Photo by Marlene Koenig for TalkNats
The Washington Nationals should not have had a happy flight back to DC. While the road trip was successful, they had a chance to win the 4-game series in Miami, but instead split it. The Nats American Airlines flight AA 9721 landed at 1:30am at Dulles and as MASN’s Bob Carpenter said on-air, he expected a 3am arrival back to their pillows. The good news is everyone gets to sleep in today and will start arriving after 1:30pm at Nationals Park for their weekend series against the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Nats have Brad Lord on the mound for tonight’s game. This will be the first turn in a 6-man rotation that began yesterday with MacKenzie Gore inserted into the rotation.
Pitching tonight for Pittsburgh, they have righty Mitch Keller on the mound. Of note, the Nats will not face the Cy Young favorite, Paul Skenes, who was Dylan Crews teammate on their 2023 LSU Championship team.
Including today’s game there are 16-games remaining in this season, and 60-wins in the books. How close can the Nats get to the 72 wins that Vegas set for their pre-season Over/Under? Probably won’t happen as they would have to go 12-4 to get there, however, that should be the goal.
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— Interim manager Miguel Cairo said after yesterday’s game
We had a good road trip — a winning road trip. The guys are playing hard. They’re fighting. They keep fighting — but it was a good road trip in general.
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The bullpen usage looks like this:
Here are your Nats’ WAR leaders with, CJ Abrams at +3.5, James Wood at +3.2, MacKenzie Gore at +2.9. Add those up, and you get a total of +9.6 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 yesterday’s game
I think we pitched really well in the whole series.
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The Nats starting pitchers have a combined ERA of 5.22 and that places the starters at 2nd from last in MLB. The reliever’s ERA sits at a 5.41 and now the worst in baseball in ERA.
Here is how the starters rank by ERA:
No. 5 Starter: Cade Cavalli 4.67
No. 4 Starter: Mitchell Parker 5.69
No. 3 Starter: Brad Lord 4.20 (starting/relieving)
No. 2 Starter: Jake Irvin 5.70
No. 1 Starter: MacKenzie Gore 4.14
Pittsburgh Pirates 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.
