Saturday, August 10, 2013
The Baseball Show: A wild week
Just because the Nats aren't winning a lot of games, doesn't mean it hasn't been interesting. The last week provided plenty to talk about on Friday's Baseball Show, as Mark, Jim and this week's host Michael Jenkins covered a variety of topics. In the first video above, they talk about Jayson Werth's comments this week and if the Nats should start looking towards next season.
In the second video below, the crew talks about Ryan Zimmerman and his potential move to first base. This week Davey Johnson acknowledged the idea that had been previously just been speculation.
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A good article on ESPN on where the Nats went wrong.
http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/38962/where-did-the-nationals-go-wrong
Reposting from an earlier thread:
All the preseason predictions and bravado have made the Nats' failure much tougher on us fans, but I honestly don't think they had an impact on the players performance. They just aren't as good as everyone thought. It's never easy to win consistently over 162 games, and the Nats just didn't have the spark this year. Plus, their hitting stinks.
Now, whether the overconfidence had an impact on how hard they worked on fundamentals is another story. It's clear they didn't fix some obvious weaknesses from last year, most notably the inability to prevent opposing teams from stealing bases, and to lay down sacrifice bunts consistently. I don't know if that's due to a "country club" spring training that was the byproduct of "World Series or bust" or not.
It's also possible that Davey was affected by preseason expectations, to the team's detriment. He seemed to manage as if an offensive explosion and a lights out bullpen was just around the corner, rather than fighting to win each and every game, one run at a time. He expected that Zim's throwing would be fine by June, that Espi would figure things out, that ALR would overcome his slow start, that H-Rod would find himself if he kept on running him out there (I'm still in pain over the May game he gave away against the Braves), etc etc etc.
I was looking for a friend's email address, and found an exchange from almost exactly a year ago -- August 9, 2012. On that day she emailed me about the possibility of getting playoff tickets. How times change.
5c3... @ 1:12 p.m.,
Thanks for the tip; I might quibble on a couple of minor points of emphasis, but it's a good, unbiased summation of what's happened this season.
It's definitely a good summary of what's gone wrong (though I'd quibble about Gio being a big factor), but, of course, it doesn't explain why. That's the $64,000 and perhaps unanswerable question. The one person who needs to figure out the answer or answers, and fix it or them, is Mike Rizzo.
Thanks for the link @5c3cd06e-cef8-11e1-abe6-000bcdcb2996.
Well you all probably know my opinion often stated from spring training on. The Span trade was a monumental mistake. They lost an excellent top pitching prospect and really got very little in return. It then had a domino effect of then they had to do away with Morse while not setting up Tyler Moore to replace him almost every day in the lineup resulted directly from that trade. Relying on Adam LaRoche to repeat what was an outlier year that came because he got most of a season to rest his sore back while recovering from surgery.
And then? Zimmerman never completely recovering from his shoulder surgery during the offseason ... he didn't get the rest and rehab that LaRoche received. Harper getting injured and regressing offensively so that he is now pathetic against left-handed pitching didn't help. One of the biggest blows was Espinosa refusing to get the rotator cuff / shoulder repaired as Zimmerman and LaRoche did. Even with the strike outs his bat was a force with 37 doubles 2 triples and 17 home runs in 2012. He became much less effective after his injury but his defense continued to be stellar.
Other contending teams had similar issues but their bench and farm system depth came to the rescue. The Nats system definite lacks the depth many of the better farm systems especially those at the top have. And it certainly was highlighted by this season.
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