Cade Cavalli’s suspension has left the Nationals juggling arms, but it may also have landed at the right moment for the 27-year-old right-hander.
Cavalli was coming off what might have been the best outing of his career - 13 strikeouts in Boston on June 30 - when the conversation shifted for all the wrong reasons. On Wednesday, he said he was remorseful over a racially insensitive remark made that night to Red Sox first baseman Willson Contreras.
“It hurt my heart knowing if there’s a 13-year-old Black kid in D.C. that sees that, that looked up to me and thinks that, he perceived it in a way that wasn’t intended the way that it came out, and then he’s not looking up to me anymore, that hurts my heart."
Both Cavalli and Contreras were handed seven-game suspensions for the incident, though each stayed on the active roster while appeals were processed. Cavalli has already started serving a reduced five-game suspension on Monday. Contreras still hasn’t received a ruling, but his penalty is expected to be cut as well, which is usually how appealed suspensions tied to on-field incidents play out.
For Cavalli, the timing may actually help. His first start after the incident was a mess: four runs allowed, eight baserunners, a balk, and a throwing error of his own.
He lasted just seven outs against the visiting Pirates. Afterward, he said he was dealing with heat-related dizziness, and the numbers backed up the eye test.
His fastball sat around 97 MPH in the first inning, then fell to 94 by the third, lower than any of his single-game averages on his four-seamer.
Whether the bench-clearing incident from the week before weighed on him that afternoon is impossible to know. What is clear is that Cavalli has some things to sort through. This was also the second time the Pirates had knocked him around this season, after a mid-April outing in which he got only four outs.
His suspension ends July 12, when the Nationals close out a series against the Yankees in the final game before the All-Star break. Washington could decide not to use him then, giving him almost two full weeks to reset physically and mentally before his next start.
The issue is that the Nationals’ bullpen has been stretched thin, and a pending appeal decision for Miles Mikolas from the same incident only adds to the uncertainty. On Sunday, rookie Eddy Yean - back with the Nationals after spending six years in Pittsburgh’s farm system - covered for Cavalli after arriving to the mound on the bullpen cart and getting a strikeout in his big league debut. He stranded both runners he inherited from Cavalli and recorded six outs.
From there, the roster churn kept going. Yean was optioned after the game so Cole Henry could be brought back up.
Then, in Monday night’s 12-11 win, Henry was asked for more length than usual and quickly ran into trouble. After getting through one clean inning, he was tagged for four runs while recording just two outs, with Braden Shewmake and Brice Matthews each delivering hard contact.
Henry was then optioned to Triple-A, and the Nationals are likely to activate recent waiver claim Matt Krook before the second game against the visiting Astros.
So Washington is living on both ends of the Cavalli situation at once. The club is short-handed and scrambling to piece together innings, but Cavalli also gets a window to step back, clear his head, and potentially return in the second half with the strikeout stuff he has flashed all season.
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