To say that the Washington Nationals have been the most disappointing and underachieving team of the past few years is like saying that the Grand Canyon is just a hole in the ground. Something just isn’t clicking in the nation’s capital and it may be time for some sweeping changes in the makeup of the Nationals team.
You can spend a good amount of time looking at the roster of the Washington Nationals and you’ll come away bleary eyed if you are trying to figure out why they are sitting at home and watching the rest of the baseball season.
Go up and down the lineup and ask yourself, where are the holes? You’ve got last year’s runaway MVP in Bryce Harper, who somehow (and that’s the key to watch here) forgot how to hit, and Daniel Murphy, who should have won a batting title but didn’t because the other guy sat down when he shouldn’t have, and Anthony Rendon who provides some run production with 20 HR and 85 RBI. I’m going to stop here because you get the idea.
Add to that the strength of the starting pitching. You have a former Cy Young winner in Max Scherzer who won 20 games for you during the regular season, and Tanner Roark who won 16. You might think that the way the season ended could be cause for asking if maybe this is not the “team” that is needed to progress any further than they have.
The Nationals Need a Good Kick in the Butt
And therein lies the problem of what might easily be the bottom of this debacle. It’s not about talent. The Nationals have at least enough of that. No, it’s something less obvious. It’s about the intangible they call “team chemistry.”
When you talk team chemistry, you always begin with the manager, who in this case is Dusty Baker. In a story recently published by ESPN, Baker is treated kindly: “He takes pride in coming in and getting to know every single player,” says reliever Blake Treinen. “He’s just real attentive, and he holds onto a lot of the little details. That’s a special quality.”
But further on in the same article, we get this from bench coach Chris Speier:
"“Earlier on, this game wore on him,” says bench coach Chris Speier, who also served under Baker in Chicago and Cincinnati. “This time around, he just seems a lot happier and a lot more at peace. And he doesn’t take defeat, doesn’t take losses, doesn’t take down times as hard as he used to.”"
And therein might lie the problem. Because maybe the Nationals don’t need a grandfather who can “relate” to his players. Instead, they might need a drill sergeant to get this team back on track again.
Because if you don’t care about losing as much as you used to, that is a big problem. That outlook will spread like a cancer throughout the clubhouse. And maybe it already has in Washington because it’s hard to find anything in the press indicating that anyone is particularly upset with the way the season turned out and abruptly ended for the Nationals, for two years in a row now.
Dusty Baker is a manager with more than 1,700 wins under his watch. And by all accounts, he’s a decent person. But it’s all a matter of timing. And the timing of Baker’s arrival in Washington was all wrong. Because it would appear that Dusty Baker does not have the energy or desire to jump-start this or any other team at this point in his life.
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Ease him out quickly and find someone with a sense of urgency. Because there’s no other reason for the Nationals not to run the table next season.