We have touched on an underlying problem with this Washington Nationals team in several articles including after Monday’s game. The bullpen and bench continue to provide too much negative production. Yes, there was a brief period after April 13 that the bullpen had come around. But now we are seeing those same issues again.
No, it’s not time for panic when you’re one game under .500. But it is unfortunate. The Nats should have been making hay while the sun shined brilliantly on Nationals Park this week. Those May flowers wilted quickly in June as the team flopped in the 3-game series against the Marlins and have an 0-3 record in the month of June. It seems the Nats are allergic to the Fish.
The weak links have long been exposed on this team. The good news is that they are few in number. And while Brady House was demoted to Triple-A two weeks ago, he wasn’t the biggest issue on the roster. While the demotion was warranted, there have been others who either need to show quick improvement or they need to leave the roster. We are talking about (listed alphabetically) Andres Chaparro, Cole Henry, Mitchell Parker, Jorbit Vivas, and Jose Tena.
If we can talk about Chaparro, Vivas, Tena, and even Nasim Nunez, they make up 31 percent of the active position player roster. Collectively, they have four home runs, and that is half of what Jacob Young (8 home runs) has this season, and that group has 486 plate appearances compared to Young’s 211 PAs. And by the way, Tena has three of that group’s four homers.
But here’s the issue, that group swings for the fences, has a negative WAR as a group, and besides Nunez’s defense and baserunning, provides negative value. And speaking about coaching, why do Vivas and Nunez swing for the fences doing their worst impression of Ken Griffey Jr.? It’s been going on too long. Chaparro is batting .190, Nunez is batting .191, Tena is batting .216, and Vivas is batting .232 — and his RISP batting average is .000 in a 0-25 complete failure.
And if you want to look at trends, Tena is 4-for-his-last-41 batting .098 with a .335 OPS. He provides no defensive or run value. Vivas is batting .163 since May 1st in 49 at-bats. Nunez is 8-for-his-last-55 batting .145 with a .353 OPS. Combined they are 20-145 and are batting .137 in that span. What are we doing here?
Nunez was actually viable last year as a singles hitter batting .232 with a .297 OBP. Somewhere and somehow, he or the team thinks he’s a power hitter. That swing is long and actually has good bat speed — but none of his batted balls this year have reached the heights of the wall and most are just can-of-corn flyball outs in the shallow outfield. How is this acceptable?
Then you have a bullpen where Parker was once looking like the answer and is now back to being a question … again. He could still be fixable, but right now he is struggling with control. And did Henry earn his way back?
By the numbers, in Parker’s last 17.0 innings, his ERA is 7.71 and the FIP is 8.03. He’s had three blown saves in that span. And for Henry, since April 7, his ERA is 12.71 with one blown save.
Each of the games in the Miami series were winnable but the bullpen allowed each to go from a tie, or 1-run deficit to unreachable. But some would correctly say you need to score a few more runs when the team averaged only 2.33 runs per game in the series. And the RISP batting averages sunk further to the point that the team dropped to a poor .235. Again, we don’t want to pounce on small sample sizes but we expect better than .231 from James Wood, and Daylen Lile‘s .141 won’t cut it.
Lile’s three slumps this season have been helped by some hot streaks, but if you removed his hometown hero 3-gamer in Cincinnati, his WAR for the rest of the season is only +0.3. His issue is clearly what we saw in his first stint in MLB last year that he is trying to pull everything for power, and the scouting report is that you get him out on chases away. So add Lile to the list that the coaching staff has to fix.
The bulk pitchers are the reason the Nats have been in these games recently. The bullpen, bench struggles, and lack of RISP hitting have been the problem recently. On Tuesday’s postgame on 106.7 The Fan, Grant Paulsen, Charlie Slowes, and Dave Jageler called into question the pinch-hitting for Young with the cold Tena. But why are you batting Vivas in the late innings in RISP spots unless you bet on the law of averages. Not to be redundant — he’s 0-for-25 now in RISP spots.!!!! He couldn’t even make a productive out to score a runner from third base with less than two outs in the series.
Again, no time for panic. No time to make a hockey line change which is usually 3-to-5 players at a time. But as we said a few times, the déjà vu to unhappier times is not good for the fan base as well as the players who want to win.
While we constantly ask “Why are they here?” as a question on some of the aforementioned players, we know that some subscribe to the theory of “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” when the team had a winning record. Maybe the guy who makes the decisions, Paul Toboni, thinks those players can be fixed. Isn’t that what the minor leagues are for? Or if the player doesn’t have options, just DFA them and move forward.
Change is needed either by coaching up these players or replacing them. There is no excuse to be betting on the law of averages because when you allow 25 failures in a row that is the definition of insanity.
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