Photo by Sol Tucker/TalkNats
When the draft lottery began in 2023, the ball didn’t bounce the right way for the Washington Nationals. The Nats got the No. 2 pick, and the Pittsburgh Pirates got the No. 1 pick.
Remember when Ben Belford-Peltzman and I got to interview Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews and their head coach months before the draft? We knew the Nats would end up with one of the LSU stars, and the team added us to their credentialed media which gave us great access. That early call to follow them right through their National Championship looked like you had the younger versions of Stephen Strasburg and Mike Trout as former LSU stars Ben McDonald and Mikie Mahtook comped them. Maybe Crews will be there one day — but McDonald might have been too conservative on Skenes. He might be Walter Johnson.
That lotto ball sealed the fate of the Nats, and the player that Washington ended up with is currently in Triple-A while Skenes has already earned the Rookie of the Year as well as a Cy Young awards. The Nats issue is pitching. Skenes would have been the team’s Strasburg. What could have been.
Good pitching is so hard to get. It’s one reason at last year’s draft, when the Nats did get the No. 1 pick thanks to the lotto ball, that I said to go pitching with LHP Kade Anderson. Who knows how that draft will turn out. Eli Willits will hopefully be a superstar. He’s the player the Nats actually did pick. But the Nats have a pitching problem currently and as you look into the future the crystal ball isn’t clear.
Over the winter, the Nats traded away one of their best starting pitching prospects, Jake Bennett, for a top prospect pitcher with known control issues, Luis Perales. On top of that, they traded away their best starting pitcher, MacKenzie Gore, for a bunch of promising prospects including one pitcher, Alejandro Rosario, who will miss at least two years of time due to injuries. You hope that President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, knows what he is doing — but the Rosario injury has been shrouded in mystery — and so far, nobody is talking.
Because of the Gore trade, the Nats pitching is weaker today at the MLB level. Toboni loves making trades — you just hope he made the right ones. They say you shouldn’t draft on need, but the Nats might have to do just that and grab a pitcher with their No. 11 pick in July. Gio Rojas, if available, is the No. 1 prep arm right now and Baseball America just mocked him at pick No. 12.
Last night, Skenes dominated the Nats while the Nats so-called No. 1, Cade Cavalli, laid an absolute egg and was pulled after 1 1/3 innings and 4-earnies. It was a disaster. The team burned Paxton Schultz for 2 2/3 innings, and then Jackson Rutledge, who was called up on Monday, pitched an encouraging inning with the best splitter we’ve seen him throw for a strikeout. But manager Blake Butera wanted length, and Rutledge collapsed in his second inning of work giving up 7-earnies on 44 pitches, and we immediately tweeted that we thought he’d be optioned after the game — and he was. If Rutledge pitched just the one inning, he would have had something to build on.
The use and usage by Butera has been horrific. Case and point was how he shoved on Cole Henry who is now on the 15-day IL. Doesn’t assistant pitching coach Sean Doolittle know these pitchers? He should. Henry shouldn’t be pitching back-to-backs, and certainly not multiple innings — and they did both. What about the biometrics that we heard so much about? FIX IT! This is ridiculous that the same issues with use and usage from years past, are still an issue now.
With Rutledge gone, expect that Mitchell Parker will be activated today. As we sourced on Sunday, both Rutledge and Parker travelled to Pittsburgh with one on standby. Well, here you go. Don’t expect Parker to solve all of the issues, but he might very well be a tandem starter to Miles Mikolas who only pitched 3.0 innings in this last outing.
Most of these pitchers should be better than what they’ve shown, and that begins with Cavalli, the team’s Opening Day starter. Foster Griffin, who the Nats since from Japan, has looked the best so far. Jake Irvin and Zack Littell have been serviceable, and the jury is still out on Mikolas.
With league-average pitching, the Nats would probably be pushing for first place given that the team’s offense has been en fuego. James Wood was just named the Player of the Week, and the week before, Joey Wiemer had to be in the Top-3 of candidates given his torrid start to the season. But the team’s most consistent bat belongs to CJ Abrams. And in that top group has to be Jacob Young who smashed his second homer last night — and that matches his home run total from all of last year.
Look at these WAR numbers:
Now look at the WAR numbers for each peer group:
The Nats have four of the top position players, and while Wiemer looks to be fading, you hope Daylen Lile and Brady House can both step up. The Nat offense has now scored 5-or-more runs in 12 of the team’s 16 games this season.
With the season 10 percent complete, you could take those WAR numbers from FanGraphs and extrapolate them by just multiplying the numbers by 10x. Both Abrams and Wood are on 50 home run paces also. And both Abrams and Wood are on MVP paces if they could replicate their numbers for the remainder of the season. Easier said than done.
While the position player outlooks look great, the pitching has to improve. The team enters today’s game at 7-9, and the Nats are in 4th place in the NL East and ahead of the last place Mets.
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