A few points before I get to the main subject of this article.
- I’m not a Washington Nationals fan. I don't have a strong interest in many of Nationals player. I think some of them are terrific, of course, but for whatever reason I’ve never cultivated any affinity for the Washington squad. I like Scherzer, and Harper’s the NL MVP, but otherwise…meh. I don’t go out of my way to watch the team, and I don’t know any Nats fans…I know a lot of Expos fans, but that didn’t carry over. I’m pretty ambivalent about the city of Washington D.C. I think 'Natitude' is the single stupidest phrase any sports team has laid claim to.
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On the other hand, I
really love the Mets, and I want them to win the NL East this year. I’m rooting for them because Mets fans are terrific fans, the best in baseball. I want them to win because they’re the underdog in the East: everyone expected the Nats to run away with division, and it’s fun to cheer for an upset. I’m pulling for them because they were my ‘
surprise’ team at the start of the year, and it’s nice when that article works out. And I'm rooting for the Mets because I’ve watched a lot of their games this season, and I feel a little invested in them.
So I have a rooting interest in the NL East. Just getting that bias out. Two more points:
- I generally think that firing a manager mid-season is a mistake, and should be avoided. There’s very little gained by switching helmsmen mid-season, and it is an act that reflects poorly on the organization doing the firing. You hired the guy: you should have the decency to stand by your decision until the season plays out.
- I think it’s never useful to ‘blame’ a manger on a team’s failures. It’s very difficult to know how a manager is perceived by the team he is managing, and it is difficult to assess with any accuracy how effective or ineffective a manager really is. Even measuring them by the stuff we can see, like bullpen usage (or misusage), or lineup construction, or a tendency to stick with veterans or give kids a long leash…even that stuff is part of a much wider tapestry of the things a manager is juggling. It’s a tough job.*
So there’s that, too. Managing is hard work, and there are a lot of moving parts to what they do. I wouldn’t want to criticize any manager too harshly, because I would inevitably be targeting one or two facets of their job that I could see, while ignoring seven thousand other ones that I couldn’t.
Now that that’s out of the way, here’s my thesis:
The Nationals should fire Matt Williams.
They should fire him tonight, while he’s still in the clubhouse. The GM or the President, or whichever temp is currently tasked with telling people to pack up their stuff…that guy or gal should tell Matt Williams that his services, while appreciated, are no longer needed by the Nationals. Someone else is going to fill in the lineup card tomorrow.
I am not advocating this position because of anything specific Matt Williams has done. While I have found a lot of his recent in-game decisions inscrutable (why did he have Rendon bunting with no outs, a not-very-fast runner on first, and Bryce Harper coming up in the bottom of the 9th tonight? Why give up an out there?) And I am not advocating this because of Williams’s recent comments about Papelbon and the proper usage of a closer.
I am not even advocating that the Nationals fire Matt Williams because of the general gap between where everyone thought the Nationals would be, and where they currently are. There is a gap, but it is entirely possible that the gap is due to injuries, unexpectedly poor performances from certain players, or plum bad luck. And it doesn’t really matter.
What matters is where the Nationals stand now, and where they need to be to call the 2015 a successful one.
Right now, the Nationals are 6 games behind the Mets. They have played 138 games, which gives them twenty-four games to save their season. Four of those games are against the Mets, including the final three games of the season.
If the Mets play .500 baseball, the Nationals would have to go 18-6 down the stretch, just to get into a one-game playoff for the NL East. If the Mets go 14-10, the Nationals have to win 20 out of 24. That’s….unlikely.
But if the Mets slip a bit….if they go 10-14 down the stretch….the Nationals would have to go 16-8 down the stretch. Essentially, they’d have to win every series. That’s still tough, but it’s not impossible.
We can put this in more mathematical terms. FanGraphs have kindly run the math on the standings: by their calculations the Nationals have a 9.3% chance of winning the NL East (it’s worth noting that they also have a 0.3% chance of winning the Wild Card).
That isn’t too bad: it’s a little better to be chasing a division lead than it is to be chasing one of the Wild Card spots. Explaining this with a real example: the Twins are a measly 2.5 games back of a Wild Card spot, but their odds of winning the World Series are at 0.2% The Nationals are 6.0 games back, but because they’re shooting for the division lead, their odds at winning the World Series are 1.4%, much better than Minnesota’s chances.
So why should the Nationals fire Matt Williams?
Because it’s the only substantial thing they can do.
The trade deadline is over, so there’s no chance to improve their odds by trying to acquire better players. There’s the waiver wire, but anyone available there would probably a) cost an unpleasant amount of future money, and b) not move the needle on their chances a whole helluva lot. It’s unlikely that they’ll get better players than they currently have.
They can’t do anything else on the field: they can’t blow up their lineup or their rotation. They can’t ask Bryce Harper to pitch or see if Strasburg is willing to play second base. They can’t decide, this late in the season, to incorporate a bunch of zany defensive shifts, or start running wild on the bases. They’re the team they are, at least until the season is over.
So what’s left? The guy pulling the levers. The guy who is connected to all of the individual parts of the team.
As I said earlier, the relationship that a manager has with his team is complicated: it is drastically more complicated than any of us can imagine. I sometimes lose sleep thinking about all of the things a major-league catcher has to do from one game to the next, but a manager’s job is exponentially more complicated, at least analytically, than a catcher’s job.
Because the job is so complicated, and because the strands of responsibilities and relationships are impossible for an outsider to make more than a fleeting guess at, it is difficult to predict how the Nationals would react to Matt Williams getting fired. Certainly, some players would be happy about it, and play better. And some players might be pissed, and see their play suffer.
And the opposite is just as likely: the happy players on the Nats might play poorly, and the pissed-off guys might break out. Humans are complicated and unpredictable. We contain multitudes, as a poet once poet’d.
At the very least, changing the manager would change the team. That change could go exceedingly well: I can still remember the excitement of the 1988 Red Sox, a lackluster team that won 12 straight games after Turnpike Joe Morgan replaced John McNamara. And it could go poorly, as it has for numerous interim managers.
One asset to having a manager is that they give you an emergency rip-cord to pull on when things are going badly. No one talks about this, and teams seldom use managers in this way (for good reason), but it’s absolutely true that the act of firing a manager is one of the few last-ditch ways an organization can re-jigger the strange group of athletes and individuals that make up a team. The manager is the when-all-else-fails button: press it and the team can blow everything up and pray that the pieces fall right.
Good organizations know not to press this button too much. The Red Sox didn’t fire Bobby Valentine until the season was over in 2012 because there was no reason to do it: hiring a new manager wasn’t going to pull them out of the tailspin they were in, and there was no reason to force an interim manager to suffer through a temp gig.
But the Nationals find themselves in the rare position where there is a clear benefit to pulling the rip-cord. They’ve just suffered two brutal loses to the team they’re chasing. Their fans are quitting on them, and the players on the field are starting to show a bit of strain. But they still have a shot…they still have a 10% chance of making the postseason. And there’s still time: there are twenty-four games left on the schedule to right a season that’s gone badly wrong. They finish the year with three games against the Mets, which means that they only have to close the gap to three for those last games to matter. They’re not dead….they’re just playing like it.
I have no idea if Matt Williams is a good manager or a bad one. I’m sure he’s a decent guy, and I want to be clear that my argument isn’t a judgement on anything he’s done or not done. It’s purely a game-theory decision: the one drastic thing that the Nationals can still do this season is fire their manager, and hope the team gels under whatever atmosphere the new guy brings to the clubhouse. That’s the one clearly proactive thing they can do…that’s the one action they can take that has a chance - albeit a small one - to significantly improve their team.
Otherwise, they can continue playing their currently listless brand of baseball, and cross their fingers that the Mets stumble down the stretch. They can wait it out until that 9.3% ticks downward every day, and then the team can figure out a way forward during the offseason.
As a bandwagoning Mets fan, I hope the Nats do that. I’d be very happy if the Nationals ease up and let the orange-and-blue take the division early, so that they can get their pitchers rested for a long postseason push.
But if it was me….if I was making the decisions for the Nationals, I’d do something. Nine-point-three percent isn’t a lot, but it’s not nothing, either. You have twenty-four game, Washington.
David Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com