At the break, Wild Things not half bad

Over the past decade, the Wild Things forged a well-deserved reputation for being a baseball team that relied on pitching and defense to win games. Washington could throw it and catch it, but when it came to hitting it, there were too many outs and too few runs. Washington’s offense always seemed to be found in the bottom half of the Frontier League’s statistical categories. The Wild Things’ hitting, or lack of it, was the primary reason the team missed the playoffs in eight of the past 10 years.
This season, however, there has been an offensive explosion at Wild Things Park. Washington has entered the all-star break leading the league in most offensive categories. The Wild Things are first in team batting average at .278, have scored the most runs (308), hit the most home runs (51), have the highest on-base percentage (.360) and slugging percentage (.441) and are second in walks (207).
Washington loaded up in the offseason on veteran hitters and hoped it could make the pitching work again, this time with younger arms and an experienced closer in Zach Strecker.
So far, the plan has worked as Washington is the only team in the league with 30 wins (30-21) and resides in first place in the East Division, holding a three-game lead over the second-place Joliet Slammers. Washington surged to the top of the division with a nine-game winning streak in June.
Washington has four of the top five players in the league in RBI. Left fielder Roman Collins leads with 42, center fielder James Harris is right behind with 41, and right fielder Hector Roa and catcher Kyle Pollock are tied for fourth with 38 each.
So even with Washington’s record, its position in the standings and nine games of double-digits runs, why did manager Gregg Langbehn sound Sunday, after an 8-4 win over Evansville, more like a cranky old guy on a Pittsburgh Pirates postgame call-in show than the manager of a team that has a .588 winning percentage?
“We have 30 wins, which is a lot at the end of the first half, but I firmly believe there are a lot of areas where we can get better,” Langbehn admitted. “We can’t rely on the offense to win 10-8 games for us every night.
“Our defense must get better and our pitching has to get better. We average almost an error a game and our starting pitching has to get more length. It has to get more competitive. We need our starting pitchers to give us six and seven innings and throw shutdown innings after we score.”
In what has been a reversal of so many recent seasons, Washington is relying on its hitting and simply getting by with its pitching. That bothers Langbehn, a guy who spent eight years in professional baseball as a pitcher, including three years at the Class AAA level.
Though Washington has left-handed pitcher Thomas Dorminy, who has a 7-2 record and is second in the league with a 1.95 ERA – he will be a starter in tonight’s all-star game – the starting pitching has been inconsistent. The Wild Things have 18 quality starts (at least six innings pitched and no more than three earned runs allowed) and only Schaumburg has fewer. The pitching staff’s ERA of 4.50 ranks 10th in the 12-team league. Too many short outings by the starters has taxed the bullpen, which is anchored by Strecker, who has been superb. He has given up only two runs in 27 outings.
The defense, long a strength of the Wild Things, is only so-so this season. It has added to the strain on the pitching staff.
Langbehn is right in his assessment because the pitching and defense must improve in the season’s second half for Washington to make a second trip to the playoffs under his watch. But the 30 wins means the Wild Things might not need another 9-game winning streak to lock down a postseason berth.
“We can make it without that kind of streak,” he said. “You just have to win series and avoid lengthy losing streaks. We have to win at home and I think we’ve established that. That was something we had trouble with in past seasons. This team has the feeling that it’s not going to lose at home.
“It’s tight in both divisions. It seems like every year it goes down to the final eight to 10 days of the season.”