Nationals Farm Authority

John Lannan’s first professional start ended with an ejection.

Who saw that coming?

The 22-year old Lannan gave up five runs in 4 1/3 innings of work in his first major league start. He allowed two walks and six hits (including a titanic home run to dead CF by Ryan Howard) and struck out only one. But the bigger story was the fact that homeplate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt ejected Lannan after he hit both Chase Utley and Howard with pitches with one out in the fifth. Wendelstedt continued to make himself the focus of this game.

I typically don’t like reading about criticisms of umpires but in this case, it is without a question warranted.

Lannan will never be known as a power pitcher. He relies more on working around the strikezone getting batters to hit his pitch. From the start of the game Wendelstedt was squeezing Lannan (and Phillies starter Adam Eaton as well) with an incredibly tight strikezone. And to compound the small strikezone, Wendelstedt was still inconsistent in the calling of pitches. Lannan threw identical fastballs early in the first inning, the pitches crossed the plate in the same place and CA Jesus Flores caught the pitches in the exact same place but one pitch was a ball and one was a strike.

Nationals bench coach Pat Corrales was riding Wendelestedt about his strikezone and Wendelstedt immediately took the bait barking back at Corrales “He’s all over the place.” I will grant Wendelstedt that point, Lannan was all over the place. However, every pitch clearly fell within even the strictest definition of the strikezone.

That brings us to the HBPs in the fifth. It was clear in this inning that Lannan had lost something. He was wild as it appeared the near 80 pitches it took him to get through four innings had paid its toll on him. After retiring Shane Victorino, Lannan hit Utley on the hand with a high and tight fastball. From the replays, he was not throwing at Utley, you could clearly see that the pitch just got away from him. It was a similar case with Howard as Lannan’s attempt to reclaim the inside portion of the plate resulted in Howard being hit on another fastball that he could not control. Rather than issue a warning after the second HBP, Wendelstedt immediately ejected Lannan.

Should a warning have been issued at that point? Absolutely.

Should Manny Acta have pulled Lannan after that second HBP? I’d say yes. He’d clearly tired and was unable to control his fastball. And if the Nationals had not played 14 innings the previous game, I imagine that Lannan would have been pich-hit for in the fourth.

But what should not have happened was the knee-jerk ejection. Wendelstedt made himself the story and that’s wrong.

Bottom line on Lannan? He was OK. Not great, but not necessarily as bad as his final line implies. He is what he is, a soft-tossing LHP who relies on his control to perform at his best. When he works in and around the strike zone he can be a solid middle of the rotation guy, but when his command escapes him, you get what happened this afternoon.