If it feels like a long time since the Washington Nationals have won a game, it is not your imagination. The last Nats’ win was exactly a week ago to start the month of September with a late win against the Braves.

Today is a scheduled bullpen game with Riley Cornelio as the opener. We will see how long and how effective he can be. He will go up against Casey Mize who the Padres acquired at the trade deadline with the Tigers. Mize has struggled overall since the trade with a 6.67 ERA in his six starts for San Diego.

Since the World Series season of 2019, the Nationals have not won more than 71 games in a season. Can these Nats surpass that number? That would take 5-wins to reach that mark. There are 16 games remaining in this 2026 season. To avoid a 90 loss season, the Nats need to get 6-games in the win column to get to 73 wins.

Contributing to the loss yesterday was some questionable defense such as a ball not caught at the wall by James Wood as the ball hit off of his glove and ruled a double, and the other two runs in the 3-2 loss were from a nonchalant underhand toss by Jorbit Vivas that was ruled out and over-turned to safe. That led to two more runs scoring. Both miscues added over 20 pitches to starter Jake Irvin‘s pitch count. That start was probably his best start since May 23.

❝I am happy with the way we are playing defensively compared to the beginning of the year when we were terrible to put it pretty bluntly. There are things we need to get better at. … The mistakes magnify. … That’s why we have to play clean baseball. Some of the best teams in baseball, in my opinion, pitch well and play good defense. That combination attributes to winning baseball.❞

— said manager Blake Butera

On offense, the Nats have the second most runs scored in MLB this season at 750 runs, and that is an impressive 5.14 runs per game. With the Nats pitching giving up 4.72 earned runs per game, the difference is really those pesky unearned runs due to the errors. Overall, the Nats have a +8 run differential on the season.

Here is manager Blake Butera‘s bullpen chart:

The FanGraphs WAR chart is now large in its sample size. You can certainly start to extrapolate the numbers for the full-season. The OAA defense stat is now giving us a picture of what the Nats have — and don’t have.

Washington Nationals vs. San Diego Padres

Stadium: Petco Park, San Diego, California
1st Pitch: 6:40 PM EDT
TV: Nationals.TV
Radio: 106.7 The Fan radio and via the MLB app. On Sirius/XM, tune to Channel 214 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.

Photo by Steve Mears /Nats.Talk