I’m gonna tell you something you might not know. The Dodgers have scored the most runs in baseball this year. Yeah, sure, you probably surmised. The Braves are second. Yeah, okay, you probably know that because, well, you’re reading this. But, guess who’s third? Yeah, as you can tell from the title of this post and the first sentence herein — it’s the Nationals.
Despite being generally woeful, to the tune of changing their entire Front Office operation midstream during what feels like an eternal rebuild,
the Nationals are doing a Thing. They actually kinda-sorta started doing it last year, where despite a roster of Not Much, they finished middle of the pack in xwOBA (and underhit it worse than almost anyone else in baseball so that no one noticed). Come 2026, well, they’re doing it again — at least through three weeks or so.
When you look at their names, it maybe gets more surprising. Nine Nationals have 50+ PAs this season: James Wood, Daylen Lile, CJ Abrams, Brady House, Nasim Nunez, Luis Garcia Jr., Jacob Young, Jorbit Vivas, and Joey Weimer. Those of those guys, recognize ‘em or not, have bad xwOBAs. Two — the two you probably do recognize, Wood and Abrams — have .400+ xwOBAs. The rest are somewhere in the middle, some not great, some decent. Point is, put it all together, and somehow, the Nationals have baseball’s seventh-best xwOBA, with that cast of characters getting prominent playing time. Weird, right?
It gets wackier when you consider that this isn’t a luck/bloop thing, at least not in one sense: their team wOBA and xwOBA basically matches. Where they have succeeded is converting their hits into runs (i.e., sequencing), being one of just three teams to score 5.5 runs per game or more. (Among the rest of the of the top seven in xwOBA aside from the Braves and Dodgers, you have the Astros, who are similar to the Nationals — more on that later — and then the trio of the Yankees, Tigers, and Padres, all of whom are substantially underhitting their xwOBAs so far.)
But, offensive outbursts aside, the Nationals are still under .500, with a negative run differential. And that’s because they have the worst pitching staff in baseball, at least so far. They’ve yielded the most runs per game in baseball. Their team pitching fWAR is -2.1. Only two other teams are negative, and they’re barely below zero. Their rotation is (barely) negative, the only such team in baseball. Their bullpen is so horrendously negative (-2.0) that this value is bigger than the positive fWAR of the Padres’ bullpen, that leads MLB with 1.9. In half their games so far, both teams have scored five or more runs; they’re 3-8 in those games and 7-4 in the others.
This sort of imbalance, if you will, is unusual. These days, teams kind of exist on a continuum of “good to bad,” without a lot of specialization in run prevention versus run accumulation. While it’s only been a few weeks, see this graphic:
The blob sort of speaks, or blobs, for itself. The upper left corner are the teams having a tough time — low scoring and lots of runs allowed. There are a few teams in the blob that are kinda-sorta pulling opposing offenses down to their level, and the bottom right corner of the blob is the “better” teams not having substantial success so far, but you get the idea: two-thirds of the league isn’t doing anything that weird with regard to pitching/defense vis-a-vis hitting. Further in the bottom right, outside the blob, you have the teams that are succeeding quite handily at both, and there’s a trio of teams with split fortunes (Mariners sad, Tigers okay, Padres happy) that are all playing a bunch of 2-1 or 4-1ish games.
And then, you look up in the upper right, far away from everyone else, and you get… the Nationals. And the Astros. So, you get the idea.
The fewest runs the Nationals have scored in a four-game stretch is 18. The most runs the Braves have allowed in a four-game stretch is 22, and that still featured a one-run-allowed game. There’s a bit of unstoppable force/immovable object thing going on here, except it’s early and nothing is set in stone. The Braves will be substantially favored to win each game because the Nationals’ pitching is what it is, but that’s not what I’m asking about. Instead, how many runs do you think they score in four games against the Braves?
