Last night, the Nationals lost 5-4 to the Dodgers, dropping to 56-50 and falling 5 1/2 games behind the Braves in the NL East race. That record is still far ahead of what you might project from their runs scored (408) and allowed (434), which mark them as a sub-.500 club. The Adjusted Standings Report, which considers that and more, calls the Nationals a “true” 49-57 team.
The Nationals’ second-half swoon should not come as a surprise. This was never a great baseball team, despite being the “It Boys” of baseball for a few weeks in June. A run of good fortune–and poor competition–in one-run games helped the Nationals push their record over .500 while they were just barely outscoring their opponents on the season. Once the good fortune ended, so did their run atop the NL East. The Nationals have lost nine straight one-run games, and now have a 24-19 record in those contests. Since their last one-run win, over the Phillies on July 8, the Nats are 4-16 overall, but have been outscored just 79-53 in that stretch. It’s just the reverse of their outcomes for much of the first half, and just as there was no underlying reason for them to go 24-8 in one-run games, there’s no underlying reason for them to be 0-9 since. That’s just the way one-run games go; the outcomes are generally unrelated to team quality. (See the chart at the bottom of the column for more on this.)
Baseball is not a morality play. There’s no good and bad way to play, and you don’t win or lose because you adopt or reject a particular style. All the ex post facto analysis of the Nationals that talked about their bullpen, their ballpark, their fundamentals, their clutchness, their veterans who had been through so much in Montreal and who now got to play in front of big, enthusiastic crowds…that was all a mirage. The Nationals were in first place because they’d played with about the quality of a .500 team, and they’d been fortunate in close games.
In baseball, you win by being good at scoring runs and preventing them. In the short term, you might distribute those runs in a way that inflates or deflates your record, but those two skills are going to dictate your final record more often than not. If your record is disconnected from your run differential, you can usually bet that the former will find its way back in line with the latter in short order.
That’s what has happened to the Nationals. They’re the same team they were in the first half, just with a bit less good fortune, and now with a lot fewer people paying attention.
The difference between the Nationals and, say, the White Sox is that the White Sox, while playing well in one-run games (23-11), are also playing very well outside of those contests (46-25). Moreover, there are considerable underlying reasons for the overall success the Sox are having–improved team defense, much improved home-run rates for their pitchers, both of which contributed to excellent run prevention–that aren’t in play for the Nationals. They have a lousy offense, and once you strip away the park effects, their pitching staff isn’t much to look at. They’re 11th in the NL in K/BB, 15th in strikeout rate.
The NL East being what it is, the Nationals could find themselves in last place by the end of the weekend. That is, of course, where most people projected them to finish, albeit not with a record of around .500. They’ve provided some good copy this year, to be sure, but by the end of the season, they’re just going to be another .450 baseball team that got lucky for a little while.
Now, maybe the mainstream press was fooled by the Nationals and I wasn’t. Hooray for me. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been just as wrong about the short-term results put up by other teams. Look back at some of the things I wrote in May, especially about the two teams currently leading the wild-card races. You’ll find me pretty much writing both of them off thanks to their anemic offenses. I made the same mistake with the A’s and Astros that so many people did with the Nationals: overreacted to a snapshot. A baseball season is six months long, and six months is plenty of time for a good team to look very bad and still be successful, and vice versa.
The challenge going forward is going to be finding ways to write interesting baseball content in the first months of the season without overreacting to snapshots. I’ve been associating this problem with April, largely, but let’s face it; it’s very possible for a team to fool us for two months or even half a season. There’s plenty of salient analysis to be done, plenty of good stories to tell, that don’t require jumping to conclusions. If the Nationals, A’s and Astros teach us all anything, it’s that we have to be patient, and balancing patience with the 24-hour media cycle is a challenge that everyone covering the game faces.
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I didn’t want to run this in the middle of the column because it would have been awkward. What follows are two sets of standings: record in one-run games, and record in other games. I think it’s illustrative of the point that the latter is more indicative of team quality than the former.
Record in one-run games is essentially the team version of player performance in whatever clutch situation (late-inning pressure situations, runners in scoring position, et al) you care to measure. It’s not predictive, and is generally unrelated to overall quality. Within a season, however, it is valuable and can be the difference between success and failure.
W L Pct. GB W L Pct. GB
Red Sox 14 9 .608 -- Blue Jays 47 35 .573 --
Yankees 12 10 .545 1.5 Red Sox 46 36 .561 1
Devil Rays 16 14 .533 1.5 Yankees 44 38 .537 3
Orioles 8 13 .380 5 Orioles 43 42 .506 5.5
Blue Jays 7 16 .304 7 Devil Rays 25 52 .325 19.5
White Sox 23 11 .676 -- White Sox 46 25 .648 --
Twins 20 22 .476 7 Indians 39 26 .600 4
Tigers 12 17 .414 8.5 Twins 34 30 .531 9.5
Indians 17 25 .405 10 Tigers 38 38 .500 10.5
Royals 9 18 .333 10.5 Royals 29 50 .367 21
A's 16 12 .571 -- Angels 40 28 .588 --
Angels 21 17 .553 -- A's 44 34 .564 1
Rangers 17 17 .500 4 Rangers 36 35 .507 5.5
Mariners 16 16 .500 4 Mariners 30 43 .411 12.5
Braves 19 15 .559 .5 Braves 43 30 .589 --
Nationals 24 19 .558 -- Marlins 42 33 .560 2
Phillies 13 15 .464 3 Phillies 42 37 .532 4
Mets 12 15 .444 3.5 Mets 42 37 .532 4
Marlins 12 17 .414 4.5 Nationals 32 31 .508 6
Astros 16 13 .551 -- Cardinals 50 18 .735 --
Reds 17 14 .548 -- Astros 42 35 .545 12.5
Cubs 18 15 .545 -- Brewers 37 38 .493 16.5
Cardinals 17 17 .500 1.5 Cubs 36 37 .493 16.5
Brewers 15 17 .469 2.5 Pirates 35 43 .449 20
Pirates 10 19 .345 6 Reds 30 45 .400 23.5
Padres 19 10 .655 -- Diamondbacks 31 41 .431 --
Diamondbacks 21 15 .583 1.5 Dodgers 34 45 .430 .5
Dodgers 14 13 .519 4 Padres 33 44 .429 .5
Giants 14 14 .500 4.5 Giants 31 46 .403 2.5
Rockies 13 17 .433 6.5 Rockies 25 50 .333 12.5
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