The Nationals Need Help. Big Time Help
No new troubles for the Nationals bullpen, just the inevitable once more.
“We need help. We need help big time.”
To know what manager Dusty Baker thought after the end of Monday’s Nationals-Braves game, just read the two sentences above. He didn’t mince words this time, he wasn’t refusing to kick the bullpen while they were down. Those three words “we need help” says more than almost anything Baker has said thus far in a Nationals uniform.
It’s not about the losses. The Nationals are 13 games over .500, an excellent spot to be in at this point in the season. They’re also leading the terrible NL East by 8.5 games, again, in excellent position to clinch the division even this early. Their playoff projections look great, and they have one of the best records in the National League.
But losses like Monday’s take a toll on a club. It leaks into the fan base. Most fans get nervous in the late innings in close ballgames. But when the bullpen door opens for the Nationals, the feeling is different. The stadium hushes a little, and a sense of dread, not nervousness, washes over the crowd. At home, fans take to Twitter. It’s the same thought for everyone, whether they watch it unfold live or on the screen. Here we go again.
It permeates the clubhouse. It’s become a constant distraction. Dusty deals with bullpen questions nearly every night as the losses pile up. It’s costing the starters wins, which matter to some more than others, but more importantly, it’s costing the club games.
The starters do their job. The batters do theirs. But the bullpen lets the game slip away nonetheless. They move on, play the next six innings, and wait for it to happen again.
The frustration has started to bubble, as Bryce Harper reacted after Monday’s game.
It’s not really a matter of if. It’s a matter of when, and how much. Will it be the seventh? The eighth? If they still lead in the ninth it’s only a matter of time. The sense of dread becomes inevitable, and once the floodgates open up there’s no stopping them. It could be just two runs… or five… but eventually someone’s going to give.
After Monday, they have two fewer blown saves than the MLB leaders — the New York Mets and Tampa Bay Rays. They have more than the Philadelphia Phillies, and the same number as the Seattle Mariners.
The lowest ERA in the group belongs to Matt Albers at 2.10, who’s ERA jumped up a full point after he was lit up yesterday in the ninth. As it stands, Albers and fellow non-roster-invitee Enny Romero have been two of their most effective pitchers out of the bullpen, along with career minor leaguer Matt Grace who has just 26 2/3 innings under his belt. Of the three best relievers, only Albers has an ERA below 3.00.
From there it gets ugly quickly. Long man Jacob Turner has a 4.43, and would-be closer Koda Glover owns a 5.12. Closer choices Blake Treinen and Shawn Kelley have 6.33 and 7.16 ERA’s respectively, and key free agent signing Joe Blanton is the worst on the staff with an 8.78 ERA. All told, the bullpen has been worth -0.5 fWAR, good for second to last in all of baseball and worst in the National League.
As far as FIP (fielding independent pitching, which only takes HR, BB, and K into account and scales like ERA) the staff looks a little better. Koda Glover has a good 2.64 FIP, meaning luck has possibly reared its head when it comes to giving up runs. Lefty Matt Grace also improves, from a 4.05 ERA to a 3.71 FIP, and Blake Treinen’s FIP is almost two points better than his ERA. At the same time, key pieces like Shawn Kelley are significantly worst in FIP (8.68 FIP to 7.16 ERA).
Entering the 2017 season, the Nationals bullpen was not supposed to be excellent. They did not splurge on a big name free agent closer as some thought they might (though they were in on Kenley Jansen and Mark Melancon) but they did go out and get excellent setup man Joe Blaton, who looks completely lost this year. In fact, Blanton was one of the best pitchers in baseball last season, but a combination of DL stints and lack of command makes him one of the worst in the game in 2017.
Blanton evidently was not enough. First Treinen was supposed to close, but he lost his job quickly. Then it was Kelley before he lost it. Glover looked sharp until his ERA bloomed over 5.00 after a couple bad outings. Now apparently Matt Albers is closing games, but that didn’t work Monday either.
People can play the blame game, and whether they fault GM Mike Rizzo, manager Dusty Baker, or the bullpen as a whole, there’s no real reason a bullpen so similar to last year’s should be this bad. Players aren’t stepping up, and when they come out of the bullpen each time, they know the reputation, they know how important those two or three outs they need to get are. And as of right now they can’t get it done.
So why has the bullpen been this bad?
The question doesn’t come by the sheer number of runs (or earned runs for that matter) but the rate of which they are giving up runs. Their bullpen ERA of 5.11 sticks out like a huge sore thumb, but they’ve only given up 104 runs, good for 13th fewest in baseball. Their 99 earned runs are the 14th fewest in baseball.
The problem lies in the number of innings pitched. As a whole, they’ve pitched the fewest innings of any bullpen in baseball, 13 fewer than the Cardinals. So while they are pitching less, they are giving up as many runs as mediocre bullpens pitching 200+ innings. Fewer bullpen innings means more innings for the starters, which could pose problems down the road in the playoffs.
For the Nationals, bullpen problems are rooted in giving up home runs. It’s part of the reason there was such a huge difference between their ERA and FIP. Some pitchers (like Glover, Grace, and Treinen) are barely giving up home runs at all. All three have HR/9 ratios of under 1.00, which is excellent.
On the other side, you have pitchers like Kelley and Blanton who seem to give up home runs on a daily basis, and indeed they both have HR/9 ratios over 4.00. The staff as a whole has a baseball worst 1.65 HR/9 ratio and a league worst 16.3 percent HR/FB ratio.
In terms of strikeouts and walks, they are actually surprisingly fine. Their 21.9% strikeout rate is around league average, and their 8.2 percent BB% is good for seventh lowest in baseball. Their K/BB ratio is 2.67, again around league average.
But the Nationals bullpen has the third worst batting average against in baseball at .266. The hits, combined with the walks, produce the eighth worst WHIP in baseball, with 1.42 runners reaching per inning.
When you combine an extremely high WHIP with a tendency to let batters hit home runs, you face a serious problem, as the team not only gives up solo shots but multi-run home runs, which can narrow and destroy leads in the late innings very quickly. In fact, 14 of their 32 home runs allowed have come with runners on base, accounting for nearly half of all home runs.
Casey Boguslaw has pointed out the Nationals have been unlucky this year using his statistic — Barrel FIP. As the ERA-FIP difference of +0.32 shows, the Nationals have been giving up more runs than expected thanks to their defense, but it goes even further than that. The difference of 1.10 between the bullpen ERA and the bullpen Barrel FIP (which uses barrels instead of home runs to calculate the FIP) shows that they have been extremely unlucky. It is the largest difference between ERA and Barrel FIP of any team, showing they may be even more unlucky than what regular FIP displays.
Still, a 4.01 Barrel FIP is not a stat to be proud of either. It’s a start though, and the Nationals bullpen needs all the good news it can get right now. With Koda Glover back on the DL for the second time this year, the closer’s spot is once again vacant, leading to more confusion in the bullpen once again. The lack of trust in the bullpen means starters are going more innings (second most in baseball) which could have consequences in the postseason and beyond.
The bullpen was a key piece for the Nationals last year, and now it has become a liability impossible to ignore, for both players and fans alike. They’ll fix what they can at the trade deadline, but a mid-season bullpen overhaul is almost certainly out of the question. Right now they don’t just need one player to right the ship, they’ll need more, and doing so means giving up more prospects and sacrificing the future for the present.
These bullpen issues are nothing new for the ball club, but it’s never really been this bad, and they’ll certainly be shopping at the trade deadline. They need all the help they can get right now.
