The Washington Nationals will roster their 43ʳᵈ pitcher of the season on the mound tonight as DJ Herz will pitch in his first MLB game since the end of the 2024 season.

After struggling in Spring Training of 2025, the reasons turned out that Herz tore his UCL ligament in his elbow and needed Tommy John surgery. He missed all of the 2025 season and made three rehab starts in June of this year before he suffered a minor flexor strain in his forearm and had to be shutdown. He built back up and now is ready to go. Don’t expect Herz to go much more than 75 pitches in this one as he will probably be amp’d up — and he just got to 65 pitches in his last outing going 4⅓ innings of 1-run baseball.

In 2024 on the MLB mound, Herz had a 3.70 ERA in mid-September before he had his worst start that season with a 7-run outing as he probably hit arm fatigue — or maybe that was the start of his UCL tearing. Up until that point, Herz looked like he could turn into a top-of-the-rotation pitcher. Of his 19 starts that season, he had 13 starts of 2-runs or less, one start with 3-runs, and four starts of 4-runs.

Back in 2024, the team seemed to be managing his pitch counts well. Then on July 7 of that year, they allowed him to go past his career high of 92 pitches and that was unfortunate as he threw 102 pitches and ended up on the 15-day IL.

Herz will go up against the Tigers’ River Ryan who is making his Tigers debut tonight. He is one of the Tigers’ top prospects. The Tigers received Ryan as part of the Tarik Skubal trade.

The Nats enter this game with 73 wins and have already improved over 11 percent in year-over-year for wins above the 66 total wins from the 2025 season. Each extra win from here represents progress and also what they could do to improve going into next season.

❝I thought we should have won all three games. You leave winning two, and you should feel good about it, but it doesn’t feel very good because I feel like we should have won all three.❞

— said Blake Butera

On offense, the Nats have the third most runs scored in MLB this season at 798 runs, and that is an impressive 5.11 runs per game. With the Nats pitching giving up 4.66 earned runs per game, the difference is really those pesky unearned runs due to the errors. Overall, the Nats have a +12 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.

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Washington Nationals vs. Detroit Tigers

Stadium: Fifth Third Park, Detroit, Michigan
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 202 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.

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Photo by Sol Tucker /Nats.Talk