Defensive issues stood out again during rough weekend series

The Nationals were charged with five more errors, bringing their MLB-worst total to 39 in 41 games, while losing two of three in Miami

Photo by Billy Sabatini / ALL-PRO REELS

The Nationals lost two of three in Miami this weekend. They probably should’ve won two of three. Or perhaps even all three.

In Friday’s opener, the Nats led 3-2 after one inning and managed to make that score hold up the rest of the way. But on Saturday, they turned an early 4-0 lead into an eventual 8-7 loss. And during today’s finale, they found themselves tied 2-2 after five innings, only to give up three runs in the eighth for what became a 5-2 loss.

The common themes in the losses? A lack of execution in the late innings, especially by the bullpen and infield defense.

Saturday’s game saw Mitchell Parker get torched for five runs while recording only three outs. Today’s game saw Gus Varland charged with three runs while recording only one out.

So it all starts with poor relief pitching. Parker got burned by a pair of home runs, while Varland got burned by a pair of walks and a pair of singles. But there’s also a defensive element to all this, and that was especially on display this afternoon.

During the torturous bottom of the eighth, the Nationals twice allowed the Marlins to double-steal off them. Varland was front and center in both cases, making multiple unsuccessful pickoff attempts to make the task of running easier for Miami, seemingly getting preoccupied with those runners to the point he could no longer throw strikes and then delivering too slow to the plate to give catcher Drew Millas a reasonable chance to throw anybody out.

Not that Millas was without blame. He burned up both of the team’s ABS challenges, including on one pitch earlier in the eighth that was outside by nearly three inches. Which meant he couldn’t challenge when he really needed to a few minutes later on one of the double-steal attempts, in which a distracted plate umpire Chris Guccione called a pitch right over the plate a ball. It should’ve at least been a strikeout. Instead, both runners were safe, and there was still only one out on the board.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Nationals hitters twice wanted to challenge egregiously bad strike calls by Guccione in the top of the ninth but couldn’t because of Millas’ two previous misses.

There were, of course, more conventional defense mistakes all weekend. During the sixth inning Saturday, CJ Abrams committed his seventh error of the season during one of the Marlins’ rallies. Blake Butera decided to give Abrams a pseudo-breather today and have him only DH, opening up the shortstop position for Nasim Nuñez. That should’ve been a net gain for the Nats. Instead, it backfired when Nuñez let Otto Lopez’s third-inning grounder scoot between his legs, turning what should’ve been an inning-ending double play into an unearned run.

Maybe the ball took a funny hop off the lip of the artificial turf and infield dirt, leaving Nuñez to look silly. Whether he was fully to blame or not, it still went in the books as the Nationals’ 39th error of the season. That’s not only the most in the majors, it’s 11 more than anybody else has committed.

No MLB franchise has been charged with 125 errors in a season since 2019. None has been charged with 150 errors in a season in the 21st century. The Nats are currently on pace for 154 this season.

Errors, of course, aren’t the only (or even the best) way to evaluate defense. But even the more-accepted modern metrics fail to paint a rosy picture. The Nationals rank 24th in the majors with -5 Defensive Runs Saved. And they’re tied for 24th in Fielding Run Value, also at -5.

Butera hasn’t shown much negative emotion so far through the first 25 percent of his first season as a big-league manager. But the few times he has appeared to be upset, it’s been because of poor defense.

After a weekend like this, you can understand why.