Photo by Sol Tucker/Nats.Talk

The Washington Nationals needed that win yesterday and got it. The hope was that Cade Cavalli would step up like an ace, and the first 4.0 innings were encouraging — then he struggled in the 5th inning and gave up three runs along with the hard-earned lead to depart in a 3-3 tie. Thanks to Luis Garcia Jr., the Nats grabbed the lead right back in the bottom of that 5th inning after Garcia golfed a 2-run home run over the out-of-town scoreboard to make Cavalli the winner after-all, and the Nats rolled to an 8-3 win.

On offense, the Nats went to the top of MLB once more in a tie with the Dodgers for the most runs scored this season at an impressive 5.38 runs per game. With the Nats pitching giving up 4.71 earned runs per game, the difference is really those pesky unearned runs due to the errors. Overall, the Nats have a +4 run differential on the season.

The defense has shown to be much better and since May 1, the team OAA is a combined -1 compared to league average with the Nats outfield at a +9 in that span. Yes, that means the infield was a -10 in that span and 90 percent of that negative defense was in May. The Nats infield has been virtually league average in the month of June.

With the OAA statistic, they don’t measure the catchers. Another point to make is that having an improved outfield defense saves extra base hits normally with above average catches like we have seen this season from Dylan Crews and Jacob Young have potentially changed games. This is why the Nats ranking on FanGraphs has the Nats defense in the top-half of baseball with 11 defensive runs saved. That’s hard to believe given the worst rankings for unearned runs — but keep in mind that oftentimes the pitching can control the body count on unearned runs.

A special shout-out to Crews who did it with his glove, bat, and speed yesterday putting three tools on display, and he did have a monster 440 foot homer on Friday to show-off four tools. He has the arm when he needs it. His speed and defense have been his constants. The hit-tool is the one we need to see more of as he is only batting .192 with a .561 OPS so far in his 21 game sample size this season. He hasn’t even reached 80 at-bats.

“Dylan’s just one of those five-tool players [who] can change the game in a lot of different areas. There’s so much that Dylan can bring to the table. You almost look at what guys are doing offensively, of course. We’d love for him to be hitting .300, .350 right now.

But what Dylan brings to the table in terms of the baserunning, the athleticism, being able to score from first on that base hit right there – which is an unbelievable, heck of a send by our third-base coach, Victor Estevez – but Dylan gave him that option to send him there because of how hard he ran and because of the tight turns he made.”

— manager Blake Butera on Dylan Crews

The Nats have a series to win today. If they can do that with Miles Mikolas as their bulk starter, the Nats will get back to their high-mark of the season at 2-games above .500. The Nats stay in Washington, D.C. for games through Wednesday as Kansas City Royals travel to Nats Park for a 3-game series beginning on Monday.

Here is Butera’s bullpen chart:

The FanGraphs WAR chart is accumulating data. The numbers are getting very large as the season is headed towards the halfway point on June 24. The OAA defense stat is now giving us a picture of what the Nats have — and don’t have.

Seattle Mariners vs. Washington Nationals

Stadium: Nationals Park, Washington, D.C.
1st Pitch: 1:35 PM EDT
TV: Nationals.TV
Radio: 106.7 The Fan radio and via the MLB app. On Sirius/XM, tune to Channel 177 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.