When Matt Williams looked at himself in his San Francisco hotel room’s bathroom mirror, a few hours following NLDS Game 4, undoubtedly he thought how fortunate he was to have had Drew Storen, Tyler Clippard, and Stephen Strasburg in the bullpen in case the game, like the one on Saturday, went 18 innings.

Never mind that the season’s now over for the Nationals while the Giants head to St. Louis to (once again) face the Cardinals in the NLCS.

Using Aaron Barrett and Rafael Soriano in lieu of Storen, Clippard, or even Strasburg in high-leverage situations within a supposedly all-hands-on-deck game was beyond puzzling, even for a skipper whose in-game tactics throughout the series had been under fire.

In a must-read piece for Fox Sports subtly entitled “Matt Williams and How Not to Run a Bullpen,” Dave Cameron describes the seventh inning, a frame that will live in infamy for Nats fans:

Tyler Clippard never even warmed up that inning. Neither did Stephen Strasburg, the team’s dominant starter who was available out of the bullpen, and who could have bridged the gap to get to the eighth inning if Williams was completely insistent on maintaining his regular season roles. After the game, Williams said Strasburg was available only in an emergency, but he didn’t clarify why pulling his starter after four innings in an elimination game didn’t qualify as an emergency.
But I can at least see an argument for why Storen or Strasburg wasn’t ready to go in the seventh inning. Clippard, though, is on the roster for these exact situations: getting big outs with men on base in extremely high-leverage at-bats. It doesn’t get any more high-leverage than if-this-guy-at-second-scores-our-season-is-probably-over, but Clippard simply sat and watched his less-talented teammates give up the run that would eventually decide the game.

Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post agrees:

In the seventh, Williams proved in [sic] inflexible. He arrived at his bullpen usage because he stuck with orthodoxy in a moment that demanded urgency. He never considered using Clippard and Storen earlier than usual because he wanted to save them for the eighth and ninth, like he would have in any game in the summer.
“Because those are our seventh-inning guys,” Williams said. “That’s how we set this up. We had two lefties at the top of the inning, and if we got to the righties, we were going to Barrett. That’s what he’s done for us all year long. We’re certainly not going to use our closer in the seventh inning.”

Oof. Natitude deserved way better than this.

(And yes, the same is true for those who bleed Dodger Blue. No one decision made by Williams was nearly as egregious as skipper Don Mattingly earlier in the day electing to sit Yasiel Puig in a nail biter of a game at Busch Stadium that would extinguish LA’s hopes for a championship.)

More here and here.