Photo by Sol Tucker for TalkNats
The Washington Nationals had the game seemingly won on Saturday with Jose A. Ferrer in to face the top of the order with 2-outs and a 3-0 lead. He did have two runners on-base with pinch-hitter Mark Vientos batting. For some reason, Brady House was not guarding the line and Vientos poked a grounder down the line and past a lunging House.
The Nats went on to win the game in dramatic style with a Daylen Lile clutch inside-the-park-HR as he didn’t settle for a record breaking 8th triple in a month — nope he sprinted home to give the Nats a 5-3 lead in the 11th inning and earn PJ Poulin his first save, and Sauryn Lao the winning pitcher.
When will the larger media start talking about Lile as a Rookie of the Year candidate? He now leads all Nats in OPS, triples, and of course inside-the-park-home-runs!
The disturbing news, Ferrer was forced to throw a career-high 43 pitches in the game — and you just hope his arm remains healthy after that. If not, interim-manager Miguel Cairo will have to answer for that transgression.
Look at the reasoning for why Ferrer went so deep in his pitch count — it sounded like a lame answer from the Dave Martinez book of excuses that we heard for years. No, you are the adult in the room.
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— Cairo said after yesterday’s game
I asked [Ferrer] if he was fine, and he said: ‘Yes, I want to go back there, and of course, that was very stressful for me. I don’t really want to hurt any arms. I want make sure he’s healthy — that’s most important. But he said he was fine.”
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The bullpen usage looks like this:
Here are your Nats’ WAR leaders with, CJ Abrams at +3.4, MacKenzie Gore at +3.1. James Wood at +2.9, Add those up, and you get a total of +9.4 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
[Lile] can fly. When he gets to second gear, it’s like he can fly. And you saw it today. It was awesome to see.
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Now there are just 7-games and the season ends next Sunday. With only 63-wins in the books, it is now a mathematical impossibility to reach the 71-wins the team had in 2023 and 2024. Of course, the hope was the team would get to a winning record in this 2025 season which fell far short. Getting win-63, now assured the team that they can’t lose 100-games. A silver lining in a poor season. Now let’s see how close they can get to 70-wins.
The Nats will fly to Atlanta tonight for a 3-game series before a Thursday day-off back in Washington, D.C. before the final series of the season against the White Sox in Nationals Park.
The Nats starting pitchers have a combined ERA of 5.17 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 4.23
No. 4 Starter: Mitchell Parker 5.85
No. 3 Starter: Brad Lord 4.18 (starting/relieving)
No. 2 Starter: Jake Irvin 5.76
No. 1 Starter: MacKenzie Gore 4.00
Washington Nationals vs. New York Mets
Stadium: CitiField, Queens, New York
1st Pitch: 1:40 PM EDT
TV: MASN2
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 179 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.
