While the Nats have been pretty relatively successful this season so far at the plate , they are not sitting on their laurels. Yesterday they officially sent Brady House down and optioned Joey Weimer to make room for Dylan Crews and Andres Chaparro to come up. Why? Well sort of because Jacob Young got hit by a pitch. On Monday Jacob Young took a pitch to the ribs. It was apparently pretty bad and he's nursing some bruised ribs. Jacob defensively is the glue that holds the OF ...
about 19 hours ago
· 0 reads
The Nats have been mediocre or worse since COVID (unrelated... OR IS IT) and this year feels different. The young bats are improving to the point you think the line-up can keep the Nats competitive for the season and with some pitching luck... Look we're not talking playoffs here but .500? Or at least best record since 2019? But before you take a close to .500 record as a sign of things being different let's remember 2025 : June 6th the Nats were 30-33. 2024 : June 23rd the Nats we...
The Nats have scored 5.4 runs per game in the first quarter of the season. That just isn't good - it's second best in baseball good. But to Nats fans this feels very weird. Sure they could be better than average if the pieces came through but second best in baseball? If you told me that last year I would have had at least some Dylan Crews fighting for ROY expectations. What do the stats say? BASE Average - .244 t10th OBP - .325 t9th SLG - ....
The Nats have had a mixed bag from their starters in 2026 which honestly is a good thing considering "big bag of just crap" was a reasonably good expectation. Foster Griffin is pitching to much better results than anyone could have hoped for. Irvin and Cavalli are hitting about where you think they would. Mikolas and Littell are struggling even with PJ Poulin doing some "Relief starting" in their place. But it;s still early and a game or two in one direction or the other can really effect how ...
The Nats at catcher are currently the worst in baseball. In the previous two seasons they were 24th and 24th in wins above position, which tracks with what we all know. They are bad. They haven't been the worst , thanks mainly to catcher being such a hard position that other teams were complete failures, but now they are the complete failure. Their issues at catcher might be the worst at any position in baseball* Their main catcher Keibert Ruiz is hitting .182 / .203 / .303. Tradit...
Sorry it wasn't. Moose outside shoulda told ya. This is what the offense looks like when Wood and Abrams aren't hot. Pretty terrible, right? Let's hope neither gets injured. The Nats have a record that looks pretty typical of a blah team. They get beat, but now blown away, by good teams and hold their own against everyone else. But it's still early enough I wouldn't read into that. I mean, they play the Cubs now instead of the first three games when things a...
James Wood is 23 years old and after a disappointing finish to last season where he hit .223 with 7 homers after the break while striking out 105 times in 269 PAs, he's back to meeting high expectations. The early season is always full of wild variation (Currently a Nats team with Alex Call, Dom Smith, and Ildermo Vargas would be DESTROYING opposing pitching staffs) but Wood is the seventh best hitter in MLB by OPS+ and the 5th youngest in the Top 50*. He's a guy you build an offen...
The Nats keep chugging along four steps forward, five steps back, and last game Foster Griffin shut down the White Sox. Ignore the White Sox for a moment, any chance the fancy stats say something is real here? No. Griffin has pitched a lot like Jake Irvin but his BABIP sits at .233 (abnormally low) and his LOB% at 90.3% (abnormally high) and so they aren't scoring the runs off his that they "should". He's not getting a crazy amount of GBs (could be better) or avoiding hard contact (no on...
James Wood has 9 homers in his last 18 games. I don't do math real well* but I think that works out to 81 homers for a season. He's also walked 19 times which would be 171 walks for a season which would be fourth all time. Yes it would come with.... carry the two... 207 strikeouts (t16th all time) but if you are doing the first and the second, the third doesn't matters as much. Now James does seem to be an early season guy. Could be the effort of running around for 150+ games in th...
The Nats are fun team this year. Well sort of. If you like high-scoring baseball you are in luck because the Nats are scoring the 3rd most runs in the game, almost a run more than average. Also the Nats are allowing the MOST runs in the game, over 1 and a half runs more than average. That's a losing combination but it's an entertaining losing combination. What adds to the fun is pound for pound the NL East is starting the season as the weakest division in ba...
It's still too early to look at individual stats but we can start to look at team trends and see what underlying things look good and what, if any, look scary. Last year the Nats issues can be broken down like this : Batting 2025 Home Runs - 161 - 24th in majors Launch Angle - 9.9% Walks - 443 - 28th At the plate the Nats could make contact with the ball - they were middling in both average and strikeouts. That should help on the path to a middling overall ...
about 1 month ago
· 1 reads
Look you wear those terrible Milwaukee City Connects bad things are going to happen. After a slow start James Wood is HOT batting .500 (Yes .500) with 4 homers and 3 doubles in the last 7 games. His complete turnaround along with streaky CJ staying on a hot streak and Curtis Mead being this weeks Joey Weimer has kept the offense moving despite everybody else being pretty mediocre. Could this be real? Kind of! Like James Wood IS really good. CJ Abrams has this in h...
about 1 month ago
· 1 reads
Miles Mikolas' last start was his best start of the year. He also threw only 3 innings and managed to give up 5 hits and 3 walks. While we don't like to jump on anything too early he is a guy who will be 38 in August and the idea that he's hit the final wall isn't crazy. The truth is Miles has been bad for a while, since 2023 really. Basically overnight his fastball went from great to trash and he went from All-Star to just a guy. Since then he gives up some homers, doesn't s...
about 1 month ago
· 1 reads
I TOLD you March is problematic So since we last left the Nats they... became the Nats we expected. Joey Weimer is not a secret superstar. The pitching is not just fine. They actually didn't do a bad job hitting against LA but it wasn't enough. The good news is they are done with perennial playoff teams for a series. The bad news is the next week isn't super easy - at least if you believe the early season results. St. Louis looks to be an average team, while Milwu...
about 1 month ago
· 1 reads
The Nats? GREAT! It was a good Opening Day and a good weekend as the Nats took the series from the Cubs and started the year with one of these for the first time since... 2018? Wow. I mean it's close to a 50/50 thing. ok. The hero of the series is Joey "Enjoy it while you can" Weimer 6-6 with two walks and 2 homers. MVP! On the other side Wood looked really lost in the series striking out 7 times. The starting pitchers were mediocre but good enou...
about 2 months ago
· 2 reads
I probably say this every March but March is my busiest month of the year for various work and personal reasons. All I ever want to do is drive down the Florida and spend a couple lazy days watching some bad Spring baseball and guys I've never heard of and I've gotten to do that one time in like 25 years. So it goes. A lot happened in Nats world in the past week or so Josiah Gray got hurt again - a flexor strain that will cause him to miss at least the first couple months. He...
about 2 months ago
· 1 reads
Mitchell Parker and Andrew Alvarez (unsurprisingly) was sent down to the minors adding clarity to the rotation. It's funny but we'll talk about "we're not sure what's going on with the rotation" but 9 times out of 10 what everyone thinks will happen, happens. It's just Spring talk. The Nats brought in Littell and Mikolas and Griffin to start. Cavalli will start. The 5th slot is likely Irvin's until someone, like Herz or Gray or Susana or Williams, shows themselves to be...
It feels weird having a Spring without the Post or MASN telling us what's up. Having to go by Zuckerman's updates or official MLB news. Anyway Zack Littell signs with the Nats which is good for the Nats but a bit weird. Well maybe. Littell was a reliever that got coverted to a starter in 2023. He was pretty solid in his half season there and in 2024 and put up a good ERA in 2025. That masked a pretty mediocre pitching effort though. If you were to describe his pitching it wou...
In short, no. Longer : The vagaries of timing and injuries mean some of the true hitting stars of the era like Trout, Bryce, Freenman and Machado are between milestones, while the slightly older players either couldn't stay stars (Cutch, Longoria) or petered out entirely (Adam Jones, Pablo Sandoval, Jason Heyward). Meanwhile on the pitching side it's becoming harder and harder for guys to get wins or honestly to get to the majors at an age early enough to challenge thin...
In our quest to look forward we often can only remember the latest things. For the Nats that means looking to who they could draft in 2026 and checking up on last years #1 pick Eli Willitis. But the development of the next great Nats team, if soon will rely on the last few drafts. These are the ones I glossed over in my "why did things go wrong" as I was talking about the bust starting in 2020. But it's when the team took a renewed effort into getting these things right and it's worth lo...
Not you guys but Nats news. Anyone care? Zuckerman is doing his thing over at Substack asking a good question - who's going to be the closer. I'd bet on Clayton Beeter, who I like in part because it's unlikely the Dodgers (a great minor league operation) and Yankees (a minor league that readily develops decent relievers) are both wrong about the guy having solid skills. Cole Henry could also be the choice as a long time org favorite. But given that closer doesn't matter as much as ...
The Nats brought in Drew Smith. He just went through his second Tommy John but says he's fully recovered. He's been a live-arm guy who has always outperformed his fancy stats. If one was to theorize it could be because his fastball is fantastic and when he needs to dial it up to get an out he can do it. But his other pitches aren't good and when all you can do to succeed is dial up the fastball well, that's how you get a guy with two Tommy Johns and under 200 IP over 6 ...
Last week the Nats signed Miles Mikolas as their first "FA to sign to trade later" of the off-season and honestly I like the deal. For those that don't remember Miles as one of the quality St Louis starters undone by the Nats staff obliterating his offense in the 2019 NLCS, a little background. He was initially a failed starter for the Padres that went over to Japan and had some success. The Cardinals brought him back to the states in 2018 and he performed great, then o...
Baseball will start this week but will it? The Nats are a team in limbo in every way. They have no home station. They have no home coverage. Under new leadership they have no direction (yet). They have an ownership as stable as the next rumor that they are trying to sell. They are a baseball team this year because they were a baseball team last year and baseball teams just don't go away. This Spring will be an exercise in finding the bright spots. In again looking for what mi...
The Washington Post sports department is no more. That really sucks for Nats fans and leaves the Nats coverage in limbo, especially after MASNs dissolution earlier in the year. This begs the question - who is covering the Nationals? I mean REALLY covering them, not covering them like me, giving out free content that's worth the price of admission. I don't know about local TV stations which will presumably continue their usual light coverages of the team and local sports talk which will continu...