Photo by Sol Tucker/TalkNats

We say it all the time that baseball is a game that if you fail as a hitter 67 percent of the time, you’re a star. But making mistakes and errors have to be cleaned up. Five baserunning mistakes on Saturday in a win was cleaned up until last night when the team had a pickoff play that killed the 1st inning rally. Yes, the Washington Nationals are somehow winning these games. But for how long? Last night, they overcame a throwing error to load the bases with one out.

Everything worked out once again in a Nationals win. That is a tribute to this team that they overcome the same mistakes. We likened these mistakes to turnovers in football. Right from Opening Day, CJ Abrams admired a flyball that he thought was a home run and was thrown out at second base. Luckily, those types of turnovers have been cleaned up. But the baserunning mistakes are still a clear and present danger.

Did Blake Butera wait too long to pull Miles Mikolas last night? Haven’t we seen that movie before? Mikolas coughed up three runs after walking the first two batters in his third inning of work. His ERA actually improved to 11.49. His record is 0-3 in his starts, but last night there was an opener which technically made Mikolas’ appearance as a reliever — and the Nats won. As we posted during the game, his ERA in his 1st inning of work is 0.00 in his four games.

Would Andrew Alvarez be an upgrade to Mikolas in the starting rotation? Maybe. Would moving Mikolas into the bullpen be an improvement? Maybe. It seems like he could pitch 2.0 innings and be an upgrade over the weakest link in the bullpen. Analytics is supposed to identify the best use and usage for pitchers. Somehow there is an optimization of where Mikolas might help the team. But once he walked that lead-off batter, shouldn’t Parker have been all warmed up and ready?

Again, the Nats are winning games they would normally lose, and that is a testament to how much these players want to win. And credit to Butera who made plenty of great decisions in last night’s game. The great teams like the Dodgers and Phillies beat the Nats when mistakes were made. And still, the Nats find themselves 1-game from .500. Again, credit to Butera, the coaches, players, and front office.

And this got a lot of mileage when first base coach Corey Ray said he was upset with himself as a coach for the bad baserunning on Saturday.

The Nats offense is the second best in all of baseball. It has helped that CJ Abrams, James Wood, and several others have come up big for the team. Joey Wiemer began his season getting on-base safely in his first 10 plate appearances. Abrams has the 4th highest WAR in all of baseball, and Wood is ranked at the 20th best. Consider that Wood’s first 9-games had him at a -0.4 WAR as he was batting .125 with a .572 OPS. Since then, he has put up a +1.2 WAR (0.8 overall now) and batting .464 with a 1.498 OPS in his last 8-games.

When you score 5-runs or more in 13-of-17 games, you can overcome mistakes. But the Nats have only had two blowout wins. They should have had more if they played cleaner games. The pitching ranks near the worst in baseball, but plenty of pitchers have come up big. If Butera’s staff can work to their pitching strengths, this team might really shock the baseball world. In last night’s win, they got 2.0 encouraging innings from Mitchell Parker in his 2026 debut, the second save from Gus Varland, another zero by Clayton Beeter, and some magic from Cionel Perez to snuff out a possible disaster after that fielding error.

A 6.39 ERA from the bullpen has to improve. It should improve as we showed in the history of the Nats. Obviously a blowup like Monday with Jackson Rutledge‘s 7-earnies in an inning will crush that bullpen ERA. So the bullpen ERA really hasn’t been a true representation due to the extreme singular failures. You know what hurts is that there have been three blown saves that turned into losses. That stings. All but two teams have had blown saves.

Another area of improvement has to be with challenging within the ABS ball/strike zones because the Nationals rank dead last in challenge failures at 68 percent. Teams are only allowed two unsuccessful challenges in a game.

Let’s clean it up, and show improvement. Maybe the Nats can get back to D.C. on Thursday evening with a winning record. Wouldn’t that be nice!