs. But now the Rangers can pitch, and they hit much less, and they’re in the thick of the hunt.
• It is a big concern for him to balance the workload of the young pitchers while getting good pitching so the team can win.
• Media has changed drastically. Even when he was managing in a big city like Chicago, in the late 90s, there were 2 or 3 beat writes and a radio station. Certainly no blogging, and there just wasn’t as much scrutiny.
• They are really working hard to improve the defense, going out and practicing before games, but this was actually Acta’s idea. The problem was under Acta, it rained so much early on, that they couldn’t consistently go out there.
• He thinks Dunn has played well at first base. They’ve got to get him to read the ball a little better off of the bat, to help his range (the hole between 1B and 2B has been an issue), but he’s made all the scoops he should and has been energized by the switch.