Adam Kilgore is right, the ball does sound different off the bat of the 20-year old, and that sonic assault was particularly sweet last night as Bryce Harper crushed a ball into the second deck of the right field stands on Wednesday night. The solo home run in the fourth tied the game for the Nats, and they wouldn’t look back from there. Ian Desmond went 3-4 with a pair of doubles and a triple, Jordan Zimmermann cruised through seven innings on just 90 pitches, and Raphael Soriano put together his fourth save as the Nationals claimed their second series at home for the season.

Like the future, the Nationals offense just isn’t evenly distributed yet. Bryce Harper (2-4, HR), Danny Espinosa (2-4, 2B, RBI) and Ian Desmond (3-4, 2 2B, 3B, 2 R) lead the squad, while Adam LaRoche (0-4, GIDP, 2 K) Ryan Zimmerman (1-4, 2 K) and Jayson Werth (1-4, 2 K) were struggling with Gavin Floyd’s pitch selection. The plate discipline from the core of the lineup was at times on Wednesday night pretty execrable. As one columnist remarked, it wasn’t until Jordan Zimmermann batted in the 3rd that the Nats had a good plate appearance.

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April first draws closer everyday, and with it the start of a new baseball season. The Washington Nationals baseball franchise is expected to be one of the best in the majors this season, but they wouldn’t have that distinction if it weren’t for their farm system. There are the obvious top-top prospects that they drafted in Zimmerman, Strasburg, and Harper, but there are also the later round and less heralded prospects that they drafted and developed like Desmond, Zimmermann, Stammen, Moore, Lombardozzi, and Espinosa. If the Nationals hope to remain good for a long time they are eventually going to need another wave of talent to refresh what they will lose to free agency. That is a few years off for now, but visiting the minor leagues isn’t just a great way to see the future of your favorite team, but also a great way to visit parts of our country you may not otherwise.

Hagerstown

The Hagerstown Suns are the low A SAL affiliate of the Washington Nationals. In recent years Harper and Strasburg both made stops there. The current crop of talent is a bit of a mystery. The top Nationals prospects are going to start the season at either AA Harrisburg or AAA Syracuse, but part of the fun of the lower minor leagues is seeing players you may never see again. In some ways it makes the outcome less important and the baseball more of the focus, and there is a lot of enjoyment that can be had in watching baseball for the sake of baseball.

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1ST_1280
courtesy of MissChatter

One of the most important details about stats is that on a long enough time line any stat will give you an indication of if a player is good or not. The effort put into advanced stats is to shorten the timeline. Think about pitching stats. You could wait through a players career to see how many wins they end up and how many seasons they have with 15+ wins, but sports fans are an impatient lot and waiting until someone’s career is almost over isn’t a good way to know if they are really good right then.

ERA does a slightly better job of this but it doesn’t measure exactly what a pitcher does. Three years of ERA should be enough to tell what a players true talent level is, but front offices have to make decisions on less than three years of data and averages of that long of a time period can vary dramatically year to year. FIP is thought of as a more predictive stat because it doesn’t fluctuate as much from year to year as ERA meaning a smaller sample size is needed to judge a players true talent level.

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IMG_8541
courtesy of NDwas

Like a goalie in hockey and a quarterback in football the pitcher in baseball has the most impact on if his team wins or not, and there was a time when a pitcher had even more control. Once the role of the starting pitcher was to pitch all nine innings and the only reason they didn’t was because they massively failed. The Win stat however doesn’t measure how well a pitcher pitched. What it does measure is if a pitcher pitched at least five innings, left with their team in the lead, and no reliever surrendered the lead. Over a long enough time line the pitcher Win stat still will inform on who was good but the win stat is a symptom of a pitcher being good and not the reason.

To more accurately measure what a pitcher is doing ERA can be used, but there are still issues with ERA. Again, like the Win stat, on a long enough time line ERA will inform us a great deal of how a pitcher has done for their career, but for one season even bad pitchers can have good Win or ERA totals. What ERA measures is the earned run average that a pitcher would have given up had he gone nine. An earned run is any run that crosses the plate not due to an error, and an error is decided upon by an official scorer. Beyond that defense can play a great role in ERA. A slow roller to the left of a bad fielder could get by while a smash deep in the hole can be converted to an out by a good fielder. A good pitcher in front of a bad defense will end up with more of his balls in play being hits than a bad pitcher in front of a good defense.

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Washington Nationals Mike Rizzo
courtesy of Keith Allison

wOBA = (0.691×uBB + 0.722×HBP + 0.884×1B + 1.257×2B + 1.593×3B + 2.058×HR) / (AB + BB – IBB + SF + HBP)

That above is the formula for wOBA (Weighted On Base Average). Looks complex, doesn’t it? It isn’t. I should point out that is was just last week when it hit me exactly what wOBA was measuring and gave me a good anecdote. When Tom, Rachael, and I had our pre-Spring Training meeting on the direction of Nationals coverage for the site Tom had the idea to do a fan Spring Training. To write a serious of articles about advanced stats. This scared the hell out of me, because there are a lot of people smarter than me and many of them happen to be Nationals fans and some of them may be reading this right now. The big fear I had was that in explaining advanced stats my tone would come across as if I was talking down to my audience.

So last week I was working on some things trying to figure out how many runs Denard Span at lead-off and Wilson Ramos at catcher would be worth. You can look at the wOBA formula and see that it assigns a run value to each batting event, and these values are based on the average run expectency of the 24 base out states. If we remove all context then a base is worth 0.25 runs, because you need four bases to score a run, but that would be in a line-up where no one ever hits anything but a single or walks and no batter ever advances more than one base. So more or less a base is only worth 0.25 runs in a world that doesn’t exist. I kept thinking about it and trying to figure how much to add to get a truer value based on the game of baseball that is actually played.

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Adam LaRoche
courtesy of ameschen

Many Nationals fans would label Adam LaRoche as the team’s 2012 MVP, and many would label Danny Espinosa as the Nat on the hottest of hot seats. You see in 2012 Adam LaRoche hit .271/.343/.510 with 33 homers and 100 RBI while Danny Espinosa hit .247/.315/.402 and led the NL in strikeouts. That makes Adam LaRoche a highly valuable batter and Danny Espinosa below average batter. In 2012 the MLB average hitter batted .255/.319/.405. Espinosa is below that slash line in every category while LaRoche is over it and in some cases significantly over it. Now that I have made the brief case as to why LaRoche is better than Espinosa I am going to tell you it isn’t true. By the advanced metric fWAR both LaRoche and Espinosa were 3.8 win players. Meaning they were equally valuable to the Nats.

When I showed you that LaRoche was a well above league average hitter and Espinosa was a below league average hitter I left off a lot of information. WAR takes everything into account (Sam Miller of ESPN and Baseball Prospectus had a great article on WAR come out yesterday and all baseball fans should give it a read). One of the things that WAR takes into account is positional difference. Basically it is the old baseball adage of defense up the middle, power at the corners. Comparing the batting ability of a first baseman to a second baseman head to head is unfair and misses a large portion of the important of the middle infield position.

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Diamondbacks Spring Training 2011
courtesy of Dru Bloomfield – At Home in Scottsdale

Pitchers and catchers have reported to Spring Training sites in Arizona and Florida, and soon we will have baseball to talk about, but the big question is will we be speaking the same language. I have had many conversations with many folks about baseball through the years and not all of them have gone well and not every time were we even speaking the same language. Baseball is a spot of numbers. The events end up displayed in columns and rows of numbers in a box score. The single event of a game repeats itself until a season occurs, and the players that played in those games go on to have careers.

It is these stats that make up most of our conversations about baseball. It is hard to even talk about the sport without bringing up a stat. You go to a game, drink some beers and eat some hot dogs, and have a general good time, but sooner or later someone is going to ask you about what you saw, and that is near impossible to talk about without using stats. Understand stats is then important to our conversation about the game. What does it mean if player X got a hit and would it have meant as much if it were player Y, and what type of hit was it, what was the game situation when the hit occurred  All of this is important to our understanding of the game.

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Photo by Luis Albisu, special to We Love DC

If the Nationals ever move from racing presidents, to racing supreme court justices, they’ve made a huge swing pickup.

On Saturday, the Nationals unveiled their latest signing: 27th President (and 10th Supreme Court Chief Justice) William Howard Taft, unveiled before a packed hall of fans and friends at the Washington Convention Center. The singular highlight of the day-long fan fest, the addition of a fifth racing president promises to provide some interesting rivalry options for the mid-game “main event” along the warning track.

In real life, Taft and Roosevelt were rivals that split the Republican Party in the 1912 election, leading to the election of Woodrow Wilson. Taft and Roosevelt split over the firing of Gifford Pinchot from the top of the Forestry Service at the USDA. A conservationist, Pinchot was canned when he opposed the Taft policies at USDA which he felt were an attempt to shutdown the conservation movement that Roosevelt had begun. Roosevelt had initially backed Taft as a good successor, but the divisions between the two men grew with the 1910 Pinchot-Ballinger affair, and then the 1912 prosecution of U.S. Steel split the party in half. Roosevelt would best Taft, but neither could assemble a majority. The rift that followed split the Republican party, formed the Bullmoose Party, and sunk the reelection chances for President Taft.

Nine years after the electoral disaster, Taft would accept President Harding’s nomination to the Supreme Court as Chief Justice, where he was approved 60-4 by the Senate.  Taft would push for the Supreme Court to get their own office space – a building immediately recognizable to all DC residents – instead of using the old Senate Chamber in the Capitol. In addition, he would reorganize their docketing structure to give the court more flexibility in modern scheduling and control. 

Taft wouldn’t live to see the new Supreme Court building built, though, as he would pass on in 1930.

He is buried at Arlington Cemetery, one of two presidents to bear that honor, and one of four chief justices.

Oh – and just to cut one off at the pass – Taft is not the inventor of the Seventh Inning Stretch, despite the anecdote of a seventh inning stretch inspired by Taft’s restless attendance at a Senators game, the practice predates his term by 50 years.