The Washington Nationals season, which will end when September ends, has been very weird. They started the season in the middle of their perpetual rebuild, and with no expectations whatsoever. But they also started with a new manager, and new front office personnel, so there was some form of hope in the air that something was going to change for the better.

And so it did, as going into July, the team flirted with a .500 record and even a potential shot at a potential playoff position. The team, the youngest in the majors and filled with likely future stars had incredible energy and spirit, as they were one of, if not THE, leading offensive team in all sorts of batting statistics. Their pitching, however, was a problem, and needed help because, although the Nats were out-hitting and out-scoring their opponents on a fairly regular basis, they were also letting many too many runs cross the plate.

It was that spread between batting and pitching that led the team to trade away two of their better hitters in the hope of obtaining some quality, young pitching help. Of course, time will tell, but to date the pitching help has failed to appear, and the two bats (Curtis Mean and Luis Garcia, Jr.) are being missed as players and as people, and the team’s spirit and energy have vanished, and their losses now greatly exceed their wins and they have a good chance of fulfilling the original thoughts about this season – a last place finish. They now stand 12 games below .500, and are tied with Mets in last place in their 5 team division.

Yet (and this is where the bizarre gets more bizarre), if you look at the hitting statistics of all 30 major league teams, even today, the Nats stand 2nd in runs scored, 2nd in runs batted in, 2nd in home runs, 4th in doubles, 4th in triples, 1st in stolen bases, and 2nd in slugging. And, to make things even more difficult to understand, the Nats, 12 games below .500, have scored more runs during the year than their opponents have. And of the games they have lost, 20 have been lost by only one run.

And the bigger statistic is how many “blown saves” the Nats have had this year. What is a blown save, you ask? It is any time a pitcher enters a game with a lead of three or fewer runs, typically in the late innings, and let’s the other team score enough runs to turn the potential victory into a loss. So far, the Nats have played 146 games, and have had 37 blown saves. In other words, in 37 of their games, the Nats were ahead in late innings only to have the other team score more than needed to win.

Well, you ask, is 37 a big number or a small number of blown saves. Let me put it this way. It is a major league record, and there are 15 games to go. And it isn’t that the Nats have not tried out different relief pitchers. The blown saves have been the result of runs scored against 16 different relief pitchers over the course of the year. And obviously, things have not got better in this regard since the trades of Mean and Garcia. If anything, they are worse.

So, what looked mid-season to be heading towards the end of a seemingly successful rebuild now looks like the Nats will have to start from scratch to rebuild their relief pitching staff. I would expect a primarily new crop of folk next season. Will any of them be those who the Nats traded Garcia and Means for? We shall have to see. I wouldn’t count on it.

That’s it for baseball. Now, a little more.

From my reading odd things yesterday:

(1) Meir of Rothenberg, a 13th century rabbi, from Worms who spent most of his life in Rothenberg on the Tauber, and who was a very influential fellow. You may have heard of him; you probably don’t know why. That’s okay, I don’t either. But what I learned was that when he was 71 years old in the 1280s, he was traveling with family members, presumably to Palestine, although apparently no one knows for sure, when he was captured in the Italian Alps and held for ransom, for surely the wealthy Jewish population would ransom its most famous rabbi. But Meir refused to even think about the possibility of ransom, as he was afraid it would simply encourage the capture of more rabbis or other prominent Jews. So he just stayed a prisoner for seven years until he died!

(2) You read and hear a lot (I know that isn’t true unless your interests are the same as mine) about Jews in earlier centuries in parts of the Caribbean, such as Jamaica and Curacao, to name two. But I heard to night that Jews were also prominent in Suriname, the former Dutch Guiana, on the South American coast. Wikipedia says: In Suriname, “Jews were granted freedom of religion in 1665 and the right to have their own courts and civil guard. They continued to enjoy autonomy after the colony was turned over to the Netherlands [from the English]. Over half of the sugar cane plantations in Suriname were owned by Jews, who received a permit to work areas that were pure jungle into agriculture. In 1825, these special rights were rescinded.” Apparently, there are about 200 Jews in the capital, Paramaribo, today and they operate a synagogue in a building constructed in 1842 (sand floors and all). Who knew?

As am aside, the synagogue shares a parking lot with a mosque next door.