David Huzzard: Waiting for October

The day after the Nationals clinched the division, they put out a lineup that was more Triple-A Syracuse than it was Washington and it was a sign of things to come. Post clinch baseball is weird. A couple of days later, with the Nationals going for a four game sweep of the Marlins, and Stephen Strasburg through seven innings with a pitch count in the 80's, Craig Stammen entered for the eighth and disposed closer Rafael Soriano for the ninth. Post clinch baseball is somewhere between spring training and the regular season. Starting position players don't come out after five innings and pitchers are allowed to pitch over 80 pitches, but winning is secondary to keeping everyone fresh and healthy, and that is the best part. The Nationals are on a five game winning streak and are barely trying to win. The Marlins, Mets, and Braves are fighting for second in the division, but really none of these teams have anything left to play for, and with the Nationals having already clinched the remaining games on the schedule, are about playing out the string for everyone. All the Nationals want to do is enter October without losing anyone else to injury. If they can do that they are positioned as well as any team entering the postseason. Go back and compare the 2014 Nationals to the 2012 Nationals entering the playoffs. Over the past 30 days, Gio Gonzalez has the highest ERA on the pitching staff at 3.41. Strasburg and Jordan Zimmermann are at 1.34 and 2.03 respectively and it can be said that the entire rotation looks as sharp as they have all season. 2012 was a different story. Zimmermann was pitching his first full season and looked tired in the later half of the season. Only two starting pitchers had a September ERA under 4.00 entering the postseason, Ross Detwiler at 3.73 and Gonzalez at 1.74. Zimmermann's September ERA was 4.41, Edwin Jackson's was 6.54, and Strasburg was shutdown. The 2014 Washington Nationals have a much different feel to them than the 2012 variety. The defense is better, the pitching sharper, the at-bats deeper, and the base running solid. This team isn't going to end up with 98 wins, but that isn't because they aren't better than the 2012 team. Remember the 2012 Washington Nationals won early in the season because players like Chad Tracy, Roger Bernadina, Steve Lombardozzi, and Tyler Moore all played over their heads and the starting rotation never once lost a player due to injury. The 2014 Nationals have had all but three position players hit the disabled list and two-fifths of the rotation. May was the month where the injuries really got the Nationals. They played games with Nate McLouth in left, Greg Dobbs at first, Danny Espinosa at second, and Jose Lobaton catching. Lobaton and Espinosa have been fine bench players for the Nationals, but when thrust into starting roles they quickly become exposed. The Nationals' May record reflected the injury difficulties as they went 11-15 for the month. Starting on Friday, May, 30 the Washington Nationals took off and over the last three months of the season they've played .644 baseball. And even in that time the Washington Nationals have lost important players to the DL, but only one at a time. The important part is that when mostly healthy, the 2014 Washington Nationals have played like a 104-win team. The Nationals are poised better than any NL team for a deep October run. They've scored the most and allowed the least amount of runs of any NL playoff team. They have a run differential 38 runs higher than the second best team in the league. The Washington Nationals are simply better than every other team in the NL and next Friday they get to start proving it, but until then we have to endure the few remaining games of post-clinch pre-postseason baseball and hope that how the Nationals have played for the past four months continues for one more month.

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.