Inside their clubhouse Wednesday evening, the Nationals packed up their bags and prepared to depart for New York. What they really were looking forward to, though, was the day off they’ve got in the Big Apple before opening a three-game series Friday against the Mets.
It’s their first day off in two weeks, since the Thursday they had in Chicago on Sept. 4. In between, they played 14 games in 13 days, winning six and losing eight, the quality of baseball seemingly getting worse as the days passed. To wit: After winning four of their first five during this stretch, they proceeded to lose seven of their next nine.
It was, to be sure, a grueling two weeks. And that would have applied no matter the time of year, but was especially true here in September of a season that was lost months ago.
These Nationals are limping to the finish line, that much seemed clear as they were suffering a four-game sweep at the hands of the Braves this week. A Braves team, by the way, that has nothing to play for itself at the end of an even more frustrating season for a perennial contender that is about to finish with a losing record for the first time in eight years.
Why, then, did Atlanta look so energized during this series while the Nats looked so flat?
“I know we’re tired a little bit ... but the other team is playing every day, too,” interim manager Miguel Cairo said after Wednesday’s 9-4 loss. “You’ve got (Matt) Olson, you’ve got (Ozzie) Albies … the whole team played four games in a row. You've got to be mentally tough. To finish the season, it’s about being mentally tough. Everyone is tired. But you have to go through it and finish it strong.”
Trouble is, very few current members of the Nationals roster have been through this before. Fourteen of the 28 active players are rookies. Several more have a bit more big league service time but are just now finishing a full, 162-game season for the first time.
The fatigue shows in a number of places, from the pitching staff to the field to the bases. But perhaps nowhere has it shown more recently than at the plate for the team’s best player.
James Wood seemed destined for one of the best offensive seasons in club history when he went into the All-Star break with a .278/.381/.534 slash line, 24 homers, 69 RBIs and 12 stolen bases. But in 54 games since representing the Nats at the Midsummer Classic, he has fallen off a cliff, with a slash line of .218/.298/.346 to go along with only three homers, 20 RBIs and three stolen bases.
Wood is striking out at an exorbitant rate, breaking Adam Dunn’s single-season club record of 199 over the weekend and now just 13 shy of Mark Reynolds’ major league record with nine games to go.
Cairo has attributed Wood’s second-half slide to the physical and mental toll of his first full major league season. And he’s given him a few days off recently to give himself a chance to reset, though there’s no plan to have Wood sit any more regularly the rest of the way.
“I want him to experience how you can deal with it. How you can deal with being tired and go and perform,” Cairo said. “Because it’s going to happen. The more you’re experienced, the better you’re going to get.”
Wood, of course, isn’t alone. Rookie Daylen Lile is the only regular member of the lineup with a September OPS over .800. And only Josh Bell and Dylan Crews have produced an OPS better than .678 so far this month. Three regulars (Brady House, CJ Abrams, Riley Adams) and three part-time players (Jorge Alfaro, Jacob Young, Andres Chaparro) all sport a sub-.600 OPS in September, with Adams and Chaparro at sub-.400.
“It’s September, and you’re playing a lot of games. But I think at this point, especially, most of it is mental,” said Crews, who missed three months in midseason with an oblique strain. “You’ve got to stay locked in. You’ve got to have a lot of heart in these months. … You can get carried away sometimes in these late months and just want to breeze through it, but it’s important to stay locked in and finish strong.”
With three games this weekend against a Mets team trying to hang on to the final wild card berth in the National League, then three games next week in Atlanta against the team that just swept them in D.C. before closing out the season at home with three games against the White Sox, the Nationals can see the finish line at last.
Some, though, may have been looking at that finish line for weeks now, and have suffered for it.
If nothing else, Cairo wants these young players to understand just how much work needs to be put in to make it through the 162-game marathon. Which, of course, is ideally just a precursor to another full month of baseball come October for the best teams in the sport.
“It’s a long season. And the message, to all of them: In the offseason, that’s when you really work,” the interim manager and former big league infielder said. “Do your weights, really attack all that stuff. So when you go to spring training, you maintain. That’s the way you last for a long time.”