BOSTON — Ian Desmond woke up Tuesday just as he woke up Monday, just as he has woken up every morning of this young season, with one clear thought in his head: “This will be the day.” No more errors. Maybe a couple of hits, a couple runs driven in, a win. A comfortable, routine day as a big league shortstop at the height of his athletic career.
And yet Tuesday afternoon, as the Washington Nationals took batting practice at Fenway Park, trying to cleanse a wretched Monday performance that lowlighted this unsettling start to the season, Desmond was both realistic and defiant. He had five errors in the first seven games. Headed into play Tuesday, that was more than 16 teams. Those errors all came in losses. Four of them led to runs — seven unearned runs, in fact, more than just two teams.
So the realistic part of Desmond’s approach is that he understands the questions will amount to, “What the $%*# is going on?”
“Do I worry about it? Of course,” Desmond said before the Nationals’ second game against the Boston Red Sox here. “Do I want to get out of it? Of course. I don’t ever want it to be part of my game. Every day, I come to the field thinking, ‘This is gonna be the day where it goes away.’ I do everything I can on the field to get rid of it mentally and physically.”
The defiant part could describe all of the Nationals at this point. They believe they are World Series favorites for a reason. Hey, Mike Rizzo, the team you constructed is 2-5 and has looked bad getting there. Are you worried?
“No,” Rizzo said. “Why? Track record.”
A baseball player or exec can use this as a fallback because more than any other sport, the past predicts the future. Desmond entered Tuesday’s game 3 for 26 on the year, with one walk and six strikeouts. For his career, he is a .268 hitter with a .429 slugging percentage. To Rizzo, to Desmond, 3 for 26 just means 10 for 26 is around the corner.
“He knows that fielding slumps, like hitting slumps, come and go,” Rizzo said. “He has the track record that proves he’s one of the elite shortstops in the game.
“We’re undermanned and playing poorly. It’s a bad combination. But slumps start and end with one at-bat. You don’t know when that at-bat’s going to be. Your next at-bat starts you on a hot streak. Your next win starts you on a win streak.”
The Nationals do not yet have a win streak in 2015, and precisely zero of their regular hitters are off to fast starts. This has led to an unusual angst as the club dropped two of three to the Mets, then two of three to the likely-to-be-terrible Phillies, then the ugly 9-4 laugher on a beautiful opening day at Fenway.
Desmond is the focal point for any number of reasons. His play, to start. But also his contract status. If there is any pressure on this particular version of the Nationals — and there is — it comes in part because it is almost certainly the last summer this group will play together. Desmond, the final vestige of the Montreal Expos — who drafted him in 2004 and moved to the District the next year — is a safe bet to play elsewhere next year.
So the contract. The contract must be in his head, right? It’s the only thing that could explain the start.
“I’ve gone through this stretch every year since I’ve been a professional,” Desmond said. “Literally since I’ve been in A ball. That’s at every level, whether it’s rookie year, whether it was last year in [the first year of] a two-year deal, or whatever it might be. I’m not worried about any of this [contract] stuff.”
So maybe, to the worrisome April Nats fan, it could be oddly reassuring that Desmond has, indeed, gone through this before. From April 10-17 a year ago, he made six errors in eight games. Four games later, he booted two balls. The Nats started the year 7-2 but then bumbled for nearly two months. On May 28, they were 25-27.
“The questions came [Monday], ‘Was this a wakeup call?’ ” Manager Matt Williams said. “All we have to do is look about 12 months ago, and we were in probably the same spot roughly this time of year. And we played.”
Which is what Desmond intends to do: just play. But there is a gravity to his situation. He showed up for batting practice Tuesday without the beard he had carried all spring, with his hair closely cropped rather than spilling from underneath his cap. For all the talk of track records and routines and it’s still early, there is also an acknowledgment that something must change.
“I’m pretty comfortable with who I am as a player to know at the end of the day, I’m going to be what I’m going to be,” Desmond said. Who he is: a Silver Slugger winner three times over who also has a habit of slow starts. His April numbers, for his career: a .247 average, .286 on-base percentage and .410 slugging percentage, lower than his career numbers by 21, 29 and 19 points, respectively. This, too, will pass.
“He’s a big-time pro,” Rizzo said. “You never see him not answer questions about it.”
Each day presents a new opportunity for the questions to stop. Tuesday night, the first Red Sox batter of the game, leadoff man Mookie Betts, bounced a ball toward shortstop. Baseball’s deeply ingrained belief system dictates that the ball will find the struggling player.
Desmond fielded that ball cleanly, comfortably. He then smacked a double in the first, a single in the fourth and a two-run single that tied the game in the fifth. Maybe this was, in fact, the day.
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