Finally! The Washington Nationals seem to have realized that the game of baseball is a heckuva lot easier when you’re able to knock the ball out of the park!
After years of kvetching, I can’t say how pleased I am with this development, and the thought of how much better our offense might be this season… next to the Chicago White Sox isn’t where you want to be on any lists of team batting statistics, as we were in 2024:
Visualizing the Rise in Three True Outcomes
To produce this power surge, the Nats seem to have changed their approach at the plate, accepting more strikeout risk for the upside of doing more damage on the balls they do hit. This new calculus has produced a noticeable bump in what is called the “three true outcomes” (TTO) of home runs, strikeouts, and walks - basically, plate appearances which end without a ball in play on the field, something I first touched on with this blog back in 2019.
While the aesthetics of a game concentrated on TTO might not be as beautiful as one focused on small ball and baserunning, analytics has shown that the tradeoff in strikeouts is largely worth it if teams are able to generate more home runs and draw more walks.
I like to view a lot of systems as a pendulum - oftentimes the ideal place to be is somewhere in the middle, so if you notice you are at either end of the spectrum, you should probably swing back the other way. In this sense, the Nats seem to have swung from a team over-indexed on contact hitting towards one with a healthier supply of power, at the cost of a slight uptick in strikeouts.
To that end, I’d like to send some kudos to Hitting Coach Darnell Coles - I was skeptical of the Nats’ decision to retain him after last season, believing the 2024 approach and results to be reflective of the limits of his ability - but Coles has proven me wrong thus far in 2025 by overseeing this shift in batting priorities. Keep it up Coach, and let’s go Nats!
