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...
about 19 hours ago
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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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 1 month ago
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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 1 month ago
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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...
about 2 months ago
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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...
about 2 months ago
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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...
Teams rebuild all the time. If you aren't blessed with an owner willing to spend your team cycles through times when they spend more and times when they spend less based on the talent they have. What you don't do is rebuild from a rebuild. This is what the Nats are doing and it means one simple thing : The Nats screwed up. So the question is where and when and like many things that are wrong it's not just one moment, but a series of bad decisions and bad luck that lead them to this...
I do have more to come but you know - snow storm . So for today - what do you expect back for CJ Abrams. They don't HAVE to trade CJ but it seems EXTREMELY unlikely that they will be competitive in the time before he becomes a FA. Are they going to be good enough to convince him to stay? Do you take that chance instead of selling him on a decently high note with a couple years of control left? The way I read the Nats management the answer is no. So what do you want back...
To the Rangers for 5 prospects. I'll delve into it more when we have the names but the Rangers system is weaker but in part due to injury and bad 2025s - which yes, I know but these guys can turn around pretty quickly. The name that is in there Gavin Fien, a guy that's arguably Top 2-4 in the Rangers system but also arguably outside the Top 100 overall. He is supposed to hit well and profiles to be a decent fielding 3B or a 1B/RF type (good enough glove to play SS in HS...
First I'd like to thank the Nats for doing next to nothing this off-season so we can get through all this without being interrupted. Much appreciated The Nats 2024 was a stop gap year in relief where they brought in some older guys they never meant to keep and traded out some assets at the end of the year. Outside of Kyle Finnegan and Jose Ferrer there wasn't much of a plan. They signed a weaker set of guys in 2025 and hoped for the best. It didn't happen. The Nats had arguab...
2024 was a pleasant surprise for the Nats in terms of the SP as while Gore didn't develop as he should, Trevor Williams pitched like a near ace for the third of the season he was healthy and Jake Irvin, Mitchell Parker, and DJ Herz all surpassed expectations. Yes, that only meant they were all "usable" but a staff of an near ace, a stretch 2, and three average arms is pretty good, especially on a shoestring budget So the Nats basically pushed to repeat the year with FA pick up Michael So...
Josh Bell returned to the Nats as a cheap DH option for 2025 to bridge the gap between competitiveness and not. A well-liked vet who had a couple of quietly solid years with the Nats in 2021 and 2022 Bell had bounced around unable to get back to levels you want a guy focused on hitting to be at. The reunion looked very dicey as Bell started extremely slow and followed up a good May with a terrible June. But Josh's second half was better and he ended the season very hot putting up a .292 averag...