FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: April 11, 2026
I went to the Nationals-Cardinals game on Wednesday afternoon at Nats Park to check in on the two rebuilding clubs early in the season. Washington has been in a perpetual rebuild for pretty much the entirety of the 2020s, while St. Louis just tore its roster down to the studs this past offseason. And yet, with Chaim Bloom installed as the new president of baseball operations, a deep farm system, and several young position players starting to come into their own, the Cardinals seem to be closer to their next winning season than the Nationals.
That’s certainly how things played out on Wednesday, when the Cards beat the Nats, 6-1, to take two out of three in the series. St. Louis first baseman Alec Burleson, the team’s second-longest tenured position player, went 3-for-4 and knocked in three runs, and second baseman JJ Wetherholt made several slick plays in the field. Wetherholt, who entered this year as the 12th-ranked prospect in baseball, has reached base in all 11 of his starts this year, and he has at least one hit in 10 of them. (He went 0-for-4 with a walk and a run on Wednesday.) The big story, though, was Jordan Walker, who hammered his fifth home run of the season in the fifth inning. It was the 17th time in franchise history that a player has homered five times within his first 12 games to start the season. After two below-replacement-level seasons, it seemed less likely that Walker would ever make good on his former top prospect pedigree, but now he looks like a completely different player. He seems way more confident and is making much better swing decisions; he’s lifting the ball, while walking more and striking out less. Yes, it’s only been 12 games, but the early returns are promising. He enters Friday night’s game against the Red Sox slashing .295/.367/.682 with a 192 wRC+.
I’ll talk more about the Nationals in my answer to the first question below. We’ll also answer your questions about the World Series teams whose players accumulated the most and least WAR by the end of their careers, the potential injuries that would stop the Dodgers from being World Series favorites, and the most successful three-true-outcomes pitchers of all time. 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.
Matt is the associate editor of FanGraphs. Previously, he was the baseball editor at Sports Illustrated. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Health, Baseball Prospectus, and Lindy’s Sports Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @ByMattMartell and Blue Sky @mattmartell.bsky.social.
I have a hard time believing any pitching is worse than the first few weeks of the 2023 Oakland Athletics. Maybe things got especially bad for them in the extra couple of weeks after them, or maybe they just got edged out by the Nationals. But they had a 193 ERA- (ERA of 7.98) and a 156 FIP- (FIP of 6.47) and a 6.69 xERA through April 24.
As of April 24, 2023 the Oakland Athletics had 3 pitchers with a positive fWAR and 12 pitchers with a negative fWAR. Leading the charge was Shintaro Fujinami who had given up 24 runs in only 15 innings. Three other members of their starting rotation (Kyle Muller, Ken Waldichuk, and James Kaprellian) combined for 64 runs over 75 innings. Kaprellian was closer to Fujinami than the other two, who were merely standard DFA level pitchers rather than send-your-manager-to-therapy level bad. The lone bright spot was JP Sears who only had an ERA of 4.98 in that stretch.
Oh this is fun. I don’t think I realized that Ken Waldichuk is part of the Nationals bullpen right now. And he is pitching at least as badly as he did as a starter in Oakland. Probably worse.
I think we may have to reevaluate what replacement level is for a relievers. I think it was reasonable to take a chance on Gus Varland and Clayton Beeter but Ken Waldichuk has gone from replacement level to unable-to-graduate-from the minors bad since his return from TJ surgery. It sure looks like this is the random org guy that replacement level is supposed to describe and he is worse than he is supposed to be.
The bullpen is horrid. BUT. I am more bullish on Nats than Cards on overall rebuild. The bullpen is dragging team performance by a substantial margin and is the easiest part of the rebuild to fix sooner rather than later.
That does not mean the rotation is in acceptable shape – far from it – but if the Nats TB Rays their way through it (my two cents on their approach from what I’ve seen so far) they can somewhat mitigate these problems with a fairly solid to dare I say good lineup.
The Nationals pitching problems are really the bullpen, and Miles Mikolas, and whoever is behind Miles Mikolas when someone gets hurt.
I remember thinking that this was going to be a horrible rotation because they only had three major league caliber starters (Cavalli, Littell, and Griffin). I didn’t necessarily know that they were going to be good, but I knew that they could pitch at a major league level.
I only realized how bad it was about a month ago when someone pointed me to the Nationals’ projected rotation and Mikolas was one of them. Mikolas was already toast last year, and I was super shocked that he got a guaranteed contract. If you set the filter to guys who pitched down to 150 innings, Mikolas was dead last in swinging strike rate last year. He wasn’t fooling *anybody* so he put the ball in the heart of the zone over 30% of the time and hoped his defense could bail him out. Opposing hitters had a 85.3% contact rate against him.
The plan of pounding the strike zone works pretty well when you’re Bryan Woo and your Stuff+ estimate is 109 and you have the fifth best score among starters in MLB. It isn’t so good when your Stuff+ score is 89 and it’s the fourth worst. The more I dug into it, the more alarmed I became. If this is the guy they’re going to run out there *in front of that horrible defense* how bad is the guy behind him?
But yes I agree the Nationals rebuild has some intriguing pieces. I think the Cards’ is going better because I love Liam Doyle, but they’re in similar places otherwise.
Stylistically it’s very different though. The Nationals don’t have positions for anybody except Jacob Young and Joey Wiemer who are probably only 4th outfielders. The Cardinals have roughly the same number of guys with the same sort of value but at least two of them are solid but not super exciting middle infielders with good defense.
I would say both of them are way ahead of the White Sox though who are a year further into the rebuild and look to be at least one year behind both of the Nationals and Cardinals.
Rotation is waiting for a bunch of guys to recover from surgeries. Including two of our top 5 overall prospects. There are so many that used to be or are currently fv50 or higher guys that I am feeling very solid about our rotation in 2028 maybe even 2027.
Waldichuk left injured today 4/12. it looked painful.
Oh boy. Tough break for him.