After Alex Bregman’s three home run game, I thought about how many veteran players have given the Nats issues this year. Obviously the likes of Bryce Harper, Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto have had big moments, but they are some of the best players in the league. I am going to take a look at three guys having otherwise mediocre seasons who have owned the Nats.
The first player we will talk about is the aforementioned Bregman. Despite being a star for most of his career, Bregman really has not put up
superstar numbers in his first season in Chicago. He is hitting .256 with 16 homers and a .759 OPS. This is not bad, but pretty underwhelming for a guy like Bregman.
These numbers would be even more unimpressive if he did not play the Nats. Six of Bregman’s 16 homers have come against Washington. Last night he put the Cubs on his back, hitting three homers in a game for the first time in his career.
It has always felt like Bregman does well whenever he plays the Nats, especially in DC. He is one of those players I feel like Ted Lerner would have gone after if he were still owning the Nats. Bregman would have been a great veteran in this clubhouse and a good mentor for players such as Wood and Abrams. However, he is now in Chicago and owns the Nats whenever he plays us.
Bregman is far from the only player 30 or older to own the Nats this year though. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Derek Hill, who has broken our hearts multiple times this year. Hill was a Nat at one point, but made zero impact on the team.
Honestly, I thought Hill would be out of baseball by now. Thanks to his speed, defense and improving offensive ability, the center fielder has stuck around. For the season, he is hitting .233 with a .708 OPS, 9 homers and has 0.8 WAR. That is a nice season for a journeyman like him.
However, a lot of that production has come against the Nats. He is hitting .368 against us in 19 at bats, and honestly that is lower than I thought. The 30 year old has 3 homers against the Nats, with two of them being complete backbreakers.
Back in June, he took Brad Lord deep in the 9th inning of a wild game that the Phillies ended up winning. It was just a total gut punch to get beat by Hill of all people. When the two teams squared off again in August, Hill hit a go-ahead grand slam off of Tom Cosgrove to extend the Nats misery.
When the Nats get beat by the likes of Bryce Harper or Kyle Schwarber, it is easy to shrug it off because those guys are elite players. This year it has been Derek Hill who has been killing this team. It is both very annoying and shows the struggles of the Nats pitching staff.
There have honestly been plenty of instances where the Nats do a solid job shutting down the best player on teams, but let other guys destroy them. That happened against Yordan Alvarez when we played Houston. It also is happening this week against the Cubs. Outside of one homer, PCA has been fairly quiet, but Bregman and Seiya Suzuki are feasting.
The last player on the list is also a veteran who is not his team’s best hitter. Like Bregman, Matt Chapman is having an underwhelming season by his standards. He was only hitting .235 with 7 homers and a .692 OPS before going down with season ending surgery.
However, he went 14 for 26 with 2 homers and 8 RBI against the Nats. The 33 year old was just hitting rockets all over the field whenever he played against the Nats. He played a big role in that horrible Nats meltdown, hitting two homers in that game to get the Giants back in it. Chapman also had the game winning hit in a 12 inning game. Despite the rough season, he has been a thorn in the Nats side.
It feels like players like Chapman and Bregman are the ones who really have owned the Nats this year. Simon Mathews and Sean Doolittle have come up with solid game plans for the stars, but the lack of pitching talent really shows up against these guys. You cannot spend as much time preparing for the sidekicks, and those guys have punished the Nats.
Throughout this season, experienced teams and players have had the Nats number. Alex Bregman, Derek Hill and Matt Chapman are just three examples of that. Hopefully the Nats learn from this season and continue to improve, especially on the mound. However, there will always be guys who are Nats killers, and these are a few of them.
