The morning and welcome to episode 413 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball

Perspectus, presented by the play index at baseballreference.com.

Today we're going to be talking about the nationals in 20 minutes.

Nick will talk to Adam Kilgore, the beat writer for the Washington Post.

But we have Craig Goldstein, who writes for Baseball Perspectus, and who wrote the nationals

player comments in this year's annual. Craig, how are you?

I'm doing well. How are you guys?

Good. Ben, how are you? I'm well enough to proceed.

Good. Craig, I want to lay out a narrative for you.

This is a narrative that I feel like had some momentum last year.

In 2012, the nationals were super duper good and decided to sit Steven Strasburg down the

stretch and in the playoffs because they didn't want him to be hurt, but also because they felt

confident that with this team and this core, they were going to be back and that they needed

Strasburg to be healthy for that next great nationals team, which was going to come in 2013.

And then 2013 happened and we learned that Baseball was really unpredictable and they didn't

come close to making the playoffs. So the question is, did the nationals, do you feel like the

nationals did ruin or throw away their big chance or do you really feel like last year was

a crazy outlier and they're going to have many, many chances this year, next year,

that you after that. And that last year was just a unfortunate blip.

Would it be cheating to take somewhere in between?

That's what we do here. Probably something in between. I think a lot of times last year we heard

about the Plexiglass Principle. I think 2012 was probably more of the outlier than 2013,

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