The Washington Nationals are mired in a 5-game losing streak. If you picked a stopper from the Nats’ staff, Mitchell Parker might not make your first, second, or third choice. And guess what, Parker starts tonight and needs to be the stopper.
With today’s game, there are just 29-games remaining in this season. The Nats only have two more series against teams with winning records: The Cubs and the Mets. But these Tampa Bay Rays are just 5-games from .500, and they have Adrian Houser on the mound tonight. They picked him up at the trade deadline when they were in the Wild Card hunt. Houser was excellent with the White Sox before he was traded — not so much with Tampa.
The Nationals got a much needed day-off yesterday giving all of the pitchers a rest day. For the starters, they get that extra rest day to hopefully help their arm health. As TalkNats reported yesterday, Drew Millas was set for finger surgery today for his fracture after a catcher’s interference ruling as the hitter’s bat made hard contact with the glove hand of Millas. TalkNats also reported that he is done for the season. CJ Stubbs was called up from Triple-A Rochester to take place of Millas on the roster. Once Stubbs enters a game, it will be his MLB debut.
Millas finished with a FanGraphs Defensive Rating of +2.0, a WAR of +0.6, and impressive offense with a .306 batting average, .358 OBP, and a .807 OPS.
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— Interim manager Miguel Cairo said after Wednesday’s game
You got to reset, take the day off and go home and keep fighting against Tampa.
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The bullpen usage looks like this:
Here are your Nats’ WAR leaders with James Wood at +3.2, CJ Abrams at +3.2, MacKenzie Gore at +2.8. Add those up, and you get a total of +9.2 WAR. The issue is the large gap between those players and the next tier, and of course the negative tier after them of which many of those players are off the roster.
On defense, the OAA stats showed some improvement with a good defensive game yesterday. Jacob Young leads the team at +13, and CJ Abrams is on the opposite end at -9. That is actually quite the improvement over last year’s -18 for Abrams who is on pace to finish at -10.
These are your stats leaders on BBRef. There are certainly some surprises on there — good and not so good. The issue is the consistency on this team.
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— Miguel Cairo said after Wednesday’s game
We’ve been playing really good. Just because we lost against the Yankees, that doesn’t mean that we hit rock bottom. We got a really good team and they’ve been playing their butts off. It’s not rock bottom here.
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The Nats starting pitchers have a combined ERA of 5.24 and that places the starters at 2nd from last in MLB. The reliever’s ERA sits at a 5.60 and now the worst in baseball in ERA.
Here is how the starters rank by ERA:
No. 5 Starter: Cade Cavalli 5.11
No. 4 Starter: Mitchell Parker 6.03
No. 3 Starter: Brad Lord 3.84 (starting/relieving)
No. 2 Starter: Jake Irvin 5.40
No. 1 Starter: MacKenzie Gore 4.15
Tampa Bay Rays vs. Washington Nationals
Stadium: Nationals Park, Washington, D.C.
1st Pitch: 6:45 PM EDT
TV: MASN
Radio: 106.7 The Fan radio and via the MLB app; In Spanish on DC 87.7 FM and La Pantera 100.7 FM/1220 AM. On Sirius/XM, tune to Channel 177 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.
Line-up subject to change (without notice):
