The Nats’ Bad Season: Blame Mike Rizzo, Not Matt Williams

The Papelbon-Harper flare-up started well before Papelbon confronted the outfielder for not running out a fly ball. In a game with local rival Baltimore last week, Papelbon threw at Orioles third baseman Manny Machado for taking too long to circle the bases after a home run he’d hit earlier against Scherzer. Harper told the press after the game that he thought Papelbon’s move was “pretty tired,” and speculated that “I’ll probably get drilled tomorrow” in retaliation. Presumably, the right-handed reliever wasn’t happy that Harper aired his issues with him publicly, but Harper was right. Even if the Nats weren’t treading water at that point in the season, why throw at a man’s head and risk his career, if not his life, for not moving around the bases quickly enough? This bone-headed version of baseball morality is something that certainly should be aired in public—and denounced (as former big leaguer Dirk Hayhurst does here)—because beanball wars make the game more dangerous for players and therefore worse for fans. 

Even if Papelbon isn’t a jerk—and there’s plenty of evidence he is; and, on the other hand, some support from major league colleagues who think he was right to wrap his hand around Harper’s neck—the fact is that the entire episode shows that the Nats were way too tightly wound, and a hothead like Papelbon hardly helped mellow them out. According to many Nats players, the person to blame for the club’s temperament is Manager Matt Williams. “They describe him as ‘tense,’ both in the dugout and, particularly, after losses,” Barry Svrluga writes in the Washington Post.

It’s worth remembering that it was Williams who effectively set the precedent for Papelbon’s chastisement of Harper when he benched the outfielder last year for not running out a groundball. As I argued at the time, it was curious to see Williams reproach a player who spent parts of the last two seasons on the disabled list after running into walls for failing to hustle. What Harper needed was someone to teach him how to pace himself for the long grind of the 162-game schedule. Harper’s numbers this year (.336. 41 HR, 96 RBIs, and a MLB-leading Wins Above Replacement at 10.2—1.3 wins more than Mike Trout) are sufficient proof he has learned how to stay focused all year long, and Williams likely has much to do with that. According to most accounts, Harper is one of the few Nats loyal to Williams, which should count for a lot when it comes time to decide the manager’s fate. After all, Harper is the heart of the franchise for the next decade and anything that makes him play better and keeps him happy should be a key concern. The club needs to make some big changes, but it’s probably not Williams who should go.

Yes, Williams seems to have had a bad year. He’s tight, according to his players, and say critics, inflexible, incapable of responding to changing circumstances. As Dan Steinberg at the Washington Post writes, Williams “hasn’t seemed interested in treating crisis situations — a road playoff elimination game, a three-game series with a charging division rival, a mounting deficit in late summer — as special cases that require special solutions.” It’s true that Williams failed to set up the starting rotation against the surging Mets so that the division rival missed Scherzer twice. It’s also true, as Steinberg writes, that Williams is set in his ways when it comes to using his bullpen. But there’s another way to understand the manager’s obsession with routine: The stability that Williams is trying to create by writing in the same lineup every day, barring injuries, and managing in the same overly predictable fashion effectively amounts to a controlled experiment. It’s impossible to eliminate variables from baseball, of course, but if most things are the same day after day—except most notably the health of your club and the quality of the opposing team—a good baseball team has a good chance of success during the course of the season. It seems that what Williams wants is to keep the ship pointed in the right direction, the same direction, in order to give his club a chance to win. After all, you can’t fire a cannonball from a rowboat. I’m not arguing that Williams is a good manager—I don’t think there’s enough evidence yet to make a solid case one way or another. All I’m saying is that the 2015 Nationals are not a good baseball team. 

Sure, the club suffered injuries to key players like Ryan Zimmerman, Jayson Werth, and Denard Span. But the Mets went most of the season without their best player, David Wright, and no Mets hitter came even close to Harper’s season at the plate. The Nationals repeatedly proved themselves to be incapable of doing the things that win ballgames when your big guns are quiet, or on the disabled list, or are just facing very tough pitching. For instance, I was at Nationals Park July 7 to witness an instructive inning of 2015 Nats’ baseball. 

Johnny Cueto was pitching for the Reds, not long before he was dealt to the Royals, on his way to a masterful complete game two-hitter with 11 strikeouts. The Nats threatened only in the 5^th when Ian Desmond drilled a ball in the gap and slid into third, just barely ahead of the throw. It was perhaps unwise of Desmond to risk making the first out of the inning at 3d base, especially behind 4-0, but his teammates now had three chances to get him home—even a passed ball or wild pitch would score him. The infield was playing at regular depth for left-fielder Matt den Dekker, a left-handed batter who just needed to pull the ball to the right side, on the ground or in the air, to score Desmond. Instead, he struck out looking. So did the next batter, Taylor Jordan, pitching in relief of Scherzer, who Williams perhaps foolishly let hit. Centerfielder Michael A. Taylor then struck out swinging for the third out.

There are many times during the course of a year that a top pitcher is going to dominate an entire lineup, as Cueto did that evening. Facing a Cueto, a Kershaw, a Greinke, a Harvey, or a Cole etc., a good club knows it has to take advantage of every opportunity to piece together one run at a time since the chances of big innings against real aces are very unlikely. Teams like the Cardinals win consistently, and advance in the playoffs so often, because they play opportunistic baseball and fight for every 90 feet. The point then is not that scoring Desmond to make it 4-1 would’ve changed the eventual outcome of the game—maybe it would have but most likely not. No, the problem is that the Nats failed three times to put the ball in play with a runner in scoring position, which showed that they don’t value the kind of baseball that gives teams a chance to beat good pitchers. 

Maybe it’s partly Matt Williams’s fault that the Nats don’t know how to play that sort of baseball, but finally the blame has to rest with the man responsible for putting together the team Williams managed this year, Mike Rizzo. The job of general manager is not just about assembling the roster—and whether or not, say, acquiring a player with a reputation like Papelbon’s was a questionable decision—it is more importantly about establishing the kind of baseball values on which an organization builds its big-league club. When Gene Michael was general manager of the Yankees in the early 1990s, the players he acquired, through the draft, free-agent signings, and trades, reflected the kind of baseball he wanted his club to play. With hitters, that meant having a good sense of the strike zone, and confidence hitting with two strikes, which translated into more walks for an offense that at the same time was wearing down opposing pitching staffs by seeing lots of pitches. Joe Torre deserves credit for steering the Yankees dynasty of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, but it was Michael who built the ship and set its course. 

General managers have become more important the last several decades because of sabermetrics and super-agent Scott Boras. It was Boras and the salaries he got for his players that compelled clubs to look for the unexploited value that sabermetrics describes. Indeed, the way Boras sees it, baseball has left plenty of money on the table, and part of his job is to force the clubs to find it. “Why not sell advertising on uniforms?” was one of the many ideas I remember he suggested when I interviewed him several years ago. 

When Boras started in the 1980s, he overmatched the baseball lifers who typically held the executive posts. If owners didn’t want to lose their shirts, they’d have to send out GMs who at least had a chance against Boras. So guys like Sandy Alderson, Brian Cashman, and Theo Epstein became the model of the new wave GMs. These execs didn’t just negotiate contracts as in the old days, or engineer a few big trades at the winter meetings—they built organizations. Of course this wasn’t entirely new, since some clubs had long taught players throughout their organizations how to play a particular brand of baseball. The Orioles used to do it, and they become a much poorer organization when they forgot about the Orioles way. You can tell pretty quickly which clubs have a method because these are the clubs that win from year to year. 

Baseball tended to overvalue the role of the manager because the job was often filled by real characters like Casey Stengel, or Earl Weaver, or Sparky Anderson, lively figures who were also baseball geniuses. But the other reason the manager was seen as a club’s central cog is because the job of the GM wasn’t as important as it is now. With more money coming in the game, baseball has become more like the real business world. Sure, there are still lots of characters in the dugout, but in reality the manager is middle management. If he doesn’t do the job, isn’t prepared every day and well in advance like a Joe Maddon then he’s gone. But if the problem is with the organization, if there is no larger plan for playing winning baseball, then that’s the fault of the top executive.