Washington Nationals: The State of the Nationals Bullpen

The Washington Nationals bullpen is the subject of mass criticism for the team’s poor performances.  However, on the individual level, it can get better.

The Washington Nationals bullpen shoulders much of the blame for the Nationals’ poor start to the 2019 season.

This season, the Nationals are worse than the sum of their parts.  A team with Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Patrick Corbin, Sean Doolittle, and Anthony Rendon should not have the fourth-worst winning percentage in Major League Baseball.

Yet here we are.

The same can be said of the bullpen.

A total of 12 players have entered the game from the bullpen in a Curly W uniform.  Exactly four of them have an ERA under 5.00 this season.

That’s right. Four.  And that includes Erick Fedde, who has only appeared in one game.

However, to be fair to the players, some of them have gotten unlucky in the small sample size of one and a half months of baseball.

It goes without saying that these guys have gotten “unlucky” consistently in high leverage situations, making their performances seem worse on the field and on our television screens.

It’s these situations that may make my next claim seem far fetched, but the Nats bullpen does have solid arms in it.

Unless the 2019 Nationals are a historic and mathematic outlier, these players will regress toward the mean performance capabilities and start pitching better.

In this piece, we are going to take a look at all 12 of the Nationals relief pitchers by categorizing them in three ways:

• The Green Flag Relievers
• The Yellow Flag Relievers
• The Red Flag Relievers