For those of you who might be unfamiliar but perhaps mathematically inclined, the Baseball Savant Statcast website is a really fun way to poke around the various metrics that can be better predictors of future success than the standard statistics with which we are all familiar from baseball cards or The Baseball Encyclopedia (which my parents will claim that I practically memorized as a kid) - now all available with even more information on Baseball-Reference. On the hitting side, a good entry point is expected batting average (xBA), which takes into account the exit velocity, launch angle, and location of any given batted ball and compares it to similar batted balls to tell you what a hitter’s batting average should be based on how well or poorly they are hitting the ball. You can then look at a player’s xBA and actual BA to determine whether or not they have perhaps been lucky or unlucky. Aaron Judge has the highest positive differential between his xBA (.332) and actual BA (.389), but that is much more a result of him hitting everything so freaking hard that more of his ground balls get through the infield than the average bear. Alex Call - who hits the ball perhaps a smidge softer than Judge - is eighth on that leaderboard, with a .269 average that is 40 points higher than expected.

Where the Nationals really “shine,” however, is on the other end of the spectrum, where they have three of the sixteen unluckiest hitters in all of baseball. Josh Bell’s miserable .183 average would look a lot better - though still not great - at the expected number of .233. Two spots above him on the list is Luis García Jr., who seems to have hit into a lot of loud outs this season, backed up by an xBA of .311 as opposed to a real average of .258. And for all those of you who may have bellyached that Dylan Crews needed to be sent down to AAA weeks ago (before he strained his oblique), please know that his .258 xBA would make him a perfectly respectable major league hitter (not to mention that he was on pace for 20+ homers and 35+ steals at the time of his injury) - but the actual .196 looks pretty miserable. You can do the same for expected slugging, and some quick back-of-the-napkin math gives you the following stat lines for those three players:

Bell: actual .183/.279/.350, expected .233/.329/.436

García Jr.: actual .258/.301/.405, expected .311/.354/.499

Crews: actual .196/.266/.354, expected .258/.328/.469

Look, I’m not doing this exercise to tell you that results don’t matter, because they do. But I am here to tell you that players can only hit the ball, they can’t guide it where they want it to go, and sometimes you can get really unlucky. Lots of Nats fans currently view Bell as an abominable black hole, García as a huge disappointment, and Crews as not ready for prime time, when the underlying data tells us that had they not hit into so much bad luck they would be a perfectly cromulent (if frustrating) DH, an All-Star second baseman, and the runaway favorite for NL Rookie of the Year. Even as frustrating as this rebuild is and has been, there are reasons for hope.

That whole lead section was a few hundred words of exposition to tell you that last night’s 7-1 loss to the Cubs - perhaps the most complete team in the National League and winners now of six series in a row - was a lot closer than the score made it appear. This was not your typical 7-1 Nats loss filled with feeble rollovers and whiffs at sliders in the other batter’s box. Here are the results of nine balls that the Nationals put into play last night:

James Wood, 1st: 111.5 mph, 17 degree LA, .800 xBA (!!!), lineout

Alex Call, 2nd: 100.4 mph, 23 degree LA, .460 xBA, flyout

Wood, 3rd: 103.0 mph, 15 degree LA, .650 xBA, lineout

Nathaniel Lowe, 4th: 93.2 mph, 8 degree LA, .530 xBA, groundout

Call, 5th: 85.1 mph, 21 degree LA, .610 xBA, lineout

Robert Hassell III, 5th: 91.3 mph, 8 degree LA, .530 xBA, groundout

Keibert Ruiz, 7th: 79.0 mph, 14 degree LA, .740 xBA, lineout

Amed Rosario, 8th: 100.5 mph, 22 degree LA, .490 xBA, lineout

Ruiz, 9th: 84.8 mph, 8 degree LA, .410 xBA, lineout

That’s nine batted balls with expected batting averages north of .400 - and which ignores two other ground balls that Wood roasted with xBAs of .350 and a first-inning flyout by Rosario that would have gotten out of two parks - including Wrigley Field. The Cubs had excellent positioning and played excellent defense all game long, and sometimes the bounces just don’t go your way. On to the next one.

With multiple starters struggling to find their way early in games over the last month or so, it’s fair to ask if pitching coach Jim Hickey and pitching strategist Sean Doolittle need to do something to alter their starters’ preparation to begin games. The first inning is the one time that you can prepare well in advance for whom you will be facing and have some kind of script or rough framework of how you want to pitch those players, and yet too many first innings either go off the rails or threaten to for Nats pitchers (will Mitchell Parker please stand up?). Two nights ago MacKenzie Gore needed to Houdini his way out of a bases loaded situation with nobody out (although two of the three hits in that case were not well-struck), and last night yet again it was Jake Irvin having to work through things in the first inning, giving up three hard-hit balls - one of which left the yard to dead center off the bat of Pete Crow-Armstrong. This is becoming a disturbing pattern for Nationals starters, and the fact that it is happening to most of the rotation with some regularity suggests that it is a general preparation/approach issue that can hopefully be sorted out by the coaching staff. If the Nats are going to take the next step in their rebuilding process they will have to beat good teams like the Cubs, and that is hard to do when you are either giving up rockets all over the outfield or walking guys with abandon.

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