Photo by Andrew Lang/TalkNats
The Washington Nationals completed a sweep in Milwaukee and headed to another NL Central opponent: the Pittsburgh Pirates. Thanks to what the Nats did to the Cubs and Brewers, the Pirates have sole possession of first place in the NL Central. Does it feel like Game 1 of the playoffs with Paul Skenes facing Cade Cavalli tonight? We wish, right?!? Cavalli can’t worry about what Skenes is doing — Cavalli just needs to control what he can control and try to put up zeroes.
Vegas has the Nats as deep underdogs in this one. But there’s a reason we play the games, right? By the way, the reigning Player of the Week plays for the Nats, and his name is James Wood. Let’s see what the Nats can do. With 10 percent of the season complete, we can have some fun with numbers, and Wood, CJ Abrams, and Joey Wiemer are all on 8.0 WAR paces, with Jacob Young on a 4.0 WAR pace, and Jorbit Vivas and Curtis Mead on 3.0 WAR paces. Could you imagine if these paces extrapolated through like that?
The FanGraphs WAR chart is accumulating data. This will start to give us a clearer picture in six weeks when the sample sizes get larger. The OAA defense stat requires a minimum of 10 defensive plays. We will start adding more statistics as the sample sizes get larger.
In the 4th inning last night, did you catch Nationals.TV’s Alexa Datt doing a voiceover of her interview with first base coach, Corey Ray? After she finished, Nationals.TV’s color analyst, Kevin Frandsen, threw some shade on ex-manager Dave Martinez. This blew up big enough that it made it onto the Foul Territory show as they had on The Athletic’s Spencer Nusbaum, and host, Scott Braun, asked Nusbaum if he saw the TalkNats’ tweet, and it turned into a long discussion. For Nats fans, that infamous Martinez quote that “It’s NEVER on the coaches” might follow Martinez much like Jim Riggleman‘s “Going to Caddies” after he resigned from his dream job in mid-2011.
There were several moves in the bullpen, and while you knew three of them from our tweets and comments here, there were five moves in total. We sourced that both Jackson Rutledge and Mitchell Parker were headed to Pittsburgh and one would replace the injured Ken Waldichuk with the other on standby. What we didn’t know was that Cole Henry had an MRI this morning and would be going on the 15-day IL with a minor rotator cuff strain, and the team would bring in Orlando Ribalta for him, with Parker going on the “Taxi Squad.” The bad news is that Waldichuk has a tear in his UCL and surgery has been recommended. His season is most likely done.
Here is a chart of usage on manager Blake Butera‘s bullpen:
Washington Nationals vs. Pittsburgh Pirates
Stadium: PNC Park, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1st Pitch: 6:40 PM EDT
TV: Nationals.TV
Radio: 106.7 The Fan radio and via the MLB app. On Sirius/XM, tune to Channel 175 for the home broadcast and the road team is online only.
