Playoff whiff isn’t anything new for Nats
As the Washington Nationals’ season comes to its quiet conclusion, one of the more puzzling aspects of this year’s team is that they never seemed to be that bad. At times, they seemed stuck in the mud of mediocrity, unable to extricate themselves for more than a couple days at a time. But that they never rose to greatness did not mean they plummeted into total ineptitude. As of Thursday morning, they owned a run differential of 94. Among teams still in contention, the Colorado Rockies, Milwaukee Brewers and St. Louis Cardinals all outscored opponents less.
So how, then, did these Nationals end up so far from a playoff spot that they could sell off pieces by late August? And how disappointing is this team, historically?
To begin with the latter question, their playoff whiff is not unprecedented.
The last team to miss the playoffs with a run differential of 80 or more is the 2014 Seattle Mariners. Before that season, teams with run differentials of 90 or more failed to make the playoffs in 11 of 12 seasons. The league introduced a second wild card team in 2012.
But the miss is puzzling because, at least on an individual level, the Nationals didn’t grossly underperform. Though injuries undoubtedly perforated this team’s potential, particularly in the first half, the combined performance of its roster will not be far from what it was in 2017. As of Thursday morning, the Nationals have accumulated 23.7 offensive Wins Above Replacement, according to FanGraphs. In 2017, they accumulated 25.3 WAR.
As of Thursday, the Nationals pitching staff had accumulated 15.7 pitching Wins Above Replacement. The 2017 staff accumulated 20.8 WAR. The mediocrity of the rotation outside Max Scherzer certainly contributed to the difference, and the gap is substantial. But whenonecombines offensive and pitching WAR into one inexact, but contextually useful overall mark, these Nationals earned far fewer wins per Win Above Replacement on its roster than last season’s group.
Wins per WAR is not a statistic used by brilliant baseball minds, but it serves a purpose here. If one considers WAR a measure of talent, and wins a measure of how one uses that talent, one could argue that the more wins a team accumulates per Wins Above Replacement on its roster, the more efficiently it has turned talent into wins. When compared with teams since 2000, the Nationals’ Wins per WARratio is nowhere near the lowest of the last two decades. Even with the talent this team showcased this year, many teams have done less with more.
Then what explains the Nationals’ mediocrity? Their manager continues to reference “the little things,” and a few of his veteran players have suggested the same. Their offense has been in the league’s upper third. Even their pitching, disappointing by the franchise’s standards, was not debilitating. Perhaps the difference lies on the bases and in the field, both places where the Nationals have made more mistakes than they should have this season - both places where they conceded enough runs to makeadifference in the 24 one-run games they lost. Had they won even half of those, they would have won the National League East by four games.