Frustrations and Schadenfreude

There's a reason pandas are so easily found in the wild.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a fan of the Washington Nationals.

You’re an 11-12 team, and you’re starting to get pretty disappointed by your team’s long-term, big-money investment in Jayson Werth, who even without his caveman beard is batting a scant .221. Your most promising pitching prospect in quite some time, who could easily break a few records in his career, will miss at least the entire season recovering from surgery, and you need to bat against the Phillies rotation 18 times.

Today, your team is facing a pitcher that can charitably be called “erratic,” who is doing his very best to leak some runs. He walked three batters in the first inning, and wound up with five walks and two hit-by-pitch in the first two innings. The one mistake that your team made, when Ian Desmond got picked off at first base, didn’t end up costing anything, because the shortstop dropped the ball. You even caught a break, when Mike Fontenot’s double hopped over the wall, preventing Miguel Tejada from scoring.

So how did they manage to score just one run?

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MadBum Men

Just to add on to the previous post and Madison Bumgarner’s inability to punch out batters, I decided to look back at last year’s comparable stats. Here’s what I wrote in last night’s post:

He’s gotten to 2-strike counts with batters 40 times this season: 8 times he has given up a hit, 7 times he gave up a walk, and just 9 times did he record a strikeout. Two of those hits and four of those walks came in an at-bat after he had a 0-2 count, but couldn’t close the deal.

Looking back at Bumgarner’s 2010 season, he faced a batter with a 2-strike count 215 times. Of those, he got 86 strikeouts (40%), gave up 42 hits (19.5%), and walked just 8 batters (3.7%). In the 96 PAs in which he got an 0-2 count against a batter, he would eventually give up only 17 hits, but punched out 48 (50%), and didn’t walk a single batter (though he did have one HBP).

So anecdotes, ERA and general crappiness aside, we’re definitely seeing a different caliber MadBum from what we saw last year.

FYI, I’m adding this tidbit to last night’s post, so please forgive the double posting.