Tonight’s disastrous game in which the Nats gave up a 7 to 1 lead in the seventh inning to lose 8 to 7 was their worst collective meltdown in a must-win game since Game 5 of the 2012 NLDS, when they also blew a 6-run lead. At the center of it, as he was in Game 5, was Drew Storen, showing his all-too-familiar deer-in-the-headlights expression as he let a 4-run lead slip to 1-run on a Cespedes double, followed by a walk, a wild pitch, and then two more walks to score the tying run. Then Jonathan Papelbon, called on to pitch two innings with the score tied, surrendered an 8th-inning home run to pinch hitter Nieuwenhuis, giving the Mets their margin of victory.
Before I finish talking about the bullpen, though, I’d also like to point my finger at the other complicitous parties in this fiasco—Mike Rizzo and Matt Williams.
Rizzo shares the blame because it’s been obvious since before the season began that the bullpen would be a weakness—indeed, perhaps the team’s most critical weakness—yet he’s done very little to address that weakness. The loss of Rafael Soriano to free agency, of Tyler Clippard and Jerry Blevins to trades, and of Craig Stammen to injury left a bullpen that had only been mediocre in 2014 severely decimated. The attempt to patch it with Casey Janssen, Blake Treinen, Tanner Roark, and Felipe Rivero was less than successful. At the trade deadline, he failed to bring back Clippard, instead letting him go to the rival Mets, and his acquisition of Papelbon might have undermined the previously successful Storen. More ambitious possible acquisitions, such as Chapman or Kimbrel, were not pursued.
Regarding Williams, all I can say is that an overwhelming sense of dread came over me when, after Storen had given up his first walk, F.P. Santangelo noted that this inning was up to Storen. No one was warming up in the Nats bullpen. Why not?!! With September call-ups, the bullpen was filled with fresh arms. After that first walk, Storen was missing the zone wildly and wasn’t getting any of his pitches where he wanted them. In a critical one-run game, you can’t let him walk two men to load the bases—the second walk on five pitches, which included a wild pitch—and then ask him to face another batter. Bring in someone else—A.J. Cole or Doug Fister or Matt Grace or Rafael Martin or Sammy Solis—somebody who will throw strikes. Storen walked in the tying run on four stinking pitches, none of them close.
Although the Nats’ bullpen hasn’t been good in recent seasons, it’s always been a pen that could be counted on to throw strikes and not give up walks. In 2013 the Nats’ bullpen had the third-best walk rate in the NL, in 2014 the second best, and in the first half of 2015 they again had the second-best walk rate in the league. So it was disconcerting to see that in tonight’s disastrous 7th inning, the six runs scored on only three hits, but six walks! The first pitch to 10 of the 12 Mets batters was a ball, and six of them got ahead 2–0, while four got ahead 3–0. It’s just really hard to pitch well if you’re never ahead in the count. I don’t know exactly what went wrong, but Treinen, Rivero, and Storen seemed to all have a collective case of bad nerves that was making them miss their locations.
The Nats are now in a really deep hole, and if they are swept tomorrow, their post-season hopes will effectively be extinguished.
For the last two weeks, I’ve posted estimates of how many games the Nats will need to win the rest of the way in order to beat the Mets.
This week, the teams are playing first of two head-to-head series which will have a significant impact on the outcome. So this time, I’ve decided to tweak my calculations to show how the team’s performance in these head-to-head match ups will affect the performance needed in their non-head-to-head games.
My starting point, as it was in my earlier two posts, is to make my calculations conditional on the Mets doing as well as expected in their remaining games. I’m looking at two statistics sites, Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus. Fortunately, they agree almost exactly on the Mets expected performance (though Fangraphs is more optimistic than BP about the Nats). Both sites expect the Mets to win on average (based on repeated simulations) about 89.5 games.
This time I’m going to split out the non-head-to-head games. Both teams (as of Saturday September 5th) have 28 games left to play. With 6 head-to-head games, that leaves 22 non-head-to-head games. The reasonable assumption is that these simulations are assuming that the Nats and Mets split their 6 head-to-head games, which means that they expect the Mets to win 12.5 of their remaining 22 non-head-to-head games.
So, rounding up and assuming that the Mets go 13–9 in their remaining non-head-to-head games, I calculate the following based on how the Nats do in the head-to-head match ups:
- If they split the head-to-head 3 games each, then the Nats would need to go 19–3 in their remaining non-head-to-head games. That’s pretty unlikely, so the Nats need to do better than split the head-to-head. (The other possible way to win would be if the Mets collapsed and did much more poorly than expected, but given their easy schedule, that’s a slim hope.)
- If the Nats win 4 of 6 in the head-to-head games, then they would need to go 17–5 in non-head-to-head games to beat the Mets. That’s still tough, but certainly more plausible than going 19–3. Winning 4 of the head-to-head match ups seems like the minimum acceptable goal for the Nats.
- If the Nats win 5 of 6, then they would need to go 15–7 in their non-head-to-head games. That’s roughly equivalent to winning two-thirds of their remaining games, and with a relatively easy schedule, that seems feasible.
- If the Nats sweep all 6 head-to-head games, then they’d need to go 13–9 in their non-head-to-head games. Sweeping the head-to-head games would clearly be the best route to try to guarantee a division championship.
So we see how critical this week’s series against the Mets will be. If the Nats fail to win at least two, they will find themselves on the periphery of the race, with little chance of contending. If they go 2–1, they’ll stay in the race, but still at fairly long odds. If they manage to sweet the series, they’ll vault directly into a tight race for the division championship. They need to go for the sweep!
In the Washington Post’s “Fancy Stats” column, Neil Greenberg wrote, “the Nats find themselves 6 1/2 games behind the Mets… taking [Bryce] Harper out of the MVP conversation.” He then analyzed several other candidates (basing his analysis on FanGraphs’ wins above replacement) and concluded that Clayton Kershaw, last year’s NL MVP, was the most viable candidate.
Now, ordinarily I try to avoid paying attention to the MVP and other awards until the last couple of weeks of the season. With 20% of the season remaining, it’s likely that some of the candidates will go into a slump or that other players will experience hot streaks and emerge as viable candidates. But in this case, Greenberg’s analysis was just so faulty that I’m going to break my own rule and write about the MVP race, based on the current statistics.
Greenberg’s biggest mistake was to place too much emphasis on the tendency of voters to avoid voting for players on non-playoff teams while ignoring their tendency to avoid voting for pitchers. While Greenberg noted that only 6 of 41 MVPs since 1994 have come from non-playoff teams,* he failed to mention that only 2 have been pitchers (Kershaw and Verlander).
*(Note: he should have said 6 of 40 MVPs since 1995, since no playoffs were held in 1994. The 6 from non-playoff teams were Walker 1997, Bonds 2001 and 2004, ARod 2003, Howard 2006, and Pujols 2008.)
He also used the version of fWAR that is based on fielding independent pitching (FIP), whereas actual voters tend to pay more attention to ERA. If he’d used the version of WAR based on runs allowed, Zack Greinke would be well ahead of Kershaw.
Here’s a link to the FanGraphs chart showing the leaders based on a 50/50 weighting of FIP and runs allowed. Right now (August 29), the leaders are:
- Bryce Harper 7.5
- Zack Greinke 6.6
- Paul Goldschmidt 6.2
- Clayton Kershaw 6.2
- Joey Votto 5.9
- A.J. Pollock 5.5
- Andrew McCutchen 5.3
- Jake Arrieta 5.3
- Anthony Rizzo 4.8
- Buster Posey 4.8
In a recent article, Joe Posnanski made an interesting observation about WAR statistics and the MVP contest. He noted that since WAR statistics have been widely available (roughly the last 7 years), the leaders in WAR haven’t been any more likely to win the MVP than they were in the past. They’ve always won about half the MVP awards. What’s changed, according Posnanski, is that the availability of WAR has driven out the quirky winners, who somehow built an MVP argument despite not playing that well overall. He notes that “Since 2008, which is just about when WAR and similar complex statistics started to become mainstream, every single MVP has finished Top 5 in WAR.”
In other words, before WAR became available someone like Kendrys Morales might have made his way into the MVP discussion because of his RBIs (89, currently 3rd in the AL) while playing for a division-leading team, even though his WAR (1.6) and other statistics (.287/.355/.464) are not MVP quality. Posnanski observes that the availability of WAR has driven those types of candidates out of the discussion. Consequently, I’m going to limit my discussion of the NL race to the 10 players listed above.
Based on their current statistics, several players can easily be excluded. Goldschmidt and Votto don’t play for playoff-bound teams and their batting statistics are clearly comparable—and inferior—to Harper’s. It would be really hard to vote for either of them ahead of Bryce. Similarly, Pollock also plays for a non-playoff team and his case is too closely tied to advanced fielding statistics, about which many voters remain skeptical.
Three pitchers—Greinke, Kershaw, and Arrieta—have a case. I note, however, that the only two pitchers who have won the MVP in the last 20 years have each dominated their league, so having three viable pitching candidates probably works against them all. I’ll also note that the “Tango Tiger Cy Young Points,” which are tracked on baseballmusings.com, are a better guide than WAR to voters’ evaluation of pitchers. In addition to runs allowed, strikeouts, and walks, the formula includes factors like wins, losses, and shutouts, which are not included in either of the FanGraphs pitching WAR formulas. Greinke has a lead over the other two pitchers in Cy Young Points and will probably also receive some MVP support, though I doubt it will be enough to overcome the bias against giving the MVP to a pitcher.
McCutchen and Rizzo will also get some support, and if the Giants manage to make the playoffs, I can see Posey drawing quite a bit of support. But at this point, basically none of the playoff-bound candidates appear to have an especially compelling case.
Turning to Bryce, while the Nats’ poor performance definitely hurts his case, I still think he’s a pretty strong MVP candidate. He fits the profile of past non-playoff bound MVP winners—great hitters who are pretty clearly the best hitter in the league. In the absence of a compelling rival, I’d still consider him at this point to be the leader in the MVP race. He won’t get unanimous support—some voters simply refuse to vote for a player on a non-playoff bound team—but if the vote were held today, I tend to think he’s the likely winner. Of course, there’s a lot of baseball left to play over the next 5 weeks, so we’ll take another look at the race later.
Last week I provided some calculations on how many games the Nats need to win to beat the Mets. Since that post went up, the Nats have done pretty well, winning the last 2 games against the Diamondbacks and taking 2 of 3 against the Padres, before falling to the Marlins last night. Going 4–2 is close to the 29–12 pace that I suggested that they would need.
The problem is that the Mets did even better, going 6–1, so the Nats fell 1.5 games further behind, making it even harder for them to catch up. As I said, my calculations were based on the Mets doing as expected, and if they stay super-hot it will basically be impossible for the Nats to catch up.
So let’s suppose the Mets revert to “expected” performance. Both FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus now expect the Mets to end the season with 90 wins. For the Nats to win 91, they would now need to go 27–8 the rest of the way. While not impossible, it’s clearly improbable. What that means is that in addition to needing to play exceptionally well, the Nats now need to count on a Mets collapse.
The Nats could help the Mets collapse, of course, if can sweep the 6 remaining head-to-head games (or at least take 5 of them). Collapses are actually not that uncommon – at least 28 teams have failed to make the playoffs after having odds of 90% or better. (That list includes both the 2007 and 2008 Mets!)
So the Nats shouldn’t be written off yet, but to come back they really need to continue to step up their performance (especially the starting pitching) and they need to start getting luckier in their timing and in close games. (Since the most recent Mets series began on July 31, the Nats have gone 1–5 in one run games.)
August 9, 2015
Memorandum for: Matt Williams
Subject: Following up on overuse of setup man
My last memo pointed out that your use of Drew Storen four times in a five-day interval may have contributed to the lack of command that resulted in a game-losing grand slam home run given up to Carlos Gonzalez.
Two days later, Storen was again called on to pitch in the 8th inning, this time in a tie game, and gave up the game-losing runs. If four appearances in five days was excessive, then five appearances in seven days also seems excessive, especially when he had been called on to face 7 batters and throw 23 pitches in his last appearance. Today, again, he exhibited poor command, hitting a batter. I note that there were at least a couple of well rested pitchers available who haven’t been used for several days.
During and after the Mets series, you were severely criticized for failing to use Storen and Jonathan Papelbon when the game was tied. While this criticism was correct, it should also be emphasized that attempting to use these two pitchers in the late innings of every game that is tied or has up to a 3-run lead in the late innings will lead to overuse. It is therefore essential that the first priority should be not overusing or underusing any of your pitchers; the goal of using your best pitchers in high leverage situations has to be subsidiary to this priority.
I’ll also note that if you had refrained from using Storen in Friday’s game, which was not a high leverage situation, he would have been well rested for today’s game, which was indeed a very high leverage situation.
August 7, 2015
Memorandum for: Matt Williams
Subject: Overuse of setup man
Tonight the Nats gave up a 4 to 1 lead in the 8th inning when Drew Storen allowed a one-out walk, then a pair of two-out singles followed by a grand slam hit by Carlos Gonzalez.
Storen was having obvious command problems all inning. The reason for the command problems also seems fairly obvious—he’s had to pitch on 3 of the last 4 days (the 6th, 4th, and 3rd).
Before the 8th inning, both Storen and Tanner Roark were warming up. Bob & FP informed us that Storen would pitch if the lead stayed at 3 runs, whereas Roark would pitch if the Nats scored an additional run. Roark had pitched on 2 of the last 4 days (the 5th and and the 3rd) and had not pitched yesterday. Although a 3-run lead is a save situation and would make Storen eligible to earn a hold, it is not a high leverage situation. It doesn’t make sense to overuse one of your two best relievers just so he can earn a hold.
I recommend that you start worrying more about the potential overuse of your pitchers and less about whether an arbitrary statistical threshold designates this as an inning for the setup man.
Nats Noodles 