Tyler Clippard: Least Deserving Nationals All-Star Ever?

Over the years the Nationals have had some pretty sad representatives in the All-Star Game.

Dmitri Young in 2007 was probably the worst--an average offensive first baseman and an embarrassingly bad fielder who in total posted 1.5 wins above replacement for the season, or half what Danny Espinosa's already done this year.

A case could also be made for Cristian Guzman in 2008. He made it because he had a fluky .337 BABIP that put him among the league leaders in hits, but he was a below-average fielder and the 5th best shortstop in his own division that year, behind Jose Reyes, Jimmy Rollins, Hanley Ramirez, and Yunel Escobar.

But Tyler Clippard really might be the weakest Nationals all-star ever, and the shame of it is that the team has played legitimate .500 ball over the first 60% or so of the year and really truly had a couple deserving choices.

I don't mean this as a big knock on Clippard. He's a very, very nice relief pitcher. Jim Bowden deserves almost as much credit as he gives himself for acquiring him in exchange for Jonathan Albaladejo.

Still, the reason he's a relief pitcher is because he wasn't good enough to start. So even though Clippard has been very good out of the bullpen over the last season and a half, and we as Nationals fans love our begoggled vulture, we still kinda gotta admit that he's at least not as good as the 50-60 or so solid starting pitchers in the NL. Wanna say he's one of the ten best relievers in the NL? Fine, I could probably go along with that. But that doesn't qualify for the all-star game.

Just looking at the Nationals roster, does anyone really believe that Clippard is better than Jordan Zimmermann? What would Zimmermann's K:BB rate be if he could go all-out and unload his fastball one inning at a time and benefit from favorable match-ups?

Or consider Espinosa, who has been the best second baseman in the NL not named Rickie Weeks. Both Espinosa or Zimmermann would have been solid choices on the merits, without any one-per-team quota.

(And I know some folks wanna make the case for Mike Morse, and he's clearly had a smoking-hot couple months, but his season is just a bit too fluky to really get too riled up about.)

Even the other starting pitchers, none of whom obviously belong in the All-Star Game either, might have a better case than Clippard. Has Clippard been more valuable in his 51 innings than Livan Hernandez has been in 121? Or John Lannan in 108 or Jason Marquis in 106? Or consider this: what would Clippard's numbers look like if he was asked to throw that many innings?

Anyway, it's nice for Tyler Clippard to get the recognition, but it's too bad that in a season when the Nationals really do have some stars to showcase and a good team story to highlight, that the goofy all-star selection process turned the Nationals once again into a punch-line, this time about the no-name reliever who got the win without retiring a single hitter.

Right Track/Wrong Track Results... And a New Poll!

Fizzleman out, Davey in, and the Nationals make it to the break at .500. All that is enough for fan confidence in June to skyrocket to 88%, nearly matching the all-time high of 89% from May, 2010, in the heady days approaching Strasburg's debut.

Voting is open on this month's poll on the right hand side of this page, and to make your voice heard you'll have to hurry up since I was off the grid in Alaska for the last two weeks and didn't get the July post up till the month was nearly half over.

Coming Up Smelling Like Roses

Not much time to write, but if the news is correct that the Nationals have inked Davey Johnson to manage the Nationals, not just as an interim basis but through 2013, then Mike Rizzo has just turned a sow's ear into a silk purse.

Makes you think maybe this was in the works all along--that Davey was on board to run the team once they had accumulated enough talent to compete. He probably had his eye on Opening Day 2012, but why not start now?

Davey Johnson would be at or near the top of any GM's wishlist, and Nationals fans can stop fretting about ol' what's his name right now.

Riggleman Goes Postal

Here's the one thing we can say with confidence after a few hours to digest the news that Jim Riggleman has quit as Nationals manager: Riggleman has thrown away any chance he'll probably ever have at managing again in MLB. Frankly, he'll probably never even be a bench coach or minor league manager.

When the Nationals came calling, Riggleman had been rotting on the vine for for a decade after getting fired as manager of the Chicago Cubs in 1999. He has a .445 career winning percentage. And just as he was proving some worth by getting the Nationals over .500 (just the 3rd time in 12 seasons he had a team win more than half their games), he decided it was time to burn down the building.

Jim seems to believe that he was terribly mistreated because it's June 12, and he didn't have a contract for next season. But here's the list of MLB managers who do not have a guaranteed contract for next year: Brad Mills, Tony LaRussa, Bruce Bochy, Terry Francona, and Jim Leyland. Add to that list interim hires Jack McKeon and Bob Melvin, and that's more than one out of every four managers in baseball.

Riggleman complained today that he didn't have the freedom to think outside the box, but what's that based on? He's been making a bunch of outside the box decisions lately, and to his credit a bunch of them were based on good process and have paid dividends, like leading off Jayson Werth or his early season eschewing of a traditional closer.

Now, it's true that it's pretty unusual for a manager to get consecutive one-year contracts like Jim did in 2010 and 2011. But he didn't have to agree to be the Nationals manager this year. No one put a gun to his head. No one ever said, "if you sign this deal and have the team over .500 at the end of June, we'll definitely pick up your option." To sign the contract and then quit on his team in mid-season is just completely beyond the pale.

We might never know the whole story. Maybe Mike Rizzo really said some things he should have, or implied assurances and didn't follow through. More likely, it appears that Riggleman just massively overplayed his hand, thought he had sufficient leverage after getting the team over .500 to give his boss an ultimatum. In fact, he had no real leverage. Riggleman wasn't being discussed as a manager of the year. He was never on anyone's list of top managers in the game. And only a fool would change that assessment based on one hot week of baseball.

So the Riggleman era is over. We can stop debating small ball vs. smart ball. The pitchers I'm sure can go back to hitting ninth. The team will probably start losing again, but not because of the manager--it'll be because the team doesn't actually have .500 talent.

And now we get to wait and see if Mike Rizzo has enough guts or imagination not to hire another pointless retread in his second chance. In the meantime, we can just sit back and enjoy the ripping Riggleman is getting on Twitter. Here are a few of my favorites:

• @Buster_ESPN A rival official on Riggleman: "I wouldn't hire him for AA or AAA job. You can't walk away..when you're under contract."
• @ngreenberg If Riggleman believed in the stats, he'd have known his stunt had about a 3% chance of working.
• @crashburnalley Quick Jim Riggleman meme I threw together... http://t.co/sWdYwBh
• @jposnanski Note to Jim Riggleman: When you tell your boss you will step down if your contract isn't fixed, it's usually called a "bluff."
• @JohnMarecek: Wonder what Riggleman would say to a player, bitching about his option not picked up in June?
• @BizballMaury I have determined that only karmatic location that would serve Jim Riggleman is the Marlins. They deserve each other #Riggleman #FAIL
• @keithlaw I would be very impressed by Riggleman's move if he wasn't thoroughly replaceable as a manager.
• @chrisneedham I'm sure Mrs. Riggleman is used to Jim giving up halfway through the job

John Lannan: He Is What He Is, But He Wasn't What He Was

I have a confession. I picked up John Lannan in my fantasy baseball league. Now, this is an unusually deep 20-team league, and I had Brett Anderson, Jake Peavy, and Brandon McCarthy all on the DL, Colby Lewis in the tank, and the best other options available were Jason Marquis, Chris Narveson, and Tom Gorzelanny. Still, I feel I owe an explanation.

You see, as some may recall, in 2009, I confidently predicted with a couple months left in the season that there was no way that John Lannan would finish with 200 innings pitched an an ERA under 4.00.

Obviously, I was wrong, and Lannan's continued success has made my skepticism seem even less well founded. But the fact is that I was right to doubt Lannan back in 2009, because he was succeeding then in a spectacularly unsustainable way.

Check it out. That year, Lannan threw 206.1 innings with a 3.88 ERA and coincidentally also a 3.88 K/9 rate. Here's the list of pitchers who have thrown that many innings with an ERA and K-rate that low since 1993, the unofficial start of the juiced ball era (or whatever you call it), year baseball baseball expanded and runs per game jumped from 4.12 to 4.60: Lannan, Mark Gubicza (1995), and Chien Ming Wang (2006).

That's three pitchers. Obviously none of them ever repeated the feat. But that doesn't really show how unusual this was in this era. Consider that there were a total of 356 seasons from 1993 through last year that a pitcher threw that many innings with an ERA of 3.88 or better--this extremely low strikeout group represents just .08% of these seasons.

Also consider this: there were only 3 other seasons in this period in which a pitcher threw 206 innings with a K/9 rate of 3.88 or lower: Jimmy Anderson in 2001 with an ERA of 5.10, Mike Moore in 1993 with an ERA of 5.22, and Jamey Wright in 1998 with an ERA of 5.67.

There's a word statisticians use for an event that occurs this infrequently: it's an outlier. It's also known as an aberration, a fluke. Unless John Lannan had discovered some heretofore completely unknown skill, there was no way he would be able to sustain the favorable outcomes he was getting with the skill set he was demonstrating at the time.

Here's the good news: Lannan's skills have gotten better. Back in 2006, he whiffed just 10.2% of batters faced--an unbelievably low number. The NL average that year was 18.4%. This year he's striking out 12.6%. That's still very low, and may not seem like a big difference, but it's meaningful.

(Pause for a statistical public annoyance announcement. I'm delighted to see how strikeout and walk rates are becoming more prominently noticed by average fans and mainstream baseball media. However, why oh why has the standard rate stat become K/9? I used it here only because Baseball Reference's Play Index only offers K/9 as a search function, and I'm still too lazy to install the raw SQL database on my own computer. When looking at strikeout rate, we want to know how often a pitcher misses bats. That's the skill we're trying to measure. Strikeouts per inning essentially tells us what percentage of a pitcher's outs are strikeouts, but totally ignores all the other outcomes a pitcher gets. Hits, walks, HBPs... these are all tossed out because those events aren't counted as parts of an inning. Only outs count towards the accumulation of innings. In effect, by using K/9, we diminish the difference between the best pitchers and the worst pitchers, making it harder for analysts and observers to notice the gap. So memo to Fangraphs, Play Index, etc. etc.: kill K/9. Just give us SO/TBF.)

Translating back to K/9 so we can search the Baseball Reference Pitcher Season Finder, we find that here were 23 pitchers from 1993 to 2010 who went 206 innings with an ERA of 3.88 and 4.86 K/9, Lannan's rate this year. That's still just 6.5% of these seasons, but we're getting into a range that's at least has some precedent for being repeatable. Carlos Perez did it twice. Tom Glavine did it four times.

And the other key skills these pitchers all possess are low walk rates and high groundball rates, and Lannan's 52.7% groundball rate is 11th among qualified NL starters.

If there's an area to be concerned about, it's Lannan's walks. His rate this season has risen from a good, not great 7.6% to a potentially troublesome 9.4%. Only 87 innings into the season, I think it's reasonably likely that he shaves that walk rate back down to where he's been the last two seasons and can maintain the groundball and strikeout rates where they are.

If that's the case, then he's a guy you can reasonably project for 200 innings with an ERA usually in the 4s, and once in a while, when luck and defense are on his side, an ERA in the 3s.

His current 3.52 ERA still strikes me as better than his skills justify, but it's possible that we've entered a new, post juicing era where this is what guys like Lannan can do. After all, from the start of the expansion era in 1961 to 1992, 118 pitchers went 206 IP with ERAs and K/9s of 3.88 or under. The game was different in many ways back then, but with scoring down two years running, we may be in a new era where guys like John Lannan survive and even thrive.

My battered fantasy team at least is hoping that's the case.

Chalk One Up for Riggleman's Super-Saber Lineup

I've usually insisted that batting order is an overrated strategic decision by the manager, so I don't want to go overboard on this topic. But today's win over San Diego was a pretty clear example of why it's smarter to put your best hitters in the 1-2 hole rather than the 3-4-5 spots in the order.

In the top of the ninth, the score was tied 0-0. The 7-8-9 hitters were due up--Jerry Hairston, the pitcher in the 8 hole, and Brian Bixler Alex Cora, the position player unconventionally hitting ninth.

Hairston popped out, and then pinch-hitter Matt Stairs and Bixler Cora got base hits. If the Nationals were using their most common line-up, it would have been Roger Bernadina (.308 OBP) and Ian Desmond (.271 OBP) due up. The Nationals best hitters--Jayson Werth, Danny Espinosa, Laynce Nix, Mike Morse (oy, is that an ugly list of "best hitters, but I digress)--probably would not have gotten a chance to hit in the inning at all.

But since Werth was hitting first, he came up and drew a key walk, loading the bases and advancing the lead runner to third. Espinosa, hitting second, drove in the go-ahead and eventual winning run with a sac fly, and Nix, hitting third, drove in another run with a base-hit. Drew Storen was able to close it out in the ninth, and the Nationals went home winners.

Sure, it's possible that the Nationals still would have scored in the ninth with a traditional lineup--putting a fast guy who isn't among your top 3 hitters in the lead-off spot, followed by maybe the 5th or 6th best hitter in the 2nd spot. But it's less likely. And it's possible that they still might have scored in the tenth inning, but then that would have forced the relievers to get three more outs.

The point is that by putting your best hitters at the top, they get more chances to hit, and you increase your odds of scoring and winning (by an infinitesimal margin in any given game, but still). Pretty much every softball team playing on the National Mall gets it, and it's nice for once to see a major league manager get it too--and get rewarded.

Riggleman's Sabermetric Lineup

Jim Riggleman's lineup card today is sure to get a lot of attention and criticism, with Jayson Werth batting lead-off, John Lannan hitting eighth, and Roger Bernadina ninth.

It's unconventional, but sabermetrically sound. First, we know that the additional at bats you get by hitting lead-off are worth more than the additional RBI opportunities you get hitting clean-up. And the most important skill for a lead-off hitter is on-base percentage.

And by hitting Bernadina 9th, Riggleman reduces the extent to which Werth will lose RBI chances hitting lead-off. He'll come up with the bases empty in the first inning, but he won't have an automatic out hitting immediately before him.

Now, Riggleman messes it up a little by hitting Ian Desmond and his .271 OBP in the #2 hole, which is actually the most important spot in the line-up. If he put Mike Morse or Danny Espinosa in the #2 hole and the other in the #4 hole, with maybe Wilson Ramos in the #3 hole, that would be pretty close to perfect.

Jordan Zimmermann: Total Control

They say that after Tommy John surgery, the velocity comes back first, and then the command. If that's true, then it's safe to say that Jordan Zimmermann is all the way back--and better than ever.

Zimmermann has always had good control. In his 2009 rookie season, he walked just 7.4%. Prior to his call-up that year, his career minor league walk rate was 8.4%. Anything under 8% is very good, and given Zimmermann's raw stuff, it was even more impressive.

But this year he's been truly elite, facing 302 batters so far and unintentionally walking just 15 of them--a minuscule rate of 4.97%.

How good is that? Put it this way: Remember what a hacker Cristian Guzman was? His career walk rate is 4.6%. (BTW--it's weird how Guzman has vanished from the face of the Earth this year. His agent says he's sitting out the season with "family issues." I'm glad I don't have to worry about it as a Nationals fan, but I am kinda curious.)

His strikeouts are also a bit down, from 23.5% to 16.9%, likely the result of an intentional shift in approach to try to throw more strikes and get quicker outs. But that's still a very good rate of missing bats. His velocity is steady, and his breaking balls, especially his slider, are getting better results than ever. Hitters are batting .237 against him this year, compared to .265 in 2009. There's no indication that he's sacrificing anything in terms of stuff.

You're going to prevent runs about as effectively on a per-inning basis with his 2011 rates as he did in 2009. The reason it's a favorable trade-off is that you're also going to be able to pitch deeper in games. He's gone from 5.7 innings per start in his rookie year to 6.2 innings per start this year. And at the same time, his pitches per game started has actually declined from 98 to 93.

These are pretty obvious, ho-hum observations--you walk and strike out fewer batters, you're going to be more efficient and go deeper into games.

But from a developmental perspective, something really exciting is happening. We're seeing a guy who was already pretty damn good develop an even more elite skill set that we didn't know was there. The ability to get hitters out while pounding the strike zone like this is something only a very few pitchers can do consistently. Guys either lack the command or don't have the stuff to throw this many strikes and not get killed.

In the end, Zimmermann's ideal approach might be somewhere in between--a few more walks and a few more Ks. But if he has the ability maintain this degree of extreme command, that means the ceiling for Jordan Zimmermann, already very high, just went even higher.

When the Nationals Outsmarted Everyone

Over the years, the Nationals have made some good decisions, more bad decisions, and they are on the upswing as a franchise because they've managed not to mess up the no-brainers in three straight drafts.

But the Nationals' handling of Adam Dunn--both acquiring him and deciding to let him go--is probably the savviest sequence of personnel moves the Nationals have made since 2005.

When Jim Bowden signed him in February 2009, Dunn had been sitting on the free agent market longer than anyone (especially him) ever expected. That was a weird off-season when, following the financial meltdown, the economy went into decline and MLB teams really retreated in their free agent spending.

Dunn seemed a great fit for an AL team looking for left-handed power, but the market for him just never developed, and with spring training around the corner, the Nationals were waiting with a 2-year, $20 million contract that ended up being a perfectly reasonable price to pay.

Even factoring Dunn's awful glove (and UZR hated his glove, especially as an outfielder 2009), he gave the Nationals almost 5 wins above replacement because of his .378 OBP and .533 SLG over his two seasons in DC. That didn't make him an all-star, but he was a major upgrade over the collection of yuck the team would have played in LF and 1B without him.

But wait? Am I really gushing over a Jim Bowden move? Yeah, I am. Jim did some things well, and one of his strengths was evaluating hitters. (And recruiting former Cincinnati Reds.)

And here's the best part. Because he was fired (yes he was) shortly after signing Dunn, he never had the chance to extend him, which we know he would have wanted to do. If finding undervalued bats was one of Jim's best strengths, one of his greatest weaknesses was falling in love with his own brilliant discoveries and overpaying to keep them (see: Young, Dmitri).

When Dunn's contract came up after last season, Mike Rizzo was all too happy to take the draft picks he would get in free agent compensation and let someone else overpay.

And looking at Dunn now, it looks like the Nationals let him walk just in time. I wrote a post last year about this time speculating that Dunn could be close to a Richie Sexson-like rapid decline.

The insight was nothing radically new. Dunn is a classic example of a guy with "old player skills"--i.e., a relatively narrow set of skills, usually power and patience, not speed or defense. When guys like this start lose just a bit of bat speed, they often fall apart fast.

At the time, he didn't seem to be showing signs of hitting the wall. But the statistical signs I warned about were an increase in strikeout and/or flyball rate, pitchers attacking him with more fastballs and a decline in his success off the fastball, and a drop in batting average.

This year, that's exactly what we're seeing. Dunn's K rate has spiked from 32.4% in 2009 to 35.7% last year to a horrid 42.6% this year. His career rate is 33.2%.

Pitchers are attacking him with fastballs 65% of the time, up from 59% in his career, which may seem like a small difference, but isn't. And the linear weights over on Fangraphs finds that Dunn is -0.91 runs below average per 100 fastballs seen this year, compared to 2.10 last year and 1.63 for his career. Again, those may seem like small, esoteric numbers, but the upshot is that pitchers are blowing him away with heat.

All that has added up to the tell-tale cratering of Dunn's batting average, which sits at .176 on Thursday.

Of course, everyone sees Dunn falling apart now. The hard part is knowing when it would happen. Maybe Mike Rizzo lucked out, or the White Sox just outbid him, but it's possible Rizzo and the team's scouts saw the decline in bat speed. Whatever, Rizzo stayed away, while the White Sox are in the first year of what looks like a miserable 4-year commitment to the second coming of Mo Vaughn.

And perhaps the biggest payoff of all came in this week's draft, when the Nationals were able to grab two high-upside, value picks in Alex Meyer and Brian Goodwin with the Dunn compensation picks.

And because they had these extra picks, it made it a lot easier for them to take a high-risk shot in the third round on Matt Purke, a pitcher considered a potential top-5 pick not long ago, before a shoulder injury derailed him. Purke isn't likely to work out, but his ceiling is that of an ace, and you gotta love the aggressiveness.

The Nationals organization hasn't done a lot of things well over the past few years, but when it came to Adam Dunn, they truly made all the right moves.

The Kiss Heard Round the World

Bryce Harper is an asshole. He's a big, fat, awesomely talented, ass-kicking, sonofabitch asshole. And we got him. The Phillies don't. The Yankees don't. The Nationals do. And that's why I love him.

OK, so backing up a bit. We've been hearing for over a year that Harper has "makeup issues." People say he's cocky and too often shows up opponents.

But there are makeup issues, and then there are makeup issues. And sometimes, as Elijah Dukes once said, "makeup is the stuff they make up about you."

The question in Harper's case isn't whether he's cocky or not. Obviously he is. But so were Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Bob Gibson, Babe Ruth... heck, how can you perform at the level these guys perform if you aren't supremely confident in a way that most of us would consider kind of off-putting if we had them over for dinner?

The question is whether his arrogance translates to laziness and/or an inability to deal with adversity. Ryan Leaf was arrogant--and as a result, he didn't work and he couldn't deal with failure.

We don't really know yet whether Harper will be able to handle failure. But we do know that he's far from lazy. Every indication is that he not only believes he's the best--he's also driven to do what it takes to prove it. That's the kind of asshole you win championships with.

Now, as for the blown kiss. We don't know the real story here. The camera shots we've seen have only shown Harper rounding the bases Wilson Ramos-speed and blowing the smooch. We don't know whether the pitcher was talking shit or how much went down before that moment. @bharpsis4534 says there were two sides of the story, and I suspect that's probably true.

But here's what I liked about it. First, the kiss felt to me like it was Harper first and foremost having fun. He loves the game, loves to compete, and loves to win. Was it polite? Ideal sportsmanship? No. But it also didn't seem mean-spirited. It seemed playful, not angry or petulant. I kinda thought it was charming.

Second, I like that he talked shit after he hit a home run. Muhammed Ali said, "it ain't braggin' if it's true." Yes, I know, Ali was a boxer, not a baseball player, but I think MLB would be better off if it had more Alis and a fewer milquetoast, corporate-packaged Derek Jeter types.

Finally, I like that he plays for my team. And if he's going to kick as many butts in his career as it seems like he will, doggone I kinda hope we get to rub some noses in it. For all the Phillies fan takeovers of Nationals Park and all the losing, we're due to enjoy our wins a little more openly than Miss Manners might approve of.

Right Track/Wrong Track Results... And a New Poll!

May's right track / wrong track poll held steady at 69%. Voting is open on this month's poll on the right hand side of this page. Will the glow of the draft overcome the team's play on the field?

Nationals Charmed Life in the Draft

In 2008, the Nationals were the worst team in baseball, and their reward was Stephen Strasburg, probably the best college pitching prospect ever. In 2009, the Nationals repeated as the worst team in the league, and wound up with Bryce Harper, considered by many to be the best power-hitting prospect ever.

In both drafts, the Nationals got to pick a consensus #1 overall pick--both can't-miss, once-in-a-generation type talents.

This year, the Nationals drafted #6 overall, and wouldn't you know it, there really wasn't any consensus #1 pick. There was a group of exactly six picks clustered at the top, and any one of them could have easily been the top pick.

As you know by now, the Nationals ended up getting Anthony Rendon, the third baseman from Rice who just a few short weeks ago was considered the top overall prospect in the draft. He's a big-time hitter and excellent fielder, drawing comparisons to David Wright, Evan Longoria, and, yes, Ryan Zimmerman. Even as of today, few predicted Rendon would slip all the way to the Nationals.

Now, there are some things we don't know about Rendon's health. He suffered a shoulder injury and has had a disappointing college season. But on the other hand, college bats tend to be the safest of all possible bets in the draft, and Rendon is closer to helping the Nationals than anyone else in the whole draft.

Some are wondering about where Rendon fits. Can he play second with Zimmerman at third? A cynic would say that Rendon is probably Zimmerman's replacement after he leaves in free agency in a couple years. If not, maybe he can play second base or first base or becomes trade bait.

At this point it doesn't matter. The important point is that for the third year in a row, the Nationals got absolute max value with their top pick. It's a historic streak that may, finally, help make the Nationals a winning team.

Is Jim Riggleman a Small Ball Manager?

I get credit for resisting the temptation to write "Jim Riggleman's Small Balls," don't I? Oops, I guess I don't.

Anyway, Jim Riggleman vented on Charlie Slowes today about how unfair it is that anyone would ever call him a "small ball manager." Nevermind the MASN commercials that prompted Joe Posnanski to tear into Riggles as if he's the patron saint of small ball. Those ads are just PR, I'm sure Riggleman didn't write the script, and regardless he should be judged on what he does, not what he says in an ad.

So does Riggleman attempt sac bunts and/or stolen bases more than the average manager? Let's look at last year to try to get a bigger sample.

First, we can't just look at the raw number of sac bunts and steals. The Nationals had a .318 OBP, 13th in the NL. This year they are second to worst. That means more outs, fewer base runners and fewer opportunities to steal and sac bunt.

Here are all the teams in the NL sorted by the percentage of time they attempted a stolen base (SBA) in stolen base opportunities (SBO)--situations when there was a runner on first or second base with the next base open (I'm told these tables are not displaying right on Internet Explorer. You can try with another browser or click here.):

Tm	SBO	SBA	SBA%
NYM	2219	174	7.84%
SDP	2227	174	7.81%
WSN	2205	151	6.85%
HOU	2166	136	6.28%
LAD	2283	142	6.22%
COL	2290	141	6.16%
CIN	2344	136	5.80%
PIT	2138	123	5.75%
LgAvg	2272	128	5.63%
PHI	2311	129	5.58%
ARI	2314	127	5.49%
FLA	2278	118	5.18%
STL	2328	120	5.15%
MIL	2396	107	4.47%
SFG	2211	87	3.93%
CHC	2246	86	3.83%
ATL	2403	92	3.83%

So Jim ran quite a bit more than average. But he can still make the argument that he ran more because he had players who ran well. That's fair to an extent. Here's the success rate of those same NL teams in 2010:

Tm	SB%
PHI	84%
FLA	78%
MIL	76%
NYM	75%
HOU	74%
WSN	73%
SDP	71%
PIT	71%
LgAvg	71%
COL	70%
CIN	68%
ARI	68%
ATL	68%
STL	66%
LAD	65%
CHC	64%
SFG	63%

The Nationals were in fact a bit better than average, and considering they ran so much, that's reasonable evidence that Jim was in fact playing to his team's strengths.

My quibble would be that so many of the steal attempts were Nyjer Morgan batting lead-off and attempting to steal with power hitters like Adam Dunn, Ryan Zimmerman, and Josh Willingham due up. First base is scoring position if Dunn hits it in the upper deck, and yet Morgan led the league with 17 caught stealings. That's the opposite of playing to a team's strength.

What about sac bunts? Again, looking at the raw number of sacs doesn't tell us much. We need to look at how often Riggleman bunted given the situations. Unfortunately, I don't have the raw data to run my own SQL queries, and I don't know of anywhere to get that info publicly, so I'm going to do a little workaround to try to get close by simply taking the stolen base opportunities referenced above (from Baseball Reference) and assume that 2/3 of these opportunities occurred with fewer than two outs. That's obviously introducing a margin of error, but so be it.

Running those numbers, here's what we get:

Tm	Sac Opps	Sacs	Sac Att %
WSN	1470	118	8.03%
LAD	1522	122	8.02%
SDP	1485	111	7.48%
NYM	1479	109	7.37%
SFG	1474	106	7.19%
HOU	1444	101	7.00%
CIN	1563	100	6.40%
PIT	1425	91	6.39%
LgAvg	1515	93	6.14%
STL	1552	95	6.12%
ATL	1602	98	6.12%
CHC	1497	87	5.81%
COL	1527	83	5.44%
FLA	1519	75	4.94%
PHI	1541	70	4.54%
MIL	1597	62	3.88%
ARI	1543	53	3.44%

Lo and behold, no manager in the NL jumped on sac bunt opportunities more often than Riggleman. What about the "playing to my players' strengths" argument? Is it possible that Jim was simply asking his players to do something they were particularly good at? Here's the sac bunt success rate of each NL team last year:

Tm	Success %
ARI	77%
HOU	74%
SFG	72%
SDP	71%
LAD	70%
ATL	70%
STL	69%
CHC	69%
NYM	68%
LgAvg	68%
FLA	68%
COL	67%
CIN	66%
PIT	64%
PHI	63%
WSN	60%
MIL	56%

Ruh-roh. That's not good, though in fairness if his guys couldn't bunt they probably couldn't hit away either, so we probably shouldn't make too much of this number.

Playing small ball doesn't make you a bad manager. The sacrifice isn't always a bad play, and we'd have to dig a lot deeper into the numbers to decide whether Riggleman is using the tactic well or not. The stolen base is a good play if you are successful about 72% of the time or more, and the Nationals were (barely). But the evidence shows that at least in 2010, Jim Riggleman was absolutely a small ball manager, and to argue otherwise is kinda silly.

Peacock Still Tearing Up Double-A

One of the things an organization needs to take a step forward in the overall talent rankings is for fringe guys to turn into prospects and for deep prospects to emerge as top prospects. It's not enough to just have the first round picks work out--you need to find breakthroughs elsewhere.

This is especially true for a team like the Nationals, who haven't won in years and even after drafting first overall two years in a row are still in the bottom half of baseball in most of the organizational talent rankings

Thing is, it's hard to find top talent even with those first round picks. The out-of-the-blue type breakthroughs just don't happen very often, and often it comes down to luck.

The Nationals had one big breakthrough a couple years ago with Derek Norris, who was drafted in the 4th round back in 2007 but emerged as a top 50 prospect with big seasons in 2008-2009. They may have another such pleasant surprise in Brad Peacock.

As a converted shortstop drafted out of high school in 2006, Peacock has been a bit of a project. But his velocity has steadily improved as well as his secondary offerings. Last year he took a big step forward and earned a mid-season promotion to AA.

This year he's really putting it together. Tonight, Peacock went 7 innings against the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, allowing 1 run on 2 hits to go with 7 Ks and 3 BBs. He lowered his ERA to 2.03, and for the season he now has 82 strikeouts and 13 walks in 62 innings.

Going into this season, there were concerns about his ability to retire lefties and talk of moving him to the bullpen, where he pitched in the Arizona Fall League. But so far this year lefties were doing even worse than righties, hitting just .133 against Peacock.

Soon, Peacock should earn another promotion, maybe even to DC at some point this season. He's passed just about everyone not named Strasburg or Zimmermann as the top pitching talent in the organization. And looking down the road, it's not hard to see him as a #2 starter by 2014.

I might be getting a little ahead of myself, but the Nationals desperately need some big wins in the player development side, and the emergence of Peacock is one of the very best things that could have happened for the Nationals so far this season.

Maybe They'll Finally Protect Catchers

After Buster Posey became the latest victim of a collision at home plate, we're suddenly hearing an outcry that the rules need to change to protect catchers. Buster Posey's agent called for the rule change today, and Buster Olney (showing his infamous Buster favoritism) led the way with a post on ESPN.com.

Nationals fans will remember Jesus Flores being taken out by Chase Utley, who launched himself into Flores's knee in a move more appropriate for a pro wrestler than a baseball player. There wasn't much outcry then.

Carlos Santana suffered a season-ending injury last year on a similar play--that's arguably the two best catchers in baseball going down in consecutive seasons in completely preventable injuries.

It's irritating to me that a star athlete has to get hurt to put this issue on the radar, but if this finally prompts a revision of the rules (or more accurately enforcement of the runner interference rules already on the books), that will be a good thing.

There was a time, early in the last century, when baseball was truly a contact sport. Pitchers threw at hitters. Baserunners would sucker-punch shortstops rounding second base. What we call "breaking up a double play" today would have been considered pansy stuff back then.

Today's game has changed, but one artifact of the old days remains. It's still perfectly acceptable for a catcher to block home plate and for a baserunner to plow into him head first.

First basemen can't block the bag on a close play, and runners can't try to block the first baseman from catching a throw. But for some reason when it's a close play at home, baseball turns into ultimate fighting.

The rule should have been changed a long time ago, and hopefully now it finally will.

Fire Lee Kuntz

Once is a mistake. Twice is red flag. Three times is a serious problem. I don't know what to call this, because I lost track long ago of how many times a Nationals player has suffered cascading, preventable injuries while playing through pain.

We all know the pattern so well that the joke tells itself. When team says a player is day-to-day, it's just a matter of time before they hit the DL. When they go to the 15-day DL, it's as predictable as the sun rising in the east that sooner or later we'll learn the recovery is taking longer than expected.

The latest is incident is Adam LaRoche, who was told that he could play the whole season with his sore shoulder, originally diagnosed as a slight labrum tear. Then he personally insisted on a second opinion only to learn that the torn labrum was much worse and that his rotator cuff was torn to boot.

What role did LaRoche playing through pain cause in the injury? When did the rotator cuff tear? Is it possible that he could have avoided surgery and shortened his DL time with rest and therapy if the injury had been diagnosed earlier? (We're told he might still avoid surgery, but who believes that?)

Who knows. But at this point it shouldn't matter. The point is that the docs got it wrong. Again.

Ryan Zimmerman. Chad Cordero. Jordan Zimmermann. Craig Stammen. Garrett Mock. Jason Marquis. Ross Detwiler. Jesus Flores. Now Adam LaRoche.

No trainer can prevent all injuries. But when players lose consistently lose extra time to injury because of late or wrong diagnoses, that's not ok. Someone should be held accountable, and Lee Kuntz is the most obvious fall guy.

Nationals and the Year of the Pitcher Redux

It's well documented that the Nationals can thank their pitching for keeping them within spitting distance of .500 for much of the first third of the season. And indeed, they've come a very long way since last season.

In 2010, the Nationals were last 12th in the NL in overall runs allowed per game at 4.58 (league average was 4.35). The starters were 14th in the league with an ERA of 4.61, while the relievers were 4th at 3.35--even though they pitched more innings than any bullpen in the league.

This season, the Nationals' runs allowed per game are down to 4.07 (before tonight's game against Milwaukee). The bullpen has improved on their excellent 2010 performance, lowering their collective ERA to 2.97. But the really big improvement has been with the starting pitchers--they've cut their ERA by more than half a run to 4.05 while pitching 6.07 innings per game, a huge and very much needed improvement from the awful 5.49 innings per start last season.

But the reality is that a lot of that improvement is a function of the dramatic drop in scoring league-wide--NL runs per game have fallen from 4.35 to 4.13--the lowest since 1992.

That's not to take anything away from the team's accomplishment rebuilding the pitching staff. Remember what a disaster the bullpen was when Mike Rizzo took over. And he's made some savvy moves to upgrade the rotation--in particular flipping 5 o'clock slugger Mike Burgess for Tom Gorzelanny and signing Jason Marquis to a reasonable two-year deal that is finally paying dividends.

Still, allowing 4.07 runs per game just isn't what it used to be. In 2009, that would have been good for 5th best in all of baseball, just .01 behind the San Francisco Giants staff led by Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum. As good as the starters have been, they don't have anyone in the top 50 qualified starting pitchers for xFIP--Jordan Zimmermann is the best at #57.

That's a big part of why, for all their seeming progress, the Nationals after tonight's loss to the Brewers are 21-26, a .447 winning percentage that puts them on pace for just 72 wins, and for that matter why things are very unlikely to get better any time soon.

Welcome Cole Kimball

The Nationals' #7 BA prospect Cole Kimball made his MLB debut a minute ago, and he looked every bit the part. Jim Riggleman wasn't afraid to use Kimball in a one-run game, and you could see why.

Kimball sits at 93 and touches 95 with his fastball. He has a curveball and a real knockout of a splitter. He struck out 31% of batters faced in AA last year, and 24.5% in 13.2 innings at AAA this year.

Bob Carpenter credited the Lerners' spending for Kimball, but he must have been thinking of someone else. Kimball was drafted in the 12th round back in 2006--one of Dana Brown's patented New Jersey/New York pitching finds (see: Lannan, John; Bergmann, Jason), and the Lerners had nothing to do with it.

There's only so much a relief pitcher can do to help your team, but if the Nationals can count on two cost-controlled plus-relievers in Drew Storen and Cole Kimball for the next 5-6 years, that would go a long way to stabilizing their bullpen for the long-haul.

And with Brad Peacock absolutely tearing up opponents in Harrisburg (8:1 strikeout to walk ratio isn't too shabby), we could see yet another pitcher from that 2006 draft debut pretty soon as well.

Most Nationals fans wrote off the 2006 draft a long time ago as a total wash, with Chris Marrero and Colton Willems fizzling and second-round pick Sean Black (also from NJ, by the way) going unsigned after the draft. If they get a solid reliever and a back-end starter out of it, that would at least save some face.

Gregor Blanco, Rick Ankiel, or a Red-Hot Poker?

First question: When did the Nationals become the landing pad for washed out Kansas City Royals? Isn't that what Pittsburgh is for?

As replacement-level free talent goes, you could do worse than Gregor Blanco. The advanced metrics say he's below average in the field but can handle LF and CF without hurting you too badly. I only saw him play left when he was with Atlanta, but I don't remember anything to contradict those numbers. At the plate, he takes a lot of walks but has no power at all. If he's plan B for the failed Mike Morse experiment, you can think of him as a poor-man's Ryan Langerhans. (Zing! I really burned Rizzo there didn't I!)

It's a tough question now--at this point what should the Nationals do in the outfield? After deciding to trade Josh Willingham for whatever they could get (a move that I supported), failing to sign any kind of starting-caliber stop-gap free agent (Ankiel doesn't count), and dumping Nyjer Morgan (a move that I guess had to happen), the Nationals were left with the motley group of Morse, Ankiel, Laynce Nix, Jerry Hairston, and Roger Bernadina to cover two-thirds of the outfield. None of those guys have been any better than you'd expect.

One decision seems pretty easy: give Bernadina regular playing time. He's at least kind of young-ish, and he was better last year than Ankiel and Morse have been.

After that? Going into the season I'd kind of hoped that Corey Brown might work his way into the picture, but he's whiffed 37 times in 87 ABs for Syracuse. There isn't anyone else in the system anywhere near ready or good.

I suppose it'll be Ankiel as soon as he's healthy, since he's the guy making $1.5 million. But why not Blanco? The Nationals have a huge OBP problem. Today they ran out a line-up that had five guys with OBPs under .300. That's more than half the line-up my friends. And the rest of the lineup included Adam LaRoche and Jerry Hairston at .310 and Danny Espinosa at .313. The other guy was Bernadina, who'd only had 8 plate appearances at the start of the day and went 0-4. He'll catch up to the rest by the end of the Atlanta series.

Bottom line, this is another one of those situations where the problem isn't really the moves the team is making now to fill their holes. It's that the player development system hasn't produced a single starting-caliber option in the outfield since Ryan Church. Now they're left scrambling for other team's cast-offs to fill two key spots, and the results are unlikely to be anything but ugly.

Right Track/Wrong Track Results... And a New Poll!

In April, my first month running the poll in about 8 months, 68% of Nationals fans say the team is on the right track. That's not awful, but it's down from the 80+% levels of optimism that the team maintained for the entire period after Stephen Strasburg signed. Here are the results over time (the section in red is the period no polling was done):



A new poll is live on the right hand side of the page. Lemme know how you're feeling this month!

Steve McCatty's Package

Steve McCatty on Henry Rodriguez:

“I’m not discouraged by it,” pitching coach Steve McCatty said. “It’s part of the package you get with a guy who can throw 100 miles per hour.”

Wrong. It's part of the package when you have a guy with lousy command. Ask Michael Pineda, Stephen Strasburg, Aroldis Chapman, or Justin Verlander whether throwing 100 mph means you can't have any clue where the ball is going.

Moreover, if 100 mph means Rodriguez loses all command, then he needs to learn to dial back. Throwing 92 with command is far better than 100 without.

I sure hope this isn't the advice McCatty is giving Rodriguez as a coach. And I hope Rodriguez doesn't read the paper.

Brad Peacock Makes the Hot Sheet

Baseball America's Hot Sheet--their weekly report on the hottest prospects in the minor leagues--includes Harrisburg's Brad Peacock. Here's what they said:

Team: Double-A Harrisburg (Eastern)
Age: 23
Why He's Here: 1-0, 0.00, 7 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 8 SO
The Scoop: The Nationals spent a combined $3 million in the 2010 draft to secure righthander A.J. Cole and lefthander Sammy Solis. While Cole and Solid are young, low-minors arms with upside, Peacock has the stuff and control to be a mid-rotation starter. Plus he's far closer to realizing that potential. A 2006 draft-and-follow from the 41st round, Peacock's stuff has gotten better since signing out of Palm Beach (Fla.) CC. He now sits at 92-94 mph and touches 96 with a hard downer curve. His location has also been superlative, as he owns a 1.16 ERA, 36 strikeouts and four walks in 31 innings this season.

Bryce Harper is on there too, but that's nothing new.

Jim Bowden Joins Harper on the Sweet Spot Network

JimBo is officially a blogger. Who wants to tell Jim that Rob Neyer asked me to be a Sweet Spot blogger a couple years ago, and I declined?

I'll start the game: every time he name drops a player he is connected to, gotta drink. In this post, we get to take only one shot (don't worry, there will be many, many more). On Alfonso Soriano:

He has an NL-leading 11 home runs and is presently on pace to hit more than the 46 home runs he hit for me in Washington back in 2006.

Zimmerman's Surgery: Why Now?

I wasn't surprised to learn that Ryan Zimmerman's injury was lingering. Core muscle injuries (abs, obliques, etc.) tend to linger, and it's tough for a baseball player to do all the twisting motions involved in hitting and fielding until an injury like this is completely healed.

I wasn't, however, expecting to hear that Zimmerman needed surgery--not after three weeks on the DL and two months since the injury was first reported. (I won't repeat the details--Mark Zuckerman does a good job recounting the sequence of Zimmerman's injury here.)

I'm not a sports medicine expert, but the question has to be asked: why didn't Zimmerman get surgery immediately after the ab tear on April 9, which may have saved four weeks of missed time? And why wasn't he ordered to fully rest the injury when it first occurred during spring training, which might have prevented any DL stint at all?

Will Carroll--previously known as the injuries guy at Baseball Prospectus, now better knows as SI's less-attractive version of Stephania Bell--says the team is annoyed at Zimmerman for not being forthright with the team about the extent of the injury. And if Zimmerman hid the injury, they should be annoyed.

But this pattern--playing through pain, leading to a cascading injury, followed by a longer-than-expected DL stint, followed by surgery--isn't new for the Nationals (see: Cordero, Chad; Stammen, Craig; Zimmermann, Jordan).

I haven't seen anyone ask head trainer Lee Kunz, who has been with the team since 2007, why this injury was allowed to linger so long and why the surgery prognosis came so late. But it's a question that should be asked. Because if the botched handling of the Zimmerman injury turned a 2-week DL stint into three months, that's a big, big mistake.

Zimmerman's been a 7-WAR player over the last two seasons, and so this could be a 3-win error by the training staff. Since 3 wins above replacement costs about $12 million on the free agent market, that's a pretty expensive mis-diagnosis.

Riggleman's Awful Inning

I realize that it's been a couple days and this is kinda old news, but Jim Riggleman on Saturday made some of the worst decisions I can remember any manager making in a long, long time.

The situation was tie score, top of the seventh, two outs, runners on second and third, John Lannan pitching, Giants' backup catcher Eli Whiteside due up, and Aubrey Huff on deck. And Jim Riggleman chose to intentionally walk Whiteside.

Walking Whiteside decreased the Nationals' win expectancy from 48.5% to 46.5%. It almost tripled the Giants' run expectancy from 0.22 to 0.57. This isn't a close call--the intentional walk clearly made a Giants victory more likely.

Maybe I'm making this too obvious, but lemme try to really break this down simply. With first base open and two outs, the Giants had to get a hit to score a run (barring a balk or wild pitch). With the bases loaded, a walk or HBP gets the go-ahead run home.

Across baseball last year, hits occurred in 22.3% of plate appearances. Walks and HBPs occurred in about 9.4% of plate appearances. So after the walk, about 32% of the likely outcomes of any given at bat get the run home, as opposed to just 22%. If you look at the rates of these events in the National League and in 2011, when offense is sharply down, these numbers are even more skewed against issuing the walk.

But this only scratches the surface of Riggleman's stupidity. Consider that Whiteside is a career back-up catcher with a career .233 / .284 / .366 line. He's 31 years old, and he's never gotten more than 140 plate appearances in a season ever. The reason is because he's a bad hitter, so his own team goes out of their way to make sure he hits as rarely as possible.

Aubrey Huff on the other hand ranked 7th in the MVP voting last season with a .290 / .385 / .506 line. He was the best hitter on the team that won the World Series. It's true Huff is scuffling in the early going this season, but if Jim Riggleman is deciding based on a 27-game sample size that Eli Whiteside is a superior hitter to Aubrey Huff, he's gone stark raving mad. This is like walking Wil Nieves to get to Ryan Zimmerman.

But FJB, you say, by walking Whiteside, Riggleman gained the platoon advantage! Alas, as bad as Whiteside has been against righties, here's his career line against lefties: .167 / .219 / .267. No, that's not a misprint. Jim Riggleman intentionally walked a .167 hitter in a situation where only a hit would get a run home. And in case you were wondering, Huff has basically no platoon split. He hit .296 / .378 / .506 against lefties last season. And I could pull John Lannan's relatively small platoon splits, but my head is starting to hurt.

Riggleman is so wrong here, that you almost think maybe he got confused and thought he was walking Aubrey Huff to get to Eli Whiteside. Now THAT would have been a justifiable move.

Finally, after all that, we find out during the post-game press conference that Riggleman would have pulled Lannan, except that Lannan might have gotten the win(!) if he got out of the jam and if the Nationals managed to score a run in the bottom of the seventh and if the bullpen managed to hold that lead:

The right thing probably to do was just bring (Tyler) Clippard in to face Whiteside," Riggleman said. "Every now and then, you make a decision for your starting pitcher. If I pull John there, he's got a no-decision or a loss. If I let him try to work through it, he's got a no-decision or a win. It didn't work. The right decision to make was to just bring Clippard in, and whether Clip gets him or not, that's the way we go with that. I should have done that. That's one that's on me.

I'm just speechless. Maybe I shouldn't be. Managers manage to the stats all the time. Pretty much every manager in the league puts a higher premium on getting saves for their anointed closer than winning baseball games. But to admit openly that he believed that changing pitchers would have given the Nationals the best chance to win, but that he instead chose to hurt his team's chances of winning in favor of the infinitesimal chance that John Lannan would pick up a stat that even the BBWA Cy Young voters don't think matters anymore?

Personally, I think Riggleman's quick hook is a problem for this team, and I would have left Lannan in regardless. He only threw 93 pitches, and yeah he was struggling with his command a bit, but hell pitchers struggle with their command sometimes.

But this is a case where it doesn't matter whether he made the right decision or not. The REASON he made the decision was so bad, so completely misplaced, that this decision alone is nearly a firing offense.

And while this is a particularly egregious situation, this isn't the first time we've seen Riggleman manage to the win stat. Don't forget--the manager works for the GM, and it's up to Mike Rizzo to call Riggleman into his office and tell him to cut the crap. The fact that this keeps happening doesn't just reflect poorly on Interim Jim. Ultimately the buck stops with Rizzo.

Will the Starting Pitching Save the Nationals?

As I've written a number of times, the one thing this Nationals team absolutely can't withstand if they want to avoid another top-5 draft pick is a prolonged injury to Ryan Zimmerman. But it's looking like that's exactly what's happening.

The good news is that since Ryan Zimmerman went down April 9, the Nationals have not fallen apart. In fact, they've managed 9 wins in 19 games, a better winning percentage than I or most other people predicted for them even with Zimmerman. At the same time, they went 2-4 against the lowly Pirates and Mets and have scored just 3.84 runs a game (in 2009, when they lost 103 games, they managed 4.38 runs per game).

So what is it, exactly, that Nationals fans should expect from here on out?

There's one reason why losing Zimmerman might not mean a return to the dark days of 07-08: starting pitching. It's starting to look like they may get best-case (or near best-case) seasons from Jason Marquis, Livan Hernandez (again), John Lannan, and Tom Gorzelanny.

Now, all four of these guys are due for some regression--they all have xFIPs at least half a run higher than their ERA. Hernandez continues to enjoy the good luck of an unsustainably low HR/FB rate, which for a flyball pitcher like Livan creates an especially large distortion. This year he's allowed homers on just 3.4% of flyballs, while 44% of his balls in play have been flyballs. No pitcher can maintain a HR/FB rate much below 11% without the benefit of extreme park effects, so once that number starts to catch up, things will get ugly fast.

That said, Hernandez his only walking 2.31 batters per 9 innings, which is an exceptionally low number but not out of line with his career performance. If you're not handing out free passes, you can get away with a few more homers. Still, we're talking about a profile that will produce an ERA around 5, not in the mid-to-low 3s.

Marquis and Gorzelanny's performances are more easily attributed to repeatable skill. Gorzelanny is whiffing 7.54 batters per 9 while walking about half as many. He's never going to be a great pitcher, but an ERA in the mid-4s is totally reasonable. I liked that trade at the time (and Michael Burgess has only continued to prove his doubters right), and I'm glad to see it work out for Rizzo.

Marquis' numbers give us even more reason for optimism. He's getting the 56% groundball rate that has always been his bread-and-butter, but he's elevated his K-rate to over 6 per nine innings (which he hasn't done since 2004) and dropped his walk rate to 1.31, which would make him one of the best command pitchers in baseball.

I don't expect the K and BB rates to continue, but he can give up quite a bit of ground on those rates and still be worth more what the Nationals are paying. And if those rates did continue--if he somehow has figured out some new skill set--he'd be on track for easily the best season of his career. Again, I liked the Marquis free agent signing at the time, and it's good to see the team rewarded for good decision-making.

And John Lannan is basically the same guy he's been for the last four years. Lots of groundballs, not too many walks. Barring a return to the lucky BABIPs he got in '08 and '09, he'll finish the season with an ERA in the mid to high-4s.

I haven't mentioned Jordan Zimmermann, because he's the one guy who's actually underperforming. I'd like to look a little closer at him, but he obviously is the most talented pitcher on the team and could also provide a boost.

The odds of all five of these pitchers coming through for the Nationals in this way is extremely unlikely. But so far, there are good reasons to think that's what's happening. Losing Zimmerman is still the biggest blow this team can take. But if they can survive this without a prolonged jag of losing, this will be the reason.

Desmond Downer

Congratulations on the birth of your son, Ian. Hope you have enough joy to carry you through the long bus rides up in Syracuse.

As I've written before, Desmond's 2010 was really disappointing from a developmental perspective. He was every bit as error-prone as he'd been in the minors, and his strikeout rate rose while his walk rate fell, compared to his 21-game audition in 2009.

This year, he's gotten worse. Much worse, actually, putting up a blech .205 / .253 / .333 line while committing 7 (!) errors already, tied for the most in baseball with Starlin Castro, who is hitting .357 / .382 / .480, thank you very much.

It's not hard to see what pitchers are doing to him. In that white-hot September 2009, he saw 77.1% fastballs. Then last year he saw just 56.8% fastballs, a really low number. This year, pitchers have continued to feed him a diet of breaking pitches and off-speed stuff, and he hasn't been able to adjust and show he can hit or lay off enough of them to make the pitchers pay.

While he's not walking much--just 6.0% of the time this year, which is actually an improvement from the awful 4.9% walk rate last year--he's taking a lot of pitches. He's swinging at just 44.4% of the pitches he sees, and 59.5% in the zone, making him one of the more passive hitters in the game against pitches in the zone. He's also swinging at just 22% of first pitches, down from 32% last year and 29% in 2009. All this adds up to a lot of pitchers' counts. He's seen just three 3-1 counts, five 2-0 counts, and one 3-0 count all year. And it means he's not getting a lot of pitches to hit.

Maybe it'll help him to get out of the leadoff spot. If that caused him to change his approach, when he was already struggling, then that probably wasn't helpful.

But I don't think the problem is his spot in the batting order. I think Desmond just hasn't taken the developmental steps needed to show he can be a starting major league shortstop. And with the errors continuing to pile up, he's just not doing enough to justify letting him work out the kinks in the majors. I'm not saying they should give up on him forever. But he should be in the minors now.

Of course they don't have anyone else to play the position. I guess their best option would be to slid Espinosa over and play Cora or Hairston every day at second. But that shouldn't be a reason to keep Ian in DC.

Oh well, look on the bright side, Ian. You won't have too much trouble getting playing time from this guy.