The Home for Washington Nationals Game Talk

The Washington Nationals squeaked out of yesterday’s game with a win. Finally, BABIP was on the side of the Washington Nationals in the 4-3 final. Mitchell Parker earned his second win, and Kyle Finnegan notched his second save. The game ended on a caught-stealing, a first in Nats’ history to see a game end that way.

The Diamondbacks put 28 balls-in-play with only five hits on the day and just two strikeouts. They actually had more walks than hits as they worked six freebies and reached once on an error. In the ninth inning, it started with the dreaded LoW followed by a wild pitch then Finnegan was late to cover first base on a harmless grounder to Nathaniel Lowe at first base — that put the tying run on-base until Alek Thomas was caught-stealing on a bullet thrown by catcher Riley Adams.

The Washington Nationals are off to a terrible start at 1-6 on this young season. However, they have been in the majority of every game to start this schedule yet have lost two-thirds of their games in the bullpen. The Nats are hitting for power — but not much else. Three dingers yesterday put them in 5th in the MLB for most home runs, but then you look at a team that did not accept a walk in last night’s game where the team is second-from-last in walks, and sixth from the bottom in OBP.

The Washington Nationals are back home, and today marks exactly 20-years from the team’s first regular season game back in 2005. To commemorate this day, the Nationals have invited back five key players from that team to also participate in a ring ceremony to place the entire team in the Ring of Honor. The Nats first home game in 2005 was against the Arizona Diamondbacks who are the Nats’ opponent this weekend.

The Washington Nationals have a getaway game in Toronto and are in need of a happy flight home in front of a Thursday day-off.

The Washington Nationals have their first injury concern of the 2025 regular season as newly acquired starter, Michael Soroka, said that his bicep in his pitching arm cramped up on him. We hope this is just due to dehydration and nothing serious — but manager Dave Martinez had no update in the pre-game.

The Washington Nationals flew last night to Canada for a three-game series against the Toronto Blue Jays. A win tonight for the Nats would get them back to .500 for the early season. You take that after the way the first two games finished in the opening series.

A year ago, I wrote a piece called “Quality Should Be Job 1” but quality also comes via employees you hire. The high risk / high reward model usually fails if you do that as a standard. That is a gambler’s mentality. Risk management needs to be measured and controlled. Signing Matt Barnes, Joey Gallo, Eddie Rosario, Nick Senzel combined for about $15.5 million of wasted total payroll last year. Do you know that Gallo and Senzel actually got paid incentive bonuses on top of their salaries? While you could say the signing of Jesse Winker worked out, that isn’t a good ratio.

This year, general manager Mike Rizzo had even more money to spend — and besides the Nathaniel Lowe acquisition and re-acquiring Trevor Williams and low risk moves for Paul DeJong and Jorge Lopez, it was the same type of high risk / high reward moves for the rest of the $50 million spent. There was enough budget to go “Quality is Job 1” and not risk a lot of money on bounceback players like Michael Soroka as a starter for $9 million, Josh Bell for DH at $6 million, Lucas Sims for $3 million, and Amed Rosario for $2 million. Even the nearly $6 million for Kyle Finnegan after his late season struggles made him a bounceback candidate. That’s $26 million of high risk signings. Sure, you could throw in Shinnosuke Ogasawara and Colin Poche too for another $3.3 million combined. Will you find a Winker or two in there? Wasn’t Sims just a more expensive version of Tanner Rainey? Rosario had a great game yesterday so maybe that works. Soroka might pitch like a star. Bell might figure out how to hit like he did in his prime. Might, maybe, if.

Maybe I can close my eyes, click my heels together three times, and repeat the sentence, “There’s no place like home” to get to the magic formula of winning. Or go the quality route and just build a better roster. Shortcuts and throwing #### against the wall rarely works. Again, let’s not panic two games in. There are a lot of positives that we have seen so far.

As we enter the first weekend of the MLB baseball season, the Washington Nationals will don their new City Connect jerseys dubbed ‘The Blueprint’ for this afternoon’s game against the Phillies. This will be a warm one with temperatures getting into the low 80’s. That should add several feet to the carry of baseballs today.