Pitching coach Simon Mathews has a mound visit; Photo Sol Tucker/TalkNats

Time flies when you’re winning and having fun. This baseball season will be 20 percent completed once three more games are in the books. Today, this Washington Nationals team is on pace to finish the season with a 73-89 record. All of that while the Nats have played the fourth toughest schedule so far this season.

Imagine where this team could be if they had just a slightly better pitching staff. Most fans who have watched every pitch of the Nats season agree that the team has given away several wins due to the poor bullpen as well as the two-fifths of the starting rotation that has been awful so far, and we are referring to Zack Littell and Miles Mikolas in particular.

Best laid plans often fail. Littell was a good pitcher last year in Tampa to the point that he was in demand at the trade deadline and was sent to a contender. He had a 3.58 ERA at the time of the trade. Things are so bad for Littell right now that he is leading the Nats in home runs over James Wood. That’s a good thing about Wood and not a good thing about Littell. He is ranked the worst in the Majors, and his 7.56 ERA tells just part of the story. A pitcher known to eat innings can’t even get into the fifth innings of games. And Mikolas has an ERA of 8.49 and is now pitching after an opener in 3.0-to-4.0 inning stints.

As of today, the Nationals pitching staff has a combined 5.24 ERA which is second to last in the Majors. But that is a huge improvement on where it was two weeks ago when that ERA was a 6.21 on April 13. Since that point, the Nats team ERA is 4.17 and the 13th best in baseball in that span. This season, the Nats pitching has given up 4-or-fewer earned runs in 14-of-29 games (48.3%).

The MLB middle is a 4.07 ERA. If we drew a line of demarcation through that mark, there would be 12 full-time pitchers worse than that mark as we delete Joey Wiemer, and nine pitchers who are better. Four of those dozen struggling pitchers are off the roster, and Andre Granillo was just added back. Two of those dozen are obviously Mikolas and Littell, and the remaining five are part of an issue of inconsistency.

Those remaining five pitchers are: Cionel Perez, Mitchell Parker, Jake Irvin, PJ Poulin, and Brad Lord listed in order of their ERA from worst to best. And only Perez and Parker are above the team average 5.24 ERA. They are part of that inconsistent group, and you could certainly expand that to include Cade Cavalli who has a 4.01 ERA.

Top strikeout pitchers are expensive in the free agency route. The Nats need those pitchers because they control more of the game versus a pitch-to-contact pitcher who relies on defense and the law of averages in BABIP. Truth is that Nats pitchers aren’t striking out enough batters and limiting enough walks. They “must control the rectangle” as Mathews says. Their 4.08 BB/9 isn’t the worst in baseball, but being 7th from last in strikeouts in the K/BB ratio with walks won’t cut it.

The best pitcher on the team has to be Foster Griffin. He is 26th in all of baseball for qualified starting pitchers with a 2.67 ERA. A week ago we wrote an article about Griffin, and what he needed to do to improve more. It was his cutter that was his issue. Most pitchers throw cutters to induce weak contact. Griffin’s cutter had a new shape to it yesterday. Not only did it induce weak contact, it also got swing and miss at 26 percent. That was his main pitch that he threw on Sunday. On Saturday, Irvin was sporting a newly shaped curveball that had vertical drop. Per Statcast, Irvin threw the curveball as his primary pitch at 36.4 percent of the time.

Both Griffin and Irvin threw scoreless outings over the weekend. They were both brilliant on the mound. The Nats won both of their games in extra innings. In Griffin starts, the team is now 5-1. Credit to the pitchers, and also credit to the pitching coaches and analytics staff. But if we credit all of them, do they also share in the blame for the struggling pitchers?

The Nationals have three pitching coaches in uniform with Simon Mathews, Sean Doolittle, and Dustin Glant. There are several analytical people behind them in support. Can they fix the struggling pitchers or is this a case that some of them are just unfixable?

That becomes the $10 million question which is the amount that the team spent on Littell and Mikolas. Some feel that Andrew Alvarez is better than both and should be inserted into the starting rotation. The team gave Riley Cornelio has shot with a MLB debut on Friday, and well, let’s just say that didn’t go well. He got a blown save and a loss in the game. But could Cornelio get a second chance? At some point DJ Herz will hopefully be ready as he is ramping up after his 2025 TJ surgery, and all of a sudden there is a depth issue of starters beyond them. Luis Perales is the only other listed starter on the 40-man roster. He’s basically a 3.0 inning starter as he is on an innings limit. The team traded away Jake Bennett for Perales.

There is also the possibility of putting Parker back in the starting rotation as well as Lord. The staff has to be creative. Right now Parker and Lord are long-men in the bullpen to cover for Littell and Mikolas. Somehow you have to cover 9.0 innings on most games, recently that has been 10.0 innings with the spate of extra innings games. And the team just lost arguably their best reliever, Clayton Beeter, to forearm soreness.

If President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, built a better bullpen, and back of his starting rotation, the Nats would be a contending team right now. Yes, shocking. The Nats are the third best offensive team in all of baseball. Did we say shocking? And that stat comes with a shocker that the team is the 8th worst in batting average with a runner on third base. This is where the team must improve. They lost a game when they had a runner on third and no outs in a walk-off situation last week and failed to score the runner. That just goes to show you that even the third best offense has room for improvement.

And then you have the components of defense and base running. The Nats are a middle of the road defensive team until you can’t excuse the fact that they have the most errors in baseball. It is a combination of good and bad as you see in the team’s OAA stat. Saved by a highlight reel catch by Jacob Young at the wall in the 7th inning yesterday is the good, but some of the unforced errors on this team are inexcusable at times. And they also lead in the most outs on the bases with Daylen Lile, Brady House, and Luis Garcia Jr. ranked in the bottom-30 in MLB. In the past week, two Nats runners were picked off at third base with Lile and Nasim Nunez making the same mistake. While Nunez is the team’s best runner, he is also the most aggressive. But you have to be aggressively smart.

When manager Blake Butera talked about fundamentals and not repeating mistakes, you have to wonder about the accountability. He claims that he calls players out in team meetings so players can learn. People have asked for years with this team if there is a baseball IQ issue. Just yesterday, third baseman House saved a near-disaster when catcher Drew Millas almost threw a ball into left field if not for House’s great save. The question at the time, why did Millas throw the ball as the runner was nearly on the base after a wild pitch? Sometimes you just have to put the ball in your pocket.

This team could be so much better if they can improve their glaring weaknesses. The team has already surrendered 18 unearned runs in just 29 games. They need to be better at hitting with runners on third base. They have to reduce the picked-off base runners, and they have to improve the defense. And most of all they have to get better at pitching as a team.

Imagine where this team could be.