Photo by Marlene Koenig for TalkNats
In 2025, the Washington Nationals starting pitchers, as a group, narrowly escaped being the worst in baseball — and ONLY because Colorado pitches half their games in the highest altitude in baseball. With a combined ERA of 5.18, that placed the Nats’ starters at 2nd from last in MLB in 2025. Subtract out the team’s best pitcher, MacKenzie Gore, who was traded last month, and subtract the injured Trevor Williams (17 starts) and Michael Soroka who headed to free agency, and replace them with free agents Foster Griffin and Miles Mikolas, along with new coaches, and we will wait-and-see if this is an improvement.
Who will be the Nats starters named on Opening Day of 2026? That is a great question, and President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, We are just 39 days to Opening Day.
If we want to honestly talk about the starting pitchers, we have to talk about the team defense (second worst in MLB) as well as the catchers (worst in MLB). If we peel back the onion, what we find is that the starting pitchers were the fifth worst in baseball if neutralize the defense using the FIP stat. If you dig further into the process, maybe use and usage along with the bullpen were contributing factors to the failures.
Will new coaching matter? Manager Blake Butera named Simon Mathews as his new pitching coach to replace Jim Hickey. And Sean Doolittle returned as the assistant pitching coach with Dustin Glant as an assistant pitching coach / bullpen coach. Their task is to take this pitching staff and improve them. The approach is to take the traditional “Driveline” pitching lab approach from offsite into real-time on the field-of-play — wherever that is.
If you want immediate improvement in your pitching staff, pair up the pitchers with competent catchers and at least a league average defense in the infield and outfield. By doing that, you just improved your ERA from 5.18 to 4.62 with little effort. That’s over a half run per 9.0 innings. The team hired Bobby Wilson as their catching coach / run game coordinator.
❝… We’re going to be really open-minded [on offseason signings]. I don’t think you can ever have enough pitching. … We’re going to see how it plays out, and what opportunities present themselves.❞
— Toboni said at the GM Meetings in Las Vegas in November
Again, this isn’t rocket science. It is commonsense. Toboni believes he has added better coaches. Fix the defense and catching. Now, did he add better pitchers to the mix? There’s the million dollar question. A 4.03 team ERA for starters was the MLB middle in 2025. The Nats only had one starter at or better than that number, however if you go by FIP both Andrew Alvarez and Gore were better than 4.03 — and GORE is GONE.
There are 10 candidates for the starting rotation as of this morning, and a couple could end up in the bullpen or maybe more than a couple. Some might go to Triple-A. And at some point, the two starters on the 60-day IL, DJ Herz and Trevor Williams, should be ready to pitch. That makes a dozen starting pitchers.
We have four locks — and this is our view, it might not be yours. This is as of today, might not be our locks in a month:
1. Cade Cavalli
4. Jake Irvin
And pick one from: Andrew Alvarez, Riley Cornelio, Josiah Gray, Brad Lord, Mitchell Parker, and Ken Waldichuk for the 5th rotation spot.
The analysts agree with our 1-4 picks for the rotation, and they are going with Lord for their #5. As a sidenote, we know that Lord was effective out of the bullpen.
Of the nine Nats’ starters used in 2025, Jake Irvin was the workhorse of the staff at 33 starts and 180.0 innings. But his 5.70 ERA won’t cut it on a team that wants to be taken seriously. Is his arm ruined or is there something there that can be fixed? Irvin’s average fastball velo dropped from 93.9 mph in 2024 down to 92.4 mph this year. That’s a 1.5 mph drop and troubling for a 28 year old pitcher who was arbitration-eligible with a projected price tag of $3.3 million — and Toboni ended up paying him $2.8 million.
We will see if the pitchers who are getting paid above Gray‘s $1.35 million like Griffin, Irvin, and Mikolas are all true locks for the starting rotation. MLB doesn’t have Gray in their rotation, but per Roster Resource, he can be optioned to the minor leagues. And same with Griffin and Irvin, as well as Alvarez, Cornelio, Lord, Parker, and Waldichuk.
Some would say that Gore, a 2025 All-Star, was the team’s best starter. Depending on how you subjectively judge that, of the full-time starters, Gore was the best, but he was certainly inconsistent. Great at times, and disappointing at times. He allowed the team’s overall bad defense, some bad umpiring, catching issues, and other extraneous factors affect him on the mound. He also struggled to receive league average run support from his teammates. The team only had a .333 winning percentage in Gore starts which was certainly due to a combination of all of those factors.
When you have the worst catchers based on framing pitches, you will lose some legitimate strikes. That is a key point. Will Harry Ford upgrade the catching? Maybe the new ABS challenge system will help Nats’ pitchers. It isn’t a full-time system, just a limited challenge system. Objectively, the Nats received the fourth worst ranking in baseball over the past five years in bad calls. So you aren’t imagining it. As pointed out, it’s overall impact of when the bad call was made. A 3-2 pitch that is botched can change a game.
Further away from starting for this team are Travis Sykora, Jarlin Susana, and Luis Perales as the Top-3 starting pitching prospects in the Nats’ system. Sykora had TJ surgery this past season on his torn UCL, and Susana had an upper latissimus dorsi tear that required surgery. And Perales was making his way back at the latter parts of 2025 from his own TJ surgery. And the team received starter, Alejandro Rosario, in the Gore trade, and Rosario tore his UCL in his pitching elbow that will keep him out for the 2026 season. With Perales healthy, the next top prospect up is Alex Clemmey.
If you watched the Baseball America video (below) on the Nats’ top prospects, you might think the world is ending. Then you read Keith Law in The Athletic, and you see optimism about the Nats 6th ranked farm system.
To honestly answer who the Nats starting pitchers will be on Opening Day in 39 days is far from set in stone. That’s the real answer. This discussion will be ongoing for the next 39 days until the Opening Day roster is published for March 26, 2026.
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