It’s Time To Blow Up The Nationals
Washington DC is a city with feelings. It’s not hard to tell what the general thoughts of the city are on any given subject. Unlike most places, most of the conversations in bars and restaurants are pretty similar, it stems from the fact that, unlike most places, most people here work in or adjacent to roughly the same industry. People, generally speaking, have similar interests and experiences day-to-day.
As a result, you can hear the whispers pretty clearly, whether they’re about politics, DC’s semi-recent inclusion in the Michelin Star restaurant rankings, or sports.
Since everyone is from everywhere in DC, people have pretty varied rooting interests when it comes to sports. The city is dotted with bars that become temporary embassies for a city or a team during big games, especially during football season. Buffalo Bills fans congregate together to cheer for their team and meet people from their hometown on fall Sundays the same way University of Alabama (Editor’s note: Tennessee) boosters do on Saturdays.
It’s a cool phenomenon, one that I haven’t seen repeated at nearly DC’s scale anywhere else and something that turns the city into a die-hard college town for 50 different colleges every week.
One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that people tend to adopt DC teams as well. Perhaps because they’re seemingly always not very good and generally nonthreatening, DC residents, who are disproportionately transplants, come to have a gentle fondness for the local teams.
To the great credit of everyone except the local NFL team, DC sports teams are extremely accessible and not prohibitively priced. Attending Nationals games is relatively easy and people tend to do it a lot. Maybe at first they went to see their hometown team when they came through- there are a ton of road team fans at Nats games, especially when the Cubs, Giants, or other big name, big city team arrives- but over time, the Nats became sort of a second team to follow and root for.
This reached its peak between 2012 and 2017, when the team was perennially good and Bryce Harper was the best and most exciting player. But even though Nats fandom might be more casual than for many other teams- the team has only been in DC since 2005- fans are well tuned in to the growing sense of dysfunction around the club.
Matt Williams was not well liked and was not a good choice for manager prior to the 2014 season. The Nats seemingly got swept up in the fervor over 1st time managers who are former players and picked the wrong one. They had a short hook with Williams, firing him after 2015, but it was the right call.
His replacement was met with his own set of questions. Perhaps the only thing less popular than hiring Dusty Baker was letting Baker go just two years later. While Baker is undoubtedly a successful MLB manager, he has a well-earned reputation as an old school kind of guy, not particularly well suited to the modern, analytics obsessed game. He particularly took knocks for his bullpen management.
That said, in the two seasons under Baker, the Nationals won 95 and 97 games. It was an odd decision to move on and fans noticed.
Last season, the Nationals, coming off that 97 win season and second straight NLDS defeat, had sky high hopes and expectations- especially in Bryce Harper’s final season before free agency. They hired Davey Martinez, Joe Maddon‘s bench coach in Chicago and another first time manager, to lead the team.
Famously, the Nationals seriously under-performed, and the trendy 2018 World Series pick (I followed the trend) finished 82-80.
There’s a lot more to get to here, we haven’t even discussed GM Mike Rizzo and his penchant for nailing the big move, like signing Max Scherzer or Patrick Corbin, while simultaneously blowing the small moves so badly that the whole team is torpedoed, but an even more under-the-radar off the field situation has begun to cement this team’s reputation in the community.
I’ve only been to one Nationals game so far this season, but I typically go maybe 10 or 15 games a year. Of those games, I think I actually purchase the tickets to maybe 2. I tend to go a couple games each season with work, and then I have a few friends with season tickets who I go with a handful of times.
Obviously, that’s an awesome way to go to a game- not only is it free but the seats are great, people typically know one another in your section so you make fast friends, the ushers and vendors are particularly friendly and attentive, and you get the inside scoop on what’s going on with the team.
For the last three full seasons, and I mean this, the number one topic of conversation among my Nationals season ticket holding friends while at the games has been the steady and not-so-slow deterioration of the Nats/Fan relationship. Prices have gone up while service has gone down. Season ticket holders, the most important group of fans to a team and a reliable source of significant revenue, are very, very unhappy.
I hear stories of un-returned emails to ticket reps, reps unexpectedly quitting in the middle of resolving an ongoing issue for a ticket holder and not notifying anyone, and other annoyances that are not deal breakers in isolation but contribute to a growing unwillingness to fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars. This is especially true for those for whom season tickets represent their third largest expenditure, after a home and a car.
This contributes to a pervasive feeling around the team of general mismanagement and ineptitude. How hard is it to keep season ticket holders happy? Nats’ games aren’t exactly sold out every night
Fans have rightfully been hesitant to embrace a team that seemingly can’t get out of its own way and that antagonizes the people who want to pay to come see them.
But let’s get back to the on-field product.
The Nats have some of the biggest stars in the game, even with the recent departure of Bryce Harper. Max Scherzer, Patrick Corbin, and Stephen Strasburg make a dynamic top of the rotation and Trea Turner, Anthony Rendon, and Adam Eaton are great players, All Stars even. Moreover, Juan Soto is a 20 year-old star and made Harper’s departure a lot easier to take. They’ve got another blossoming player in the outfield in Victor Robles, too.
GM Mike Rizzo has rightfully gotten a lot of praise for assembling this group of top tier talent. His method for doing so, which involves a ton of deferred money that will have the team paying these players for years or even decades after they stop playing, is either brilliant or insane depending on whom you ask, but its definitely effective for putting the largest collection of stars together at the same time.
And yet Howie Kendrick has spent much of the last couple weeks as the team’s cleanup hitter. Corbin has a sub 3 ERA, Strasburg has been excellent with a 3.32 ERA, Scherzer has gotten off to a rocky start but his ERA is just 3.72 and closer Sean Doolittle has been lights out with a 1.71 ERA (all stats as of 4pm on Sunday) and yet the team ERA is 4.87, which is actually down from where it was. Former first-rounder Eric Fedde has helped stabilize things.
Once you get past the top-flight, household names, the Nationals are horrendous. Sure, injuries happen but any plan that involves a 35 year-old Howie Kendrick in the cleanup spot needs to be thrown out and started again. The Nats have too much riding on a few guys to be both healthy and productive. When those guys aren’t, the middle infield suddenly becomes Wilmer Difo and Brian Dozier‘s worst season for most of the first two months of play.
The Nats have a 19-26 record going in to Sunday night and that’s an accurate reflection of this team.
Here’s the thing though, all of this is excusable. Bullpens are volatile. 5th starters can be tough to come by. A starting shortstop taking a ball off his hand and breaking a finger happens. You can’t do anything about that. But all this happened last year and ruined everything and yet no contingency plan was made.
This is the story of the under preforming 2018 Nationals all over again. The team added Patrick Corbin, who is great, but the GM Rizzo did nothing to improve a dumpster fire of a bullpen and so the fire got even worse. He decided that 35 year old Anibal Sanchez and 32 year old reclamation project Jeremy Hellickson, two fine veterans with absolutely zero chance of exceeding expectations and developing into something more than you think at this point in their careers, were the best options behind his big three starters and they have been a disaster of epic proportions.
There have been injuries and under performance, but that’s part of baseball. Part of the job a GM is to plan for that and put systems in place to ride through the tough stretches. Part of the job of a manager is to rally the troops in times of adversity and keep on going.
Neither Rizzo nor Martinez has proven to be up to the job. Both have failed repeatedly at their most important tasks.
It’s hard to fire a GM when what he built has such a nice facade and ornate decorations- from the outside it looks great- but the truth is that its foundation is crumbling.
It’s hard to fire a manager when what the GM handed him to work with has a crumbling foundation, but he has done nothing to try and patch the holes.
Additionally, neither Rizzo not Martinez is responsible for ticket sales and fan relations, but I brought that up because its part of the puzzle too. There is an organizational rot in the Nationals- not a hole so big that the ship is clearly sinking, but one so that it is undeniably taking on water.
The team has invested a lot of money in its on field product and done so in a way that may actually hinder its ability to compete in 5, 10, or 15 years time. That’s fine, it may even be good, but what it means is that they better make the most out of what they have now, they better win when they have the talent on the field and they better use this chance to build the relationships with fans that they’ll need when times are leaner down the road.
Instead, they’ve turned into a bit of a morbid curiosity, still there but surrounded by nowhere near the energy or vigor that they were 4 years ago.
The novelty of having an MLB franchise in DC has worn off, its been nearly 15 years. It’s not that fans expect a winner but if the franchise thinks of itself as a winner, acts like a winner, spends like a winner, treats people like its a winner, and never wins, people will be turned away. There is a malaise building quickly and team ownership needs to be smart enough to see it and act to snuff it out.
Clean house. Start over. Ask for a reset with the fans. Provide a reset on the field. Some teams are lovable losers. The Nationals are not. If they continue down this road, they risk significant damage with a fanbase that wants to love them almost as much as it loves their actual hometown teams.
-Max Frankel
