David Huzzard: Nats' early-season bullpen struggles can be fixed

The Nationals' 3-6 record is not the fast start that fans wanted and experts expected, and the early struggles have been three-pronged. The offense took the first five games off, the defense has had issues catching and throwing the ball, and the bullpen has given away leads.

Of the three, the offense has already started to turn with Jayson Werth off the disabled list, and Ryan Zimmerman and Bryce Harper's bats coming to life. The Nats' fielders are better players than they've shown so far and are traditionally slow starters, so that should turn around as well. The area for the most concern is the bullpen, but even that can be fixed.

Bullpens are strange things. This past offseason, the Nationals traded one of the rarest commodities in baseball, a reliable reliever. Relief pitching is a highly volatile position. A player could be great one season and then awful the very next. That is due to the nature of the job. A season for a relief pitcher is a small sample size. If a starting pitcher gets hot for 70 innings, then they had a good third of a season, but if a reliever does it, then they had a good season. Tyler Clippard was the rare reliever who could be relied upon for a good season year after year.

With Casey Janssen starting the season on the DL, the Nationals were already down a set-up man and have tried without much success using Blake Treinen and Matt Thornton in that role. Thornton was once a good set-up man for the White Sox but that was several seasons ago, and Treinen has the stuff to eventually be a set-up man, but the results haven't been there yet. It is still extremely early in the season and Treinen won't have a .353 BABIP all season, but despite throwing 98 mph, Treinen is a groundball pitcher and the typical set-up man has swing-and-miss stuff.

A lot of the Nationals' early bullpen struggles have to do with Janssen being on the DL. If he were healthy and productive, the eighth inning wouldn't even be a concern, but the Nationals went into the season with an overhauled bullpen missing a key piece. Matt Williams is still working on finding roles for everyone and now has to find a set-up man until Janssen is healthy.

Bullpens are not set in stone. Craig Stammen recently joined Janssen on the DL and Stammen gives us good insight into what a relief pitcher is. Stammen started his major league career as a starting pitcher and wasn't very good at it. In two seasons starting, he amassed a 5.08 ERA over 210 innings pitched, but since becoming a reliever, he has a 3.02 ERA in 280 innings. The difference should be obvious. Stammen didn't change much, but as a relief pitcher, he was working one inning at a time and never had to worry about hitters seeing him a second or third time. Taylor Jordan, who was called up when Stammen hit the DL, fits the mold of failed starter turned reliever, as do several other pitchers in the Nats' minor league system. Jordan, Taylor Hill and Austin Voth are all minor league starting pitchers who could have a future in a major league bullpen.

The 2012 campaign is often regarded as a season to be emulated, but a lot of that has to do with the fallibility of human memory. The early-season bullpen for the 2012 Nationals was a disaster. Brad Lidge and Henry Rodriguez blew saves left and right, the Nationals wasted spots in the bullpen on Chien-Ming Wang and then Ross Detwiler, and had to deal with Drew Storen being on the DL. The mid-season addition of Mike Gonzalez and an out-of-nowhere performance from Ryan Mattheus helped to stabilize the 2012 Nationals bullpen. Rafael Martin and Matt Grace, Rich Hill or Felipe Rivero could end up doing the same for the 2015 Nationals bullpen.

As concerning as it is that the Nationals bullpen has let leads slip away, nine games into the season a bullpen is something that can be built on the fly. General manager Mike Rizzo has done it before and he can do it again.

David Huzzard blogs about the Nationals at Citizens of Natstown. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidHuzzard. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our regular roster of writers.