Tuesday was Dave Martinez day at the Winter Meetings

Yesterday was Dave Martinez‘s day to step out in Las Vegas and do his interviews with the Press. The entire interview can be heard on this link:  https://www.pscp.tv/Nationals/1OyJAyknOdWJb?t=1s

The questions were flying at Davey, and after a while he started sounding like the Davey Martinez who did those post-game interviews that started to sound like his boilerplate answers on the “little things” and pitching and defense.

For Martinez, he gets a second chance and 2019 is the opportunity to prove that 2018 was due to the injuries because an 82-80 record is not acceptable, and Davey said the same while acknowledging that if they had just won 50% of those one-run games — the 2018 season would have been much different.

We learned from Davey that Michael A. Taylor is playing in the Dominican winter league, and he loves the Patrick Corbin acquisition — part of the “three horses”. He talked about working on situations in Spring Training and working on fundamentals. He talked about the Nationals pitchers must improve in two-strike counts. He also talked about when the Nats had a lead early they didn’t put teams away.

“We’re trying to get more athletic,” Martinez said. “We got younger players coming up. We have two catchers that can move pretty good. You got Robles, you got Michael, you got Eaton whose going to be healthy. Soto moves pretty good in leftfield. We’re just trying to get more athletic. We talked about going to Spring Training and really honing in on fundamentals. We lost a lot of games last year by one-run. And if you look back, giving teams 28-29-30 outs, I think that is the difference, and we have to get better at it.”

Martinez said he learned a lot last year as a new manager — we will see how 2019 is different from 2018. Of course his presser would not be complete without Bryce Harper questions, and you can listen to the interview for more on that. With the rumors swirling on Tanner Roark, the Nationals’ manager spoke as if Roark will be an integral part of the back of his rotation in 2019 — but admitted that he was good for 3 months and bad for 3 months and that seems to sum up Roark’s season.

Later in the discussion, DMart raved about Juan Soto‘s two-strike approach as well as Anthony Rendon‘s.

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