Photo by Jake Stephens/TalkNats
The Washington Nationals beat a stacked Venezuela WBC team last night by a final score of 5-1 in a game capped by a 3-run homer by Keibert Ruiz who is Venezuelan. Ruiz was born in Valencia, Venezuela, and probably wanted to show his countrymen that he should have been on their roster. Another proud Venezuelan, Anibal Sanchez, threw out the ceremonial first pitch as a distinguished member of the Nats 2019 World Series team.
A few other key notes from last night’s exhibition game was getting to see Luis Garcia Jr. playing first base for the first time this year — and playing it well, and Daylen Lile roping two hard singles. While exhibition games don’t count towards the Spring Training stats, keep those hits in mind since Lile had not notched a hit or walk in Spring Training, yet.
The Nats are scheduled to start Miles Mikolas in this game for his second start. He will face a New York Mets team that won’t have Juan Soto who is playing for the Dominican WBC team.
Video by Steve Mears/TalkNats
The Nats have had 55 batters step into the box, and 24 of them have no hits. And as mentioned, these stats won’t include the exhibition game against Venezuela. As the sample sizes get larger, and there is more data to analyze, we can all start to form better judgements. Process means a lot in small sample size analysis. But we also need to know back-stories of what players are working on.
At this point, we only have 11 Spring Training games in the books and the one exhibition game, and no batter has more than 16 official plate appearances on the Washington Nationals. And for that matter, no pitcher has more than 5.0 innings. Second cuts happened yesterday, and the starters should be getting more work soon.
Some of the players, like Cade Cavalli and Foster Griffin got starts on the minor league side of camp. Griffin got the start last night against Venezuela and pitched 2.0 scoreless innings. His defense made things more interesting than it needed to be.
On injury news, Dylan Crews played last night after he saw a few days after he was plunked on the hand during live BP and had an injured thumb. It’s getting dangerous out there. This is the second intra-squad injury we’ve heard about after Jacob Young was plunked two weeks ago by his own teammate (Bryce Montes de Oca) in one of those “live” BP sessions. His only Spring Training work was on Friday with two at-bats and of course his stellar defense robbing a home run on Jose Altuve to start that game. Young is still considered day-to-day.
New York Mets vs. Washington Nationals
Stadium: CACTI Park of the Palm Beaches, West Palm Beach, Florida
1st Pitch: 1:05 PM EDT
TV: Nationals.TV
Radio: Nats Radio and the MLB app
