I was going to write a post about what I think the Nats should do with John Lannan, but the question has been suddenly rendered moot by today’s injury to Chien-Ming Wang. For now it looks like the pride of Tainan City, Taiwan has at least a strained hamstring. I hope it’s not worse than that.
Parenthetically: watch that video of Wang going down again. Once you get over the awkward, vaguely slapstick fall, you get to see some pretty good baseball. Wang seems to injure himself just as he goes down to scoop the baseball. Then, as he’s falling, he has the presence of mind and focus to drag his (good?) foot over the bag and retire Russell Martin, who also leaps to avoid clobbering Wang. Excellently played by both the falling Wang and the running Martin. This is why they’re in the big leagues, folks.
Wang’s injury means that John Lannan drops right into the Nats’ Number 5 starter role. Oddly, this substitution doesn’t really change my projection for the 2012 Nats at all: 86-88 wins. Lannan’s mediocre FIP is, oddly, cancelled out by his better offense.
We’ll re-visit the whole starting line-up and do the calculations more rigorously after the next round of cuts. For now, I’m going to hope that Wang’s hamstring recovers and that he’s not seriously injured. I was looking forward to watching him pitch this year.
Natstradamus 