What’s Up With the Nationals, and Who’s to Blame: The Team, Management, or the Fans

After a night out at Nats Park, the question feels obvious: What’s happening with
the baseball team that began the season with such high hopes? Monday night’s game,
the first in a series against the Pittsburgh Pirates, had sharp contrasts. At the
high end, it began with a glowing
Gio Gonzalez, receiving the large, bronze Warren Spahn Award in a pregame ceremony. There were
some sparkling home runs from
Adam LaRoche and
Jayson Werth. But it wasn’t enough—despite a surge in the late innings, the game wrapped with
a painful 6-5 Washington loss.

At the lowest end? A down-in-the-dumps manager
Davey Johnson, at his postgame news conference, calling the day probably his “toughest” in a life
of baseball. That’s because earlier he had to fire longtime hitting coach
Rick Eckstein, who will be replaced by
Rick Schu, coming up from the minors. The firing was the decision of general manager
Mike Rizzo, but it was Johnson who had to do the deed, and it visibly weighed on him and appeared
to have a hold on the team.

Was Monday a seismic moment for the Nats, who arrived in DC in 2005? Yes, and it’s
amplified by the bumpy season, so far, and the contrast with this time last year when
winning was the norm. Besides, what boss ever wants to be told, over his own wishes,
to fire a trusted subordinate? Johnson indicated he won’t quit, but it wouldn’t be
outlandish for him to feel humiliated.

None of that behind-the-scenes drama was apparent at the start of Monday’s game. Fans
arrive at games with optimism and ebullience, and Monday was no different. The ready
logic was that after three losses in a row, this would surely be the turning point.
Except in the stands, sitting close enough to the Nats dugout to watch the players
closely, their faces were an easy tell. They were glum, and they played glum, at least
until the fifth inning, when LaRoche knocked out a homer and brought a roar from the
home crowd. Fans are so easy. It takes only the basic truth of baseball, a glorious
home run, to enjoy a sports version of the Sunday Christian ritual of “peace.” The
fans look at each other, and it shows in their eyes: The tide has turned. But Monday
night, it hadn’t. Even with the LaRoche homer the Nats were down 5-1. Another lift
came later, with two homers from Werth (following on two homers he scored on Sunday),
but that rally wasn’t enough.

It’s a sweet problem to even have a baseball team to debate about—way better than
the days of no team at all—but the debate at this stage of summer is taking a slight
turn away from the traditional fan grumblings to something more personal and intense.
It’s veering into the blame game. Is that fair, and where would the blame go—the players
themselves, the management, or the fans?

The conventional wisdom is that the team is good—very good, in fact. “There’s simply
too much talent to give up now,” writes
Joe Giglio in the Bleacher
Report.

“After dominating the National League for six months last year,
the team is finding
ways to lose on a nightly basis, overshadowing the pedigree in
the dugout and on the
field.” His recommendation is to make some strategic “stretch
run” trades. The buck
always stops with ownership, of course, and the Lerner family
appears to be solidly
behind their players and manager, particularly Rizzo. In his
Sports Bog column, the

Washington Post’s
Dan Steinberg highlighted
this nugget from principal owner
Mark Lerner, spoken only last week at an event in Florida: “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen
our team play in person, but let me tell you something about them that I think is
important: We have a very young team that is on its way to greatness. When we bought
the Nationals, we were in the equivalent of baseball’s Death Valley: last place, with
the worst record in baseball, way below sea level. . . . Mike Rizzo—one of the best
general managers in Major League Baseball—and my family have, in a very short time,
built one of the deepest farm systems in the game.”

Still, another
Washington Post sportswriter,
Adam Kilgore, who covers the Nationals,
noted

that in the discordant back-and-forth with Rizzo over the
Eckstein firing, Johnson
volunteered to get the ax over Eckstein. Kilgore quoted Johnson
from June, saying,
“If you want to fire the hitting coach, you might as well fire
me right with him.”
That didn’t happen, nor did Johnson quit. But at the end of his
postgame news conference
Monday, when a reporter hinted at his job security, Johnson
said he wasn’t going to
“go there.”

In his Florida remarks quoted by Steinberg, Lerner mentions the Nationals fans: “Last
season sparked a love affair between our fans and the team, and it continues to grow
with each passing game.” That’s true, and the affection is tangible at Nats Park,
even on the night of a losing game. Lately it’s loved tinged too often with frustration
and disappointment, but it’s still love. If the Nats fan base is guilty of anything,
it’s too much optimism, believing in too much too soon, and buying into the preseason
hoopla that the Nats were on an express ride to the World Series and the pennant.

It’s still possible—if not this year, then maybe the next, or the one after that.
And maybe if the bar hadn’t been set ridiculously high before game one, and DC wasn’t
still fueled by the optimism of winning the NL East last year, all the debaters would
see the season so far as just what it is: hovering around the middle, with time ahead,
and a team that is a solid, growing contrast to what it was at the beginning—Lerner’s
Death Valley of baseball.

So if there’s blame to be directed it probably goes around evenly. But there are still
more than 60 opportunities on the schedule between now and the end of September, and
tonight’s a whole new ballgame.

Carol Ross Joynt