One goal, two different plans for getting it
Nationals hope to ride ace Scherzer to win, but Brewers will lean on many
WASHINGTON — The Washington Nationals and Milwaukee Brewers have opposite approaches to the question of how best to win with pitching.
The Nationals will start ace Max Scherzer on Tuesday and hope he goes as deep into the National League wild-card game as he possibly can. The Brewers will start Brandon Woodruff, their ace on the mend, and likely lift him after around 40 pitches — at which point the bullpen will become a revolving door. The Brewers match up with relievers as much as any team in baseball.
“It’s basically like we’re starting in the sixth inning with their pitching staff,” Nationals right fielder Adam Eaton said. “There’s nothing we can do to prepare for that.”
The contrasting philosophies on display for the one-game playoff reflect the heart of these organizations. The Nationals, principally owned by the richest family in baseball, committed $525 million to three starting pitchers — Stephen Strasburg, Patrick Corbin and Scherzer — and rode them here. The small-market Brewers cobbled together one of the sport’s better bullpens on largely inexpensive deals and deployed it liberally to string together 20 wins in their past 24 games and eke into the postseason. They paid their entire pitching staff $39.2 million this season, according to Baseball Prospectus, which is only slightly more than Strasburg ($38.3 million) and Scherzer ($37.4 million) will earn this year alone.
The answer to which approach works best — quality or quantity — could play an outsize role in who advances to the NL Division Series against the top-seeded Los Angeles Dodgers. Both teams expressed confidence in their way, but Brewers manager Craig Counsell didn’t believe one was better.
“Playoff teams should be different; I think that’s cool,” he said. “Teams have to play to their strengths (and take advantage of their personnel). … Our depth and our numbers are what makes our pitching good, and that’s how we’re going to treat games.”
If Counsell had the Nationals’ roster, he would manage accordingly. He called Scherzer a probable Hall of Famer and intimated that, if Woodruff were further along in his return from injury, he’d probably lean more heavily on him, too. The Brewers’ star righthander tossed six scoreless innings against the Nationals in May, but he missed two months with an oblique strain and has thrown fewer than 40 pitches in each of his two starts since. Whether Scherzer can get into the sixth or seventh inning and deliver an acecaliber start is unclear. He has been shaky since returning from injuries of his own — a balky back sidelined him for six weeks — though he has had eight starts since and feels 100 percent. Manager Dave Martinez will apparently afford him some leeway; he intimated Sunday that he wouldn’t lift his starter at the first sign of trouble.
But Scherzer could need relief early. If he does, Martinez must make hard decisions. He could go with regular relievers, who said they will be available from the first inning on, or Strasburg or Corbin. Even if this doesn’t happen, the Brewers said they would feel more confident the longer Scherzer stays in.
“If he’s throwing well, he’s obviously one of the best pitchers in the game,” Brewers infielder Travis Shaw said. “But if you can get multiple shots at a pitcher, (no matter who it is), it benefits the hitter.”
Whenever the Nationals go to the bullpen, they forfeit any advantage Scherzer might have given them. The Brewers’ bullpen is a welloiled machine, refined by the fire of their playoff push. It features three versatile, dominant lefties in Josh Hader (one of baseball’s toughest matchups for years), Brent Suter (NL reliever of the month for September) and Drew Pomeranz (a once-struggling starter who went to the bullpen and became Haderlite). Their top high-leverage righthanders are Junior Guerra and Jay Jackson.
The Nationals’ bullpen is still undefined. Washington doesn’t have the lefthanded specialist it acquired at the deadline (Roenis Elías, out with a hamstring injury), and its relievers aren’t locked into definite roles. Strasburg, seemingly the Nationals’ first option in relief, has never appeared out of the bullpen. Their second choice, Corbin, has but not regularly in three years.
Closer Sean Doolittle proposed normalizing the situation for starters-turned-relievers as much as possible by only using them to start innings. If Scherzer, for example, left with two on and one out, let a reliever familiar in those spots “clean that up.” Doolittle emphasized he felt confident no matter what, that the team will have three pitchers who will receive Cy Young Award votes available, but it’s all about what button to push and when.
“These are the questions that you have to think about,” he said. “You want to use your strengths, but where is that line where you’re putting somebody too far outside their comfort zone?”