Time to Start Believing What You See

It’s June 1, it’s the day after Memorial Day, and it’s 2 months into the season. The Nats have played 26% of their season, over one quarter of their games. It’s time to start believing what you’re seeing. Whatever they’ve done up to this point is probably pretty indicative of the type of team they are. Here are a few observations on what we’ve seen:

Thanks to an offensive outburst yesterday, the team is no longer being outscored by a massive amount. They’ve allowed only 10 more runs than they’ve scored, so with a record of 26-26, they are only considered “lucky” by one game. Their pythagorean W-L record is 25-27, still impressive considering where this team has come from. It’s been my opinion that a team with an effective bullpen is likely to play better than their Runs Scored/Runs Allowed would indicate – and that seems to be what is happening with the Nats. They’ve lost a few blowouts that got out of control, but other than that, their bullpen has kept them in it, and they’ve won (and lost) their share of very close games.

Bullpen Holds, But Nothing to Hold

The bullpen was able to plug the dam, and keeping the water from rushing through, which was the good thing. Unfortunately, they were already up to their armpits in water at the time. Or something like that. Jason Marquis is not a front line pitcher. He will have some good days, and he will have some bad days. The bad days are more likely to come against teams that can score run. You know, teams like the Phillies, Mets, Rockies, Braves… ugh. According to Baseball Prospectus, they forecast exactly 4 NL teams to score at least 740 runs this season. Those are it, and 3 of them are in the division. It could be a long year for Marquis.

Back to the good news, the bullpen. In the 5th inning, Ryan Howard hit a prodigious home run. Jason Marquis was replaced with Tyler Walker, who pitched 2 perfect innings and struck out three. Then came the 7th, where Jesse English, fresh off his perfect debut, gave up a liner hit at him, a walk and got Howard to fly out. He was replaced with Tyler Clippard, who walked someone and allowed a run, credited to English, on a sac fly. Clippard also pitched the 8th, and other than that run, didn’t give anything up.  Finally, Matt Capps allowed an unearned run thanks to another error by Ian Desmond, and generally looked bad. But for the most part, outside of Capps, the bullpen looked effective.