The Washington Nationals haven’t pitched well this season. Employing 41 different hurlers — the most in the majors — the NL East club ranks fourth from the bottom in both ERA and FIP, and has the fifth-worst strikeout rate. With a handful of exceptions, the often-patchwork staff has been mediocre at best.

The future is nonetheless promising. Under the leadership of Paul Toboni, who was named president of baseball operations 11 months ago, the Nats have cast aside their old-school ways and adapted an analytically driven approach to securing outs. Bringing on board Simon Mathews as pitching coach and Grayson Crawford as director of pitching were especially meaningful steps in the organization’s much-needed retooling.

Retaining Sean Doolittle was likewise a shrewd move. Now the assistant pitching coach after serving as pitching strategist in 2024 and 2025, the 39-year-old former closer is simpatico with Toboni, Mathews, and Crawford when it comes to modern-day methods. Data savvy while also bringing a been-there-done-that understanding of what translates to success on a big league mound, Doolittle is an important part of what the Nationals are working to build.

Doolittle sat down to talk pitching when the Nats visited Fenway Park earlier this summer.

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David Laurila: The organization overhauled its pitching infrastructure this year. What are some of things you, and the staff as a whole, have been focusing on?

Sean Doolittle: “One thing that we’ve paid a lot of attention to this year is getting guys to use both of their fastball shapes, even to off-handed hitters. For our group, that’s been new. We don’t have a ton of velocity, so we have to be really conscious of our combos and our sequencing. I think it’s helped a few guys in our group quite a bit this season. Guys like Brad Lord have thrown a lot more sinkers this year to lefty batters. It’s still not a high-percentage-usage pitch for him, but overall it’s been a big part of our education process with helping our pitchers and our catchers read swings and sequence. Game calling and stuff like that.”

Laurila: I believe Andrew Alvarez is throwing more two-seamers this year? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Angels unexpectedly announced that longtime owner Arte Moreno had agreed to sell the organization to Stan Kroenke, the icositetra-billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, the Colorado Avalanche of the NHL, the Colorado Rapids of MLS, the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League, and Arsenal Football Club, both the men’s team of the English Premier League and the women’s team of the Super League. The deal is reportedly for $4 billion, a record price for the sale of a controlling stake in an MLB franchise, surpassing the $3.9 billion sale of the San Diego Padres to Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano earlier this summer.

Forbes estimates Kroenke’s net worth to be $24.3 billion, making him the new wealthiest MLB owner, ahead of Steve Cohen, who’s worth about $23 billion. Ben Clemens wrote about the sale on Wednesday, and I’d encourage you to check it out for everything that you need to know about the Angels under Moreno and the ever-increasing values of MLB franchises. That second part is what I want to stress, especially as it pertains to the seemingly inevitable lockout coming this offseason. Rob Manfred and the 30 team owners are going to push for a salary cap, and to support their case, many of them will both cite the need for competitive balance and claim that baseball is a bad business. When they do, think back on the two record-setting sales from this year and understand the real reason why management has shut down the sport. But let’s not get too caught up in the doom and gloom right now, because the upshot of the sale is the Angels’ future looks a whole lot more promising under Kroenke than it did under Moreno.

That’s the last we’ll talk about the business of baseball today. Instead, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll answer your questions about teams that finished the season below .500 with a positive run differential, the single-game feat most correlated with career success, the pitchers who had the longest careers while pitching their first and last games on the same field, and the ideal hot dog per game ratio. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams’ ambitions as a fielder have fallen short, but the future remains bright for the Nationals star.

Washington over the weekend announced Abrams will move from shortstop to second base. That’s not a surprise. Abrams has been terrible at shortstop for his career, ranking as one of the worst fielders ever recorded by Baseball Savant’s fancy player-tracking technology. What is a surprise, however, is that a minor-career update for Abrams is newsworthy enough to justify an article, a testament to his tremendous breakout at the plate in 2026.

Abrams this year has posted -17 Outs Above Average at shortstop, which is the worst mark in the majors at any position. This isn’t an outlier for him. Since his debut in 2022, Abrams has played almost exclusively shortstop, putting up OAA marks (chronologically) of -8, -9, -18, and -11 before the -17 mark so far in 2026. His career -64 OAA makes him the sixth-worst fielder — at any position — ever recorded by the system, which dates back to 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

As an inveterately unhappy middle-aged man, I don’t like pointing out when things get better. So when I say that the 2023 MLB rule changes massively improved baseball as a spectator experience, you can rest assured that I’m not making that assertion lightly.

You know what I’m talking about: The shift ban, the pitch clock, and the pizza box bases. Back in the olden days, a sufficiently daring and athletic ballplayer could rack up 50, 60, or even 100 steals in a season. But the response to that era has been a gradual tightening up of baserunning tactics.

First, the roided-up giants of the 1990s got too stiff and meaty to run and slide. Even those athletes who maintained their springiness didn’t want to run into an out when the guy at the plate could use his 25-inch forearms to drive them in from anywhere. In the 2000s, an army of Theo Epstein wannabes took over baseball operations en masse. These men, with their locust-like commitment to efficiency, discouraged risky baserunning behavior even further. While their Harvard MBA classmates were killing the American housing market, they killed the stolen base. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals have the misfortune of playing in the wrong league. At 55-58, they’re absolutely buried in the National League Wild Card race, 4.5 games out with four teams between them and the last spot. Meanwhile, the Guardians have the fortune of playing in the American League, where their 57-56 record not only has them in a playoff spot at the moment, but a mere three games back of the division lead. So while these two teams have played to nearly identical records (the Nats have better Pythagorean and BaseRuns records, but it’s close), Washington is selling and Cleveland is buying. More specifically, Cleveland acquired Nats ace Foster Griffin in exchange for a four-prospect sampler platter, as first reported by Mark Feinsand.

It seems like Cleveland is always hanging around the playoff race. They’ve won the AL Central six times in the last decade and finished in second place another three. Of late, they’ve done it with great bullpens and blah starters, with a contact-and-defense approach to hitters. But this year, the defense isn’t clicking like it normally does, the offense is scoring less than four runs a game, and the bullpen is outside of the top 10 in WAR for the first time since 2023, the only year since 2012 where they’ve finished below .500. In other words, the rotation has been shouldering a much heavier workload this year.

Parker Messick and Gavin Williams have been the straws stirring the drink for the Guardians so far in 2026. Joey Cantillo has been better than advertised as well. Heck, Tanner Bibee isn’t missing bats like he used to, but he’s provided valuable innings. But there just wasn’t enough there for Cleveland to feel comfortable – not enough depth, not enough certainty about who would start in the playoffs, not enough margin for error. And so they acquired not the best pitcher on the market – that’d be Tarik Skubal – but perhaps the most Guardians-y pitcher on the market, a pitchability-and-command lefty who doesn’t throw hard but still gets outs. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees acquired another bat for their offense on Sunday, bringing in first baseman/second baseman Luis García Jr. in return for pitchers Jack Cebert, Ben Grable, Yovanny Cruz, and Jake Bird. Scratched from Sunday’s lineup due to the strong possibility of a trade being completed, García has had a breakout season, at least when it comes to power, hitting .283/.313/.560 with 23 home runs in 104 games, for a wRC+ of 134 and 2.2 WAR.

The offense has been a real sore spot for New York lately, so making an addition here was a primary concern for the club. When the Yankees woke up for an off-day on the morning of June 1, they ranked second in baseball in wRC+ and fourth overall in runs scored. Aaron Judge had gone 1-for-4 with two RBI the night before, and that was the last time we saw him in a game. Before first pitch that day, the three-time MVP was removed from the lineup due to lingering shoulder soreness. Later, after imaging revealed a stress fracture in Judge’s right rib cage, he was placed on the IL.

Since losing Judge, the Yankees have had the worst wRC+ in baseball, at 87, and have ranked 26th in the league in runs scored. That they have still managed to play barely winning baseball, going 27-26 since then, is thanks to their elite pitching. Crunching some numbers, if the Yankees had merely had a league-average pitching staff over the last two months, they would have about six fewer wins right now, which is basically their entire cushion in the wild card race. Read the rest of this entry »

What has Tarik Skubal been thinking about lately? The obvious answer is where he will be playing once the trade deadline passes, but that wasn’t how I posed the question to him a few weeks ago. What I was interested in were his thoughts on pitching as a whole.

“The evolution of the fastball,” replied Skubal, whom the Detroit Tigers dealt to the Los Angeles Dodgers late last night for a package of prospects. “What is a fastball and how guys pitch. In today’s game, more than ever, guys have two versions of the fastball. Maybe three. The cutter is still a fastball in my eyes, so cut-fastball, sinker, four-seamer. Lance Lynn was the guy who did it when I was first in the big leagues. He threw three fastballs. Now you see Cam Schlittler doing it, others guys doing it. The development of fastball offerings: just how much different it is now versus, say, 10 years ago? That’s something I would be interested to see.”

I dug up that info — more specifically, my colleague Jon Becker unearthed it for me — and we’ll get to that in a moment. First let’s hear more of what the always-insightful southpaw had to say.

“I think you almost have to have two different fastballs now, just to give them different looks,” Skubal told me. “Hitters are so good at covering one fastball, and if you give them two, that’s tough on them. I feel like that transition — multiple fastballs — is happening a lot right now.”

Skubal, whose arsenal is sans a cutter but includes an elite changeup, has thrown his four-seamer at a 36.5% clip this season, and his sinker at a 19.8% clip. The lesser used of his two fastballs isn’t great in a vacuum, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an important weapon in his arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals have been one of my favorite teams to watch this season. Their offense has been spectacular, the best in the majors in multiple statistical categories. They’re scoring 5.48 runs per game, which easily paces the league. Even better for my viewing purposes, they rarely play a dull game. That’s because their pitching staff allows nearly as many runs as their offense scores. They’ve allowed the third-most runs in the majors this year, an ugly 5.21 per game.

This combination of amazing hitting and questionable pitching has given the Nationals their best shot at making the playoffs since they won the World Series in 2019. It also makes their goals at the trade deadline simple: Get more pitching. But before the Nats decide who to acquire, they need to figure out who to replace. That means the question I’ve been wondering in recent months is also surely of great interest to the DC decision-makers. That question: Is Cade Cavalli this good?

The majority of the Washington rotation is easy for me to evaluate. Foster Griffin? Pretty good! He came back from a three-year stint with the Yomiuri Giants this winter, and the six-pitch mix he developed there has served him well. Nothing he throws will wow you, but he has good command of it all and uses everything well. Sure, he’s not as good as his 2.76 ERA, but pretty much every other ERA estimator has him in the mid-to-high threes. The Nats, again, are allowing more than five runs a game. He’s an outlier relative to the rest of the pitching staff. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox and Washington Nationals kicked off trade deadline season in earnest on Saturday night, when Boston sent left-handed pitcher Connelly Early to the Nats for corner infielder Curtis Mead.

Most consequential trades this time of year involve a contender swapping one or more prospects for an established big leaguer. Not so this one. At the time of the trade, the Red Sox and Nationals were in similar positions in the standings: The Sox were 53-50, seven and a half games out of the division lead, but half a game up in the AL Wild Card race. The Nats were 53-52, eight and a half games out of first place in the NL East, but only two games out of a Wild Card spot. Both teams are playing with house money: Boston on account of being 14 games under .500 less than five weeks ago, and Washington on account of… everything that’s happened since the start of the 2020 season.

And there’s little difference between Early and Mead in terms of age or team control: Mead is 25, and barring substantial changes in the next CBA, he’ll be arbitration-eligible after the 2027 season and under team control through 2030. Early is one year younger and one year behind Mead on the journey to both of those milestones.

Sound the alarm, friends, because what we’ve got here is a bona fide challenge trade. Read the rest of this entry »

Troy Melton has excelled since returning to the mound in late May. Over nine starts comprising 55 innings, the 25-year-old Detroit Tigers right-hander has won five of six decisions while logging a 1.80 ERA and a 3.86 FIP. Sidelined for the initial two months of the season due to elbow inflammation, he is back to being one of baseball’s most-promising young pitchers.

What most stands out about Melton’s campaign to date? From an arsenal perspective, the answer has to be his cutter. Last season, he threw the pitch at a 10.8% clip to the tune of a .368 BAA and a 12.8% whiff rate. This year, the offering has elicited a .083 BAA and a 26.0% whiff rate while being thrown at a nearly-double 20.5% clip.

Why the increased reliance on his cutter, and why has it been so effective?

“I didn’t really change anything, which is the weirdest part,” Melton told me in the days leading up to the All-Star break. “I’ve just been throwing it way, way harder and getting a lot of swing-and-miss. I’ve been throwing my slider harder, too. I got one up to 91 [mph] in my last start, which is well above what I’d been doing previously.

“It’s definitely interesting,” the second-year big-leaguer continued. “It’s not even something I consciously changed, it’s just that I’ve had a little bit more intent. I realized that my intent wasn’t high enough, so I literally started trying to throw harder, and that didn’t sacrifice any execution. I’ve been executing just as good, if not better. My cutter has been kind of been the leading beneficiary of that.”

In terms of velocity, Melton’s cutter is averaging 92.2 mph, up from 90.9 mph in his rookie campaign. Locating the pitch better has likewise been a factor in its success, as has its role in his attack plan. Read the rest of this entry »