David Huzzard: However you measure it, the Nationals dominated in 2014

Just as it is unfair to judge a painting until the artist makes the final stroke, it is unfair to judge a baseball team until it's played its final game. On Sunday, the Nationals finished off the regular season with a masterful pitching performance by Jordan Zimmermann, as he threw the first no-hitter in Nationals history. It was truly the perfect ending to what had become a dominant season.

Step behind a tapestry and the artist's plan will be lost in the mess of threads, but step around to the front and the picture is clear. Baseball is a game of numbers, and those numbers speak to us in many languages. In even the most basic language of baseball, the Nationals were great. They finished with 96 wins, the best in the National League, and they scored the third-most runs in the league and allowed the fewest in all of baseball.

There are many that will tell you the beauty of baseball is lost through numbers. It is easy to get lost in a sea of FIP, xFIP, ERA+, ERA-, wRC+, wOBA, and WAR. Most baseball fans understand the importance of statistics, but they'd rather leave it up to front offices to find the valuable players while they just watch the game. But the point of the more advanced stats is to clear away the dust to reveal how good an individual player or team truly is.

The strength of the Nationals in 2014 was pitching. The staff, as a whole, led all of baseball in fWAR, ERA, FIP, K/BB, ERA-, and BB/9. Some of these stats are trying to tell you the same thing in different ways, but they all tell you that the Nationals pitching staff was excellent. It is hard not to know this as the regular Nationals starters went 13-0 to close out the regular season, and the four projected playoff starters gave up a grand total of six hits in their final starts.

Want to know how good the Nationals pitching staff was? They walked fewer batters (212) than Barry Bonds drew walks in 2004 (232). What is important in pitching is not giving away free bases and generating outs without the need of fielders, and the Nationals did that better than anyone in baseball.

Statistics are about the story they tell you, and many old statistics tell a complex story. Modern statistics look to pare that down. The formula that goes into figuring them out is more complex, but the story they tell is much clearer. ERA- and wRC+ are the pitching and hitting equivalent of each other. 100 is a league average player and how ever many points below or above 100 that player is is how much better than league average they are.

The Nationals rotation as a whole earned an ERA- of 83 making them 17 percent better than 2014 league average. The Nationals offense earned a wRC+ of 99 which marks them as 1 percent below major league average. That may strike some as confusing because the Nationals scored the third-most runs in the NL, but the league average wRC+ uses is for non-pitchers. Removing pitchers from the equation gives the Nationals a wRC+ of 107 or 7 percent better than average.

After a rough May, many were ready to give up on the Nationals, but even then the statistics said they were better than they'd played. On May 28, the Nationals sat at two games under .500, but the pitching was excellent, half the offense was on the DL and the Nationals had a positive run differential. Everything pointed to this team being much better than their record indicated. That didn't stop some from claiming 2014 a broken and lost season. That was still early in the season and the final picture was not yet clear.

Now that it is all said and done, we can look back at the statistics and see a team with no clear weakness, a team that is near the top of baseball in offense and is the top of baseball in pitching. We'd be remiss if we didn't mention anything about the Nationals being the best base running team to go along with all of that. The 2014 season is general manager Mike Rizzo's masterpiece, and with its completion, we can step back and admire it.

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.