Planetary Nats Blog

… instant replay is toxic to Major League Baseball.

In baseball, every officiated call is subjective. It is the opinion of the umpire whose job it is to make that ruling. His (or her) opinion is the one that stands. That is fine. In fact, it is more than fine – it is part of the perfection of the sport. It isn’t about a calculation, or empirical evidence. It is a drama that plays out over time. It is an ebb and flow of events. It is human.

And it is precisely that reason that there is no room in baseball for instant replay. Because while an umpire may make a mistake, the umpire is never wrong. That is the basic premise that is at the core of the sport. The umpire is the last, final arbiter of what happens on the field. The umpire is, by definition, always right.

Allowing instant replay allows for the possibility that if an umpire makes a mistake, someone can review a video to determine whether that umpire is  wrong. Now that we’ve allowed for the possibility of an umpire to be wrong, every call is now open to interpretation. If you can use technology to determine whether a hit is a home run, why can’t you use the same technology to determine if a player beats a tag, or if a pitch is a ball or a strike? The technology exists to get these calls “right” all the time. Why don’t we use them? If it is appropriate in one case, shouldn’t it be appropriate in all cases?

The bottom line is, the mistakes that umpires make are random events. They’re professionals. The circumstances that arise that put the umpire in the position to make a judgment call – one about which he or she is absolutely right, by definition – occur randomly and in equal numbers for both teams. Instant replay doesn’t make the umpire’s calls more accurate or the outcome of the contest more fair. It doesn’t remove a bias. And at the same time, it slows down the game, polarizes the fans, and reduces the stature and authority of the umpires.

In the last three games, I’ve seen two instant replay scenarios. Having watched the video, I feel that the umpires ultimately made the wrong call both times. I am incensed, because they got it wrong both times, even with the help of technology. I feel cheated. And had the decisions gone the way I would have liked, Mets fans would feel the way that I do. But in both cases, I could live with an umpire making a judgment call without the aid of video, and having that call be a mistake.

Umpires making judgments is a part of the elegance of the game. The fact that they occasionally make mistakes is unfortunate, but it is also part of what makes baseball the wonderful game that it is. The technology and philosophic basis that underlies instant replay in baseball tramples on that elegance.

I am totally at peace with the idea that umpires make mistakes.

I find it completely intolerable that umpires can be wrong. Instant replay allows for umpires to be wrong. If they can be wrong, they’re not umpires.

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Note on the home run from last night’s game: I went back and watched the SNY feed of the home run, and there is a very good angle that they had in that feed that shows clearly that the ball DID NOT change direction as it passed in front of the Subway sign. The SNY feed “rocks” the ball back and forth as it passes the sign, and the ball is taking a straight trajectory.

Also… while this is going on, Mets broadcaster Ron Darling comments that he doesn’t think it hit the sign, because he says that the fans in right field would have been reaching out to catch the ball if it was that close to them… and also, none of the fans are pointing to the sign to ‘help’ the umpires with the call. He thinks those fans know it didn’t hit the sign… and of course, Debbi Taylor went out there and interviewed some of the fans, and they said that they didn’t see or hear the ball hit the sign.

A big part of being an organizational communication consultant is about reading between the lines. It isn’t about what people say or write, but rather, about what they do. The assumption here is that the culture of an organization will emphasize the values that are important to it, and reward people for furthering those values, and de-emphasize those actions that are not important, or even contrary to their values. By watching what an organization does (and paying less attention to what it says), you learn what the organization values.

I recently wrote a piece called The Font of Accountability, where I suggested that the quality of Nationals play on the field was indicative of the organizational culture as a whole. While I stand by my speculation, I admit there is a certain danger in it all, because a baseball team has many organizational arms, and it is the one that is on the field that is most visible. So, it might be a bit if a stretch to say that the entire organization is sloppy, just because the on-the-field team is sloppy.

So imagine my lack of surprise when I read this piece in Dan Steinberg’s D. C. Sports Bog about how the Teddy Roosevelt bobbleheads being sold in the team store are labeled ‘Teddy Rossevelt’. [sic]

Don’t get me wrong. As organizational sins go, this is almost insignificantly small – except that of all the things the Nationals marketing department has done since the Lerners took over, the Rushmores (the Racing Presidents) are probably one of the few unabashed successes. Add to that the fact that Teddy’s losing streak has become a metaphor for Nationals baseball, and you’ll see that Teddy Roosevelt has become an integral part of the Nationals brand. And unlike most of the products that are sold in the team store, which is apparel – whose manufacture and quality control  is conducted by national (or global) brands, such as Antigua, New Era or Majestic, the bobbleheads appear to be team-specific items. Presumably the Nationals stated the specifications for the product, approved the packaging copy, accepted the product (after inspection), and stocked it on the team store shelves. It is probably safe to assume that the Nats had numerous opportunities to insure the quality of the product… and in this case, the packaging. Somehow the error got through the quality checks.

Some of you will correctly point out that even Majestic makes mistakes, shipping jerseys to the Nats with the team name mis-spelled: ‘Natinals’. Very true. But, the Nats have some culpability here, too – they accepted the jerseys and sent their players on the field with them.

No process is perfect. Mistakes are made. In many organizations, the mistakes are caught and rectified. In some organizations, people fail to be accountable to their processes and the organization, and the processes fail. In some organizations, the processes just aren’t that rigorous, because there is no demand that they be.

In the case of the Nats, I am not sure what exactly is going on. But the Nationals have  reached the point where isolated instances are no longer isolated. Whether you’re talking about misspelled packaging on a product in the team store, or team jerseys, or errors or tentative pitching, or interminably long losing streaks or blowing leads in the ninth inning, or corruption in your overseas baseball academies… one or two.. or even three of these constitute isolated instances. But they don’t all happen to one organization, unless there is something about the organization that allows them to happen. What conclusion should we draw from that?

In fairness to the Nationals, my two most recent posts have suggested that at least where the on-the-field product is concerned, there seems to be considerable improvement in the areas that I have found most troubling – relief pitching and fielding. As I pointed out in my post from earlier this morning, Manny Acta’s team meeting last Thursday seems to have made some difference. Additionally, when organizations make a concerted effort to change – for example, to embrace excellence and accountability as core organizational values, change does not happen overnight. It takes weeks or months, and perhaps years. It isn’t like throwing a switch, it is like turning around a ship. There is a lot of momentum carrying the ship in one direction, and it takes time and effort to point it on the proper course. So it may be that ‘Teddy Rossevelt’ is a vestige of the old way. It may be more of the same. It is too early to tell.

It isn’t for me to tell the Nationals what their core organizational values should be. And they’re not in danger of losing me as a fan – I followed the Senators as a kid, and if I can follow them, I can certainly follow the Nats. But here is the red flag for the Nats: I am the ninety-ninth percentile fan, and there are a lot of people who are a lot less committed to the Nationals than I am, and I believe they’re losing faith in the brand. All of these little miscues, whether on the field, in the media, in the team store, isolated by themselves, are nothing. But a brand is not discrete pieces, it is the umbrella under which everything resides. You can’t look at the miscues in isolation, especially when they pop up everywhere you look. Consumers may not ask themselves explicitly what it is that the Nationals stand for. But consumers make choices, and the reputation of that brand figures in the calculus.

It is time for the Nationals to ask themselves, “What do we stand for?”

Before the Nationals game last Thursday against the Pirates, Manny Acta held a team meeting.

Since that time, the Nationals bullpen has an ERA of 2.30 (4 earned runs in 15 2/3 innings). Of those four earned runs, two were charged to Kip Wells, who gave them up in the twelfth inning of last Friday’s game against Baltimore. He was pitching his second inning in relief, and after a fluke base hit by pitcher Danys Baez of the Orioles, Wells gave up two doubles.  The bullpen has  struck out nine while walking eight – and if you throw out Daniel Cabrera’s performance last night, they’ve walked only five. Joel Hanrahan has two saves. Jason Bergmann, Kip Wells (despite giving up those two runs Fiday night), Ron Villone and Joe Beimel have pitched very well. Even Jesus Colome had a scoreless inning last night.

The team as a whole has had two errors, and given up no unearned runs.

That is quite a turnaround, and we would be feeling a lot better about it if the Nats were hitting the way they have been all along this season. What we’ve seen instead is a struggling offense. My theory is that the Nationals sorely miss the bats of Elijah Dukes and Jesus Flores. In the meantime, we’re left with a team that looks a bit like last year’s team -  a team that opponents can pitch around a bit, leaving our lineup without protection. The Nats are a very different team at the plate with Flores and Dukes in the lineup.

Add to it all the strong performances by callups Craig Stammen and Ross Detwiler – both of whom have pitched well as starters, and suddenly the Daniel Cabrera situation seems a bit less urgent. Cabrera didn’t make a strong case for himself last night… but at the same time, that probably means he could probably be DFA’d without risk of losing him, and perhaps some time in Syracuse would be good for him. And maybe that would be as good for him as time in Washington has been for Stammen and Detwiler.

The Nats rotation has enough depth to survive an injury or two. We’re playing better defense, and our bullpen has started to show their stuff. Later this week we should have two big bats back in the lineup.

I am not crazy enough to declare the disaster over… but there are certainly lots of reasons to be hopeful.

It may have all started in the Nats clubhouse last Thursday.

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On a different topic, Chico Harlan posted in Nationals Journal about the Reviewed, Debated Home Run. Here is what I commented:

This situation is the shame of instant replay.

It isn’t that the umpire made the wrong call. In my biased opinion, he did make the wrong call. But instant replay gives umpires the opportunity to make a mistake twice, under the guise of trying to get it right once.

With no instant replay, mistakes are made. With instant replay, mistakes are affirmed. And in fact, the instant replay rule detracts from the game. It isn’t as if instant replay eliminates bias – it eliminates a random event.

I don’t think it was a home run. But nobody is served by instant replay in this situation. The kind of remedy that instant replay gives you here is the same kind that technology might one day automate the calling of balls and strikes. It offers the illusion of objectivity… and it is just that, an illusion. Baseball is the most human of sports. Adding technology to the mix does not make the game better. It separates us from the game.  That the umpire made a mistake last night isn’t nearly as bad as the idea that technology only served to affirm that mistake.

I’ll take my chances with the umpires.

You have to admit, watching the “Battle of the Beltways” has been entertaining so far.

In the last two games, we’ve seen great Nationals pitching and at least crisp, and occasionally spectacular defense:

Justin Maxwell robs the Orioles Adam Jones of a home run in the first inning. (Image courtesy of MASN and the Washington Nationals. Used with permission)

What we haven’t seen is the Nationals hitting the ball.

The reason for that has to do with the Disabled List. When you remove Jesus Flores and Elijah Dukes from the lineup, there’s actually a way to pitch around the Nats. Adam Dunn has struggled since Dukes has been out, and the Nationals miss Jesus Flores both behind the plate as well as when he’s at bat. And while Anderson Hernandez doesn’t make the lineup any more formidable by himself, his speed, and the presense of Cristian Guzman two hitters later in the lineup helps to insure he gets some pitches to hit.

In my last post I spoke about the need for the Nationals to be accountable for their level of play. The next day, Manny Acta held a team meeting, and since that time, the Nats seem to have been transformed – at least when it comes to pitching and defense. It hasn’t been lost on at least some of the national media: Tim Kurkjian wrote a piece last week about the bright future for the Nats. If the Nationals can play average defense and get average pitching from their bullpen, if the all-rookie (almost) rotation can continue to go six or seven innings every game… and if the Nats – and given history, this is a big if – can keep their starting eight on the field and off the Disabled List, we’re going to see real baseball break out on Half Street.

But in this respect, the Nationals are fragile. As well as the team has played since the end of the Pittsburgh series, they’ve barely been able to put up runs, even against a team as weak as the Orioles. Once you’re into the bench, things get dicey. The bench is acceptable, and perhaps above average, as a bench goes. But when the Nats bench is starting every day, the lineup just isn’t as imposing as it could be.

And as spectacular a catch as Justin Maxwell made today, he isn’t the hitter that Dukes is.

The sample size is small – three games – but since Manny’s team meeting, the Nationals seem to have their head screwed on more or less straight. Once we get all of the pieces back, we might actually see what the Nationals are capable of.

About twenty years ago I worked for a company called GlobeWireless that processed marine telegrams – messages to and from ships at sea. This was done via morse code. Every message that passed through our station was matched with a confirmation receipt. Nobody went home until every message was accounted for as being delivered. If it meant staying an extra two hours to track down the loose ends, that is what you did. My bosses insisted on it, because a lot hinged on the proper delivery of these messages. Money. Sometimes, lives. Records were kept, and we could prove the delivery of every message going back many years.

Years later, when I started working in the hospitality industry, I noticed that there was a certain similarity in the process. Our guests would want certain items reserved on their behalf, and we would make those reservations. As the manager, I insisted that we get written confirmation of every reservation, and that confirmation be compared to and attached to the original request. That way we could prove that every reservation had been made for the guests. The only problem was, my boss thought that was an unnecessary step, and so she wouldn’t back me up when it came to insisting my employees follow the processes.

The reason I mention these two examples is because I wanted to point out that accountability is an organizational value that starts at the very top of an organization, and the values that are held at the top are the ones that are implemented at the bottom.

What does this have to do with baseball? Only this: Look at the product that we see on the field at Nationals Park. How accountable are the players to the outcomes? Only as accountable as their manager asks them to be… who is only as accountable as his boss asks him to be… and so on, up the chain.

This is one of the reasons that I am much more concerned about the errors that the Nationals make than I am about the bullpen. Errors are, by definition… errors. They are the plays that the defense should make, but does not. Contrast errors with skill and talent: Ronnie Belliard can play third base, and he and Ryan Zimmermancould have the same fielding percentage, and have the same number of errors. But having Belliard at third is not the same as having Zimmerman. A sharply hit ball down the third base line gets snagged by Zimmerman and is scored 5-3, while the same ball is a double with Belliard at third. And that isn’t an indictment of Belliard – it is just that Zimmerman is more talented.

Yesterday’s game is a perfect example of one where we’re ready to pile onto the bullpen (and certainly the bullpen didn’t hold up their end of the bargain), but the real damage was done earlier in the game – by errors.  Ross Detwiler lasted five innings, but his defense gave up three errors. In my Fantasy Baseball Alternate Universe, if you take those three errors away, Detwiler goes six innings instead of five, with the same number of pitches (84), and comes into the 7th inning facing the 8-9-1 batters, and a 5-2 lead! Now, I know that you can’t simply advance through the results and assume they would be the same had certain events not occurred, but you have to admit, this would certainly be a plausible outcome - without those three errors. At that point, Manny Acta could have sent Detwiler out for the seventh, warming two pitchers in the bullpen, and be one inning further down the road, with a bigger lead, and a strategic advantage. The bullpen might well have blown up in the Alternate Universe, too. But the bullpen would have been entering into the game in a very different situation… one where they had a much better chance of success, and one that a winning team designs their bullpen around.

There may not be much that the Nats can do about the bullpen, in terms of talent. In today’s Nationals Journal, Chico Harlan points out that half of the Nats bullpen has a negative VORP (for the uninitiated, there is some discussion and explanation of this statistic in the comments of that posting). That statistic is calculated on the historical outcomes, so it is hard to separate talent from performance from VORP. But on the defensive side of the equation, the performance of the pitchers and the performance of the defense are not inseparable from the talent of the pitchers and the talent of the defense. In other words, if the team is not being asked to be accountable for their outcomes when they have the ball – when four errors in a game is minimized at the expense of overworking the bullpen, and hoping the bats come and bail you out - that is an organizational problem, not a talent problem. Being the less-talented team is acceptable – disappointing, but acceptable. Being a better team that is not playing at the level they are capable of is not.

Errors, narrowly defined as a statistic, do not answer all of the questions. Errors, as a statistic, are an indication of the larger problem. The problem that makes the Nats play sloppy in all aspects of their game. The problem that causes Elijah Dukes to be picked off first four times. The problem that has bullpen pitchers taking the mound and believing that they need to be perfect, because if the defense isn’t there for them, the pitcher is the one on the way back to Syracuse (or free agency, in the case of Mike Hinckley). The problem that prevents a team from executing basic, fundamental baseball.

It isn’t about errors. It isn’t about poor baserunning. It isn’t about the bullpen or the pitching – and in fact, complaining about that distracts from the real issue. It is about being sloppy and unprofessional in every aspect of their game. The Nationals are sloppy because they are allowed to be sloppy. I am not saying they’re not trying. I am saying they’re not disciplined.

Rob Dibble has advocated that the Nationals take infield practice every day. There’s something to be said for that, though it has to be part of a larger belief – that excellence and being accountable for the outcomes is important. That has to be a core organizational belief. And it has to come from the top, Ted Lerner. If you’re still unconvinced, you only need to look up I-95 forty miles. The Orioles were the envy of every Major League team in the 70’s and 80’s. They created “The Orioles Way”, which was an organizational philosophy of excellence. Everything they did furthered that goal. Enter Peter Angelos. Witness the death of “The Orioles Way.”

It isn’t that the Nats are not talented. It is that nobody is holding the organization accountable for doing their jobs. When Ted insists that it be done, it will be done. And if it isn’t, find someone that will do it.

Period.

I tuned into yesterday’s game in the 8th inning. I usually watch entire games, but between the game time and some family obligations, I didn’t get back to the office until late. The Nats were leading.

It was excruciating.

Ryan Zimmermanwas hitless, and once he came up in the 9th inning and grounded into the fielder’s choice, the reality of it all settled in. The streak was over. As Zimmerman stood on first base, the fans in San Francisco gave him a standing ovation. Bay Area, you guys are class.

Far from being a sure thing, the Nats had to just survive the bottom of the 9th, and they’d head home winners for the day, and .500 for the west coast road trip. They survived. And if you think about it, first place teams are happy to go home splitting a west coast road trip. The Nationals should be absolutely thrilled.

After the game, I wandered through the current thread on Nationals Journal. It was full of fan posts rooting for the Nats to blow the save and go to extras, so Zim could get another at bat. How strange! I secretly felt the same way.

I imagined the post game interviews, and I imagined that every time someone asked Zim about the end of the streak, he said, “We won the game.”

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so melancholy after a win.

A little later in the day, I got an email from a friend who had taken his three year-old daughter to her first Potomac Nationals game. It put it all into perspective for me. Here’s an excerpt:

[My daughter,] She had a ball! At first she was a bit cowed by the large crowd — there were literally scores of strangers packing the stands. Soon enough, though, she was peeking at the action. She saw a batter swing and miss (a Red Sok, fortunately) and giggled uproariously. Then a foul ball? Forget about it, the kid was hooked. By the end of the game, as the sound-effects guy pulled out all the stops, she was clapping along to the clapping thing and imploring us to “Do the charge again!”

We got there dreadfully late — big trouble getting out of bed and out the door. The upside of that is, we stayed till the end. I just did the math, and I’m pretty sure my three-year-old just spent almost two hours sitting and watching a ball game. That does my heart good. And as we left the stadium, some random woman walking the other way was appropriately smitten with Herself’s copious charm and handed her a Nerf-type baseball. Just because, as far as I could tell. So sweet.

As I loaded her into her car seat to drive home, my daughter announced, “We see baseball tomorryow.”

This is what separates baseball from every other sport. There is a complex web of story lines. At one end of the spectrum, we see a struggling team packed with talent. We see one of its young players start to edge onto the stage with the immortals of the sport. We watch one of our most talented pitchers continue his undefeated streak – on a last-place team. We see a hitting streak end. We see our fans torn between the success of the team and the achievements of one of its stars. And at the other end of the spectrum, we see a father and daughter start a tradition that will last a lifetime.

More importantly, those story lines don’t exist in a vacuum. They are all tied together – even when they occur 3000 miles apart at different games, in different leagues. By watching, we become a part of it.

It is fitting that today is an off day, because it feels like the end of a chapter of an incredibly compelling story. The Nats will be home tomorrow. Zim’s streak has been wiped clean, but not before we’ve glimpsed greatness. Spring is over, and now it is summer. A new baseball fan is born.

What time is first pitch?

For most of the season, Nationals fans have been rooting for exactly the scenario that they received last night: a lead in the ninth inning, and Joe Beimel in to close the game.

The result: A blown save.

Most of the Natosphere was probably asleep as the Nats fell behind, then came back and took the lead, heading into the bottom of the 8th up 7-5. Kip Wells gave up a  solo homer in the 8th, and the Nats took the field in the bottom of the 9th ahead 7-6. Beimel retired the first two batters, then allowed Emmanuel Burris a single up the middle. Burris took a lead off first, and Beimel threw away a throw-over, and Burris advanced to second. Beimel walked Edgar Renteria and then served up a hanging curve to Pablo Sandoval, who dutifully placed the ball into the left field stands. Nats lose, 9-7.

Everyone is going to want to pile on to the bullpen, and Beimel in particular after yet another blown save. But none of that matters.

It doesn’t matter because Cristian Guzman’s error in the 4th inning contributed two unearned runs to the Giants total. Two runs. Who knows how many additional pitches. Beimel’s error in the 9th didn’t make a difference in the final outcome, but Beimel would likely have pitched differently with Burris at first, rather than at second.

The bottom line is, the Nats are playing sloppy defensive baseball, and the pitching staff, and the bullpen in particular, are paying the price. That isn’t to say the pitchers are blameless. Daniel Cabrera couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn from the inside with runners on base. But the pitchers are being asked to do more than they should have to do… and the pitching staff is the Nats weakest link.

The Nats can’t continue to play sloppy defense, and hope that a top-notch offense will come to the rescue every night. The interesting thing is, the offense does seem to come to the rescue every night. But the team has to pitch, and the team has to play defense. Lately, it has been enough about half the time. Imagine how good the outcomes would be with fewer erros.

Rob Dibble posted a very interesting blog on the MASN site the other day, suggesting that the Nats could win 92 games if they won four out of every seven every week for the rest of the season. Of course, it is foolhardy to believe that this team could do that. Or is it? I argue that it is only foolhardy to believe it because this team either can’t or won’t play the disciplined baseball they should be playing.

For the first time since the Nats moved to Washington, they have a team that can hit. No lead is safe when playing the Nats. But because the Nats don’t play disciplined baseball when they have the ball, no Nationals lead is safe, either.

The Nats are making too many errors.  They’re throwing too many pitches. They’re giving away too many bases. They’re handing their opponents too many runs.

Joe Beimel blew a save tonight… A save he should have made. But don’t be fooled – it should never bave been a save situation in the first place.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, the scattering of spectacular wins that the Nationals have pulled off in the early part of the season were fun to watch, but not really indicative of the way a team builds a winning habit. Surround them liberally with games-they-should-have-won, and you have the formula for our April malaise.

Yesterday’s game was another spectacular win, but unlike some of the earlier versions, it was a game where the better team won, rather than the worse team getting lucky.

And don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of luck involved… but it wasn’t the luck that results from the other team’s bad fortune, but rather, the luck you create when you’re playing well. The highlight was Austin Kearns and Jesus Flores combining for a 9-2 force at the plate, but there was plenty of highlights to go around, and you can see them here (to see the Kearns-Flores put-out, click the link below the video player).

… and for those of us who care to revel in ex-Nat schadenfreude, there was no better central character than Felipe Lopez. In addition to being the player thrown out at the plate going from third to home on a ball hit to right field, he was called out at first earlier in the game on a ball hit in the infield , even though Adam Dunn dropped the throw… but Dunn was able to pick the ball up before Lopez got to first because Lopez didn’t run it out. Some things never change.

The Nats modest streak doesn’t undo a terrible April. But suddenly the Nats are winning the games they should win, and as a team, and for us, as fans… we can finally take a breath and look around at the MLB world. On this Sunday, we discover that we’re only 5.5 games out of first, and we no longer have the worst record in baseball – that distinction belongs to the Indians.

The Nats can’t undo April. But they’ve started to build a sound season, despite the rocky start.

Other notes: Dunn and Ryan Zimmerman both hit solo homers deep to center. Zimmerman’s extended his hitting streak to twenty-seven games. Both homers can be seen in the video highlights linked above.

The opening game of our series with Arizona is in the books, and perhaps for the first time this season, the Nationals won with sound baseball.

In all of the previous wins, we’ve seen the extreme ways a team can win: flawless pitching, hitting barrages, improbable  comebacks – and don’t get me wrong, those wins were fun to watch and demonstrated some of the important characteristics that a team has to have.

What we hadn’t seen this year was a game where we took the lead early, held it all game, and protected a one-run lead in the ninth inning. Until last night.

This game was precisely the sort of game I’ve been waiting to see from the Nats – an unremarkable, fundamentally sound game. The reason is, almost all of baseball is comprised of games like this. You don’t often go down six runs in the first inning, and then come back to win 11-9… or get complete games from a 23 year-old starter… or hit four home runs in a game. The Nats wins this season  have been precisely this type, and while they’re fun to watch, they’re not the thing that a successful season is made of. Last night’s win was different.

Also important was the fact that the Diamondbacks are a team we should beat. They’re suffering from internal turmoil, having just let Bob Melvin go as their manager. They’re also a team of Nationals cast-offs – many of whom we’d like to see do well, and the occasional slacker-malcontent.

The Nats made giant-killers of every team in the National League East in the month of April, as they stumbled out of the gate. But just as the Nats played the rest of the division, they played each other, too… and now that we’ve bothered to look up and see where we are twenty-seven games into the season, we see that the rest of the division has been in a four-way bar fight with each other, and they haven’t put any distance between them and us. As we wake up on Saturday morning, we find the Nats six games out of first with most of the season ahead of us. The Nats are 5-5 over the last ten games, and 4-1 over the last five… and we have a runner on first with one out in the 11th inning against the Astros… and as the home team, I like our chances.

Am I suggesting that all is well with the Nats? Absolutely not! The Nats lead the majors in errors, and they continue to make plenty of miscues in the field. The bullpen is struggling, though recent moves to bring more veteran arms into the ‘pen seem to be helping… and of course it helps to have Joe Beimel back.

There’s a lot to be happy about with the Nats right now. They’re hitting a ton, their young starters are doing well (for the most part), and the bullpen seems to be settling down a little bit. They’re sure fun to watch – it is just a shame for most of you on the east coast that they are playing out here on the left coast. They make for entertaining viewing during dinner here in Alaska.

… and then there’s this: Ryan Zimmerman extends his hitting streak to twenty-six games, and probable future Nationals player Stephen Strasburg threw a no-hitter for the San Diego State Aztecs last night.

There was something particularly compelling about today’s complete game win by Shairon Martis. Not only did he only give up a run and five hits in nine innings, the defense was there for him more than once, and the offense provided a winning margin in two different innings.

All of this bothers me. It was too easy.

Mike Henderson at NationalsPride.com correctly points out that Martis and the Nats were lucky today – lucky that Pujols had the day off, lucky that the Cardinals hit balls sharply right at people, lucky that Martis was having a career day.

… but we didn’t see the bullpen today. Any day that the bullpen gets a rest is a good day, I’ll agree. But the Nats have already won the six games this season where pretty much everything goes as you need it to. What they need to start doing is winning the games where they can overcome their shortcomings.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a spectacular win. Now show me some ordinary wins.