Cade Cavalli is forcing his way into the Cy Young conversation, and the numbers are starting to back it up.
Last night was another strong turn for the Nationals right-hander, and it fit the pattern he’s built as the season has worn on. Cavalli keeps leveling up.
That matters, especially in a sport where plenty of pitchers fade as the summer drags on. Instead, he’s been climbing into down-ballot Cy Young territory.
He’s not going to win the award. Jacob Misiorowski and Cristopher Sanchez are the ones fighting for that honor. But Cavalli has pitched his way into a spot where a top-10 finish in voting makes real sense, and even former Nats play-by-play voice Bob Carpenter said he should be in the mix.
The full-season line is strong across the board. In 142.2 innings, Cavalli is 11-5 with a 3.22 ERA and 162 strikeouts.
The punchouts jump off the page first: he’s tied for fifth in the NL and tied for ninth in all of baseball. That kind of swing-and-miss ability is a huge weapon in today’s game.
The advanced numbers support it too. Cavalli is tied for eighth in the NL among qualified starters in fWAR.
Put that next to the ERA and strikeout totals, and the case for a top-10 Cy Young finish gets even cleaner. For someone in his first full MLB season, that’s a massive statement.
He entered the year with high expectations, and he’s blown past them.
The last 10 starts have been even more eye-catching. Over that stretch, Cavalli has a 2.12 ERA with 73 strikeouts and 13 walks in 59.1 innings. He’s also rattled off eight straight quality starts, which says just as much about his stamina and consistency as it does about his stuff.
That was the missing piece earlier in the year. In the first three months, Cavalli was mostly effective, but he often sat around five innings.
He also had outings where the pitch count ballooned and he was gone in the third or fourth. That hasn’t happened since the Pirates start at the beginning of July.
Right now, he looks like the anchor of the Nationals rotation. Dare I say, he’s been an ace.
That’s not a word fans hand out lightly, especially when names like Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg have worn that label before. Cavalli may not be fully in that class yet, but over this 10-start stretch, he has absolutely pitched like one.
What makes the run even more impressive is where his career stood 18 months ago. It looked like things were slipping off the rails, and he was struggling just to stay on the mound. Now he’s putting together a season that points straight toward a top-10 Cy Young finish, which is a remarkable turnaround for the 28-year-old.
The arsenal helps explain why it’s happening. Cavalli’s fastball sits around 97 MPH, but his breaking stuff is doing the heavy lifting.
His curveball and sweeper both bring elite power and break, and each one is generating whiffs at more than a 30% clip. By the stuff models, both pitches grade out as elite.
The velocity on those breaking balls is part of what makes them so nasty. The curveball and sweeper average 86 MPH, and over the past couple months they’ve been closer to 87.
That extra heat, paired with the movement he gets, makes them brutal to handle. He’s also added a cutter, which helps connect the fastball and the breaking balls and gives the whole mix more shape.
The Nationals’ pitching coaches haven’t had many success stories this season, but Cavalli is clearly one of them. The sweeper has helped him a ton against right-handed hitters, a group he really struggled with last year.
In 2025, righties hit .381 against him. This season, that number is down to .222.
The cutter, added in midseason, has been a smart move too.
For the Nationals, it’s enough to make you wonder what this staff could do with more talent around Cavalli, including a pitcher like Connelly Early. For now, though, the story is Cavalli himself: getting better start by start and giving Nationals fans something they haven’t had in a while. A Nats pitcher on a Cy Young ballot should be back in the picture this year, and Cade Cavalli is the reason why.
In Other News...
Nationals Get A Real Opening As Rangers Shake Up Their Lineup
The Nationals opened the series by getting shut out 5-0, with Cal Quantrill cruising through seven scoreless innings for Texas. Washington now gets another look at the matchup with Cade Cavalli on the mound, and there is at least a sense that the next game offers a cleaner path for the home side after a flat start against a Rangers club that dictated the game from the outset.
Texas, meanwhile, is giving the lineup a different look as it tries to keep the pressure on. Joc Pederson is set to lead off and handle first base, while Danny Jansen is getting a breather after being activated from the injured list, part of a reshuffled group that could change the tone of the series if Washington does not answer early. [Read more 🡒]
Cade Cavalli Is Giving Nationals Fans Real Reason To Believe
Cade Cavalli keeps giving the Nationals something they have been searching for all season: a starter who can take over a game and make it look routine. Against the Rangers, he threw six scoreless innings, struck out 11 and helped Washington cruise to a 6-0 win, continuing a run that has made his recent stretch impossible to ignore. Over his last 10 starts, Cavalli has posted a 2.12 ERA, and his scoreless-innings streak now sits at 17.
What stood out even more was how quickly he piled up the strikeouts, getting to 10 within four innings, a level of dominance only two other Nationals pitchers have matched since 2005. For a club that has spent plenty of time looking for signs that its rotation can be more than just serviceable, Cavalli is starting to supply them in bunches. The bigger question now is how long he can keep carrying that kind of momentum. [Read more 🡒]
White Sox Have A New Reason To Watch Murakami Closely
The latest midseason hitter rankings are a reminder of how quickly the conversation can shift after the All-Star break, when a hot stretch starts to matter almost as much as the full season line. Yordan Alvarez, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Shohei Ohtani are all featured prominently because of the way they have been driving offenses lately, with Crow-Armstrongs jump from last year standing out as one of the biggest year-to-year gains in the group.
For the Nationals, the broader lesson is the kind of bat profile the front office and fan base have to keep tracking as the season moves on. These rankings are built around current form, not reputation, and they point to a pool of hitters who have found a groove at exactly the right time, while others are still trying to climb back into that conversation. [Read more 🡒]