The Nationals season so far has been marked by a good rotation, a terrible bullpen, and an offense with problems.
Good news for all Orioles fans: Charlie Morton is not going to pitch in this series since his turn in the rotation will not come up until it was over. Bad news for all Orioles fans: There’s no avoiding the rest of the rotation.
Let’s talk about the Nationals. They enter this series with a worse record than the Orioles, having gone 9-13 through their first 22 games. The O’s are 9-12. In terms of run output and (lack of) run prevention, the squads are in the same ballpark. The Nats are at 93 runs scored and 113 runs allowed. The O’s, following Sunday’s demolition by the Reds, sit at 98 runs scored and 118 runs allowed.
For the Washington club, their run prevention problem is mostly that their bullpen sucks. Pretty much everybody other than their closer, Kyle Finnegan, is doing quite badly. Finnegan has saved eight of the team’s nine wins and is sporting a 1.86 ERA, though if I rooted for this team, I’d be nervous about his walk rate (5.6 BB/9) and the fact that he already has three wild pitches.
The rest of the bullpen for the Nats is ugly. I’m talking higher ERAs than Morton ugly: Lucas Sims at 15.26 ERA through 12 outings, Colin Poche sitting on 15.88 after nine games. Former Oriole Jorge López isn’t in double digits but he fits right in with a 9.72. If the Orioles are going to manage to have a successful series, getting into this bullpen is probably part of that. It is usually a good plan for success for any series, to be sure.
If I hadn’t just watched the Orioles get worked over by a Reds offense that had, up to that point, not been very good, I might feel better about the fact that the Nationals offense has a lot of struggle to it. Their team batting line of .229/.305/.368 is bad. Their position players combined are worth 1.2 bWAR. For the O’s, it’s 3.7 bWAR.
Former #2 pick Dylan Crews, who entered the season as a top 10 prospect in the game, is OPSing just .505. Five of the Nationals regular players are struggling mightily. Again, this means nothing to the Orioles pitching staff. They are, as they have demonstrated to us, perfectly capable of stinking it up against anybody. As my Camden Chat colleague wrote yesterday, it’s not just Morton who’s having problems.
Two Orioles hitters I’ll be watching are Jordan Westburg and Adley Rutschman. Westburg is not far removed from an 0-30 streak, while Rutschman rolled up five hitless games in a row before collecting two in Sunday’s finale against the Reds. A plan for the O’s going anywhere good this season requires these guys to get things going in the right direction.
Game 1 – Tuesday, 6:45
- BAL starter: Dean Kremer – 4 GS, 6.41 ERA, 5.78 FIP, 1.475 WHIP
- WAS starter: Mitchell Parker – 4 GS, 1.85 ERA, 3.61 FIP, 1.110 WHIP
It’s not just that Orioles starting pitchers have been bad, which they have, but it’s also that they aren’t eating innings. Kremer is certainly among the culprits here, averaging fewer than five innings per start. He needs to start striking guys out (5.9 K/9) and stop giving up dingers (2.3 HR/9). You might have had low expectations for Kremer – I sure did – and even those low expectations were probably an ERA two full runs lower than this. This is certainly an offense where it would be nice to see some improvement.
Parker is a lefty, so brace yourself already for the Orioles “against a lefty” lineup that, up to this point, has been garbage. The team’s OPS against lefty starters is .570. The 25-year-old Parker is sporting a .233 BABIP, has allowed home runs on only 4.3% of fly balls, and has stranded 83.3% of runners to reach base against him this season. All of which is to say that his ERA is due to be inflated. Whether the O’s are up to making that happen is another story.
Game 2 – Wednesday, 6:45
- BAL starter: Tomoyuki Sugano – 4 GS, 3.43 ERA, 5.60 FIP, 1.286 WHIP
- WAS starter: Trevor Williams – 4 GS, 5.95 ERA, 4.30 FIP, 1.627 WHIP
Sugano has struck out eight batters across 21 innings over his first four MLB starts. I think that is going to need to change if he is going to end up maintaining an ERA lower than 5. Regular readers of this website know that I will never have any confidence about any positive Orioles outcome, and Sugano’s strikeout thing is no exception. Perhaps the veteran Japanese player will be able to make adjustments as his MLB debut season moves on.
Williams, who turns 33 immediately after this series, is a 10-year MLB veteran. Since joining the Nationals for the 2023 season, he’s had one season where he was awful (5.55 ERA in 30 GS in 2023), a bit less than a half-season of doing well (2.03 ERA in 13 GS in 2024), and so far this year, he is bad again. A problem for Williams is that his average fastball velocity is now down to 87.9mph. You probably just winced at the idea of the Orioles having to face a righty junkballer, and I did too.
Game 3 – Thursday, 6:45
- BAL starter: Cade Povich – 4 GS, 6.38 ERA, 5.21 FIP, 2.073 WHIP
- WAS starter: MacKenzie Gore – 4 GS, 3.41 ERA, 2.21 FIP, 1.207 WHIP
Cade Povich has a comical BABIP in the other direction from Friday’s Nats pitcher, Parker. After four starts, the BABIP of Povich is .441. That’s almost unbelievable. The thing about a BABIP that high is maybe it means he’s having bad luck, that so many of the balls are being struck that are just missing the fielders – or the fielders are doing something wrong behind him.
However, the fact that Povich in the 11th percentile for “hard-hit %” on Statcast suggests it’s not all luck. He is throwing eminently hittable slop and batters are not missing. The Orioles need to either find a way to improve that or find a way to get him out of the rotation. As mid-April turns to late April, there’s no immediate hope of either.
Gore is another lefty. The Orioles have committed roughly $30 million to their 2025 payroll to sign guys who were supposed to hit lefties. So far: Tyler O’Neill, .222 OPS vs. LHP. Gary Sánchez, .077. Ramón Laureano, .220. The sample sizes are small and could turn around with one hot game or two, but for now they are quite bad.
**
After winning two of three against the Guardians last week, the Orioles had a chance to come in against the Reds and show it was the start of sustained improvement. They biffed that chance. It is not a crisis to be where they are yet, but a loss in this series and they’d be looking at a 10-14 or worse record. Each passing series makes it tougher to rationalize that good times will be coming later.