At the end of Monday’s Trade Deadline, the Nationals didn’t just add depth. They loaded up on arms.
Washington brought in 10 players, and nine of them are pitchers. Six of those pitchers are still working toward their Major League debuts, and four now sit among the organization’s Top 30 prospects. President of baseball operations Paul Toboni made clear the club wasn’t chasing pitching for the sake of it, but the deadline broke that way anyway.
“Looking backwards, we came onto a ton of pitching in these deals,” Toboni said. “Did we want to pursue it?
Yeah, we wanted to pursue it to help this year’s team. We wanted to pursue it to hopefully allow us to roll out a better pitching group in the future.
But we didn’t want to be overly dogmatic about it. We didn’t want to pass up on really good position players in favor of lesser pitchers.
It worked out that way.”
He also spelled out the profile Washington targeted.
“From a pitching standpoint, what we were looking for were players that ideally can miss bats, can fill up the zone and can induce weak contact,” said Toboni. “A lot of the time, pitchers can't really do all three. But there's a sliding scale between all those things, and we thought we came on to a number of pitchers that do those things well.”
Among the new additions, No. 20 reliever C.J. Cebert gives the Nationals a strike-thrower who has kept moving up with a mix of pitchability and a fastball that has ticked up.
He spent three seasons at South Florida before finishing at Texas Tech, where he worked in the low-90s with a two-seam fastball that reached 96 mph and paired it with a slider and cutter. In pro ball, his four-seamer has averaged 95 mph and touched 98, while his slider has gained some velocity and sweep.
He’s also mixed in an upper-70s curveball to grab early-count strikes.
Cebert has leaned on control more than true command, and when he gets too much of the plate, he can get hit. He hasn’t leaned heavily on a changeup yet, though his splits have been close to even.
No. 22 left-hander Sean Grable brings a different kind of upside: pure power. His college path was interrupted twice by elbow problems, including Tommy John surgery, but he resurfaced at Indiana in 2025 and the Yankees grabbed him in the 11th round. This season, he rocketed from High-A to Double-A after just three weeks and later reached the Futures Game.
Grable’s fastball sits at 96 mph and has reached 99, with average induced vertical break in the 20-21 inch range. Hitters know it’s coming, because he throws it 75 percent of the time, and they still struggle to square it up. His mid-80s slider gives him a second weapon, and his delivery - with a high release, good extension and unusual flexion in his arm action - adds another layer of deception.
No. 26 right-hander Matt Hartle offers a more conventional starter look, but with enough shape and strike-throwing to keep him in the conversation. He made it to Double-A in his first full pro season, earned High-A Midwest Pitcher of the Year honors after posting a 2.35 ERA, 100 strikeouts and a 1.05 WHIP in 103 1/3 innings for Lake County, and then put up solid numbers at Double-A Akron in 2026 before the trade.
Hartle’s stuff isn’t overpowering, but he works from a 6-foot-6 frame and a horizontal release that creates tough angles. His slider is his best pitch, especially against lefties, and his changeup can miss bats even if it doesn’t always find the zone.
He mixes a four-seam and two-seam fastball in the low 90s, along with an upper-80s cutter that he uses in the strike zone to keep the ball on the ground and limit hard contact. The concern is whether that formula holds if the velocity doesn’t climb, especially after a slight uptick in homers allowed in ’26.
The final pitcher in the group, No. 30 Yovanny Cruz, has taken the long road to the big leagues and finally arrived as a hard-throwing reliever.
Signed by the Cubs for $60,000 out of the Dominican Republic in 2016, he never got above High-A in Chicago’s system. He later reached Double-A with the Padres and Red Sox as a Minor League free agent, joined the Yankees last offseason, and after a strong start at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, debuted in the Majors on May 20.
Cruz’s calling card is obvious: his four-seam fastball reached 102 mph in Triple-A and averaged 99.4 mph. The pitch doesn’t have elite extension or eye-popping movement, but the velocity still plays.
His 89-91 mph slider is actually his most-used pitch in both the Minors and Majors in 2026, and it’s the pitch that gets batters swinging over the top of it. He also flashes an upper-80s splitter, though it barely appeared in Triple-A.
With his control improving and his work coming almost exclusively out of the stretch, Cruz has kept the formula simple: let the fastball and slider do the damage.
In Other News...
Nationals Fans Have Every Right To Debate The Foster Griffin Return
The Nationals decision to move Foster Griffin to Cleveland for a four-prospect package immediately invites debate, because this is not the sort of deal fans usually shrug off. Griffin had been a steadying presence in Washingtons rotation, going 12-3 with a 3.06 ERA this season and giving the club the kind of dependable left-handed arm that is hard to replace, especially when the season is already asking a lot from the pitching staff.
What Washington brought back is a mix of arms and a position player in Josh Hartle, Kendeglys Virguez, Will Dion and Nick Mitchell, which gives the front office quantity and some developmental upside. The question, though, is whether the ceiling in that group is high enough to justify parting with a pitcher who was doing so much of the heavy lifting, and that is where the conversation around this deal gets uncomfortable for Nationals fans. [Read more 🡒]
Guardians Paid A Real Price To Strengthen Their Rotation
The Nationals moved Foster Griffin to Cleveland in a deal that says plenty about how much the Guardians wanted to fortify their rotation. Griffin, a left-hander who had been one of the more dependable arms on the market, is headed to a staff that already had real depth, making the fit easy to understand from Clevelands side and the return all the more notable for Washington.
For the Nationals, the trade brings back four prospects, a sign they were willing to cash in a proven major league pitcher for volume and upside. Griffin had been an All-Star and had put together a 2.77 ERA, which is exactly why the Guardians had to pay up, and why this deal could end up shaping both clubs pitching plans for a while. [Read more 🡒]
Nationals Deadline Left One Big Question About Their New Direction
The Nationals used the trade deadline to keep reshaping the roster around their young core, and the overall direction was clear enough: add pitching, avoid a full teardown, and hold on to cornerstone talent like CJ Abrams. Washington came away with several arms, including Connelly Early and Cade Cavalli, while also dealing Foster Griffin and Luis Garca Jr. as part of a broader effort to stock the organization with more pitching depth.
Even with those moves, the deadline felt more like a cautious step forward than a bold reset. The club did add bodies to a system that needed them, but it also passed on chances to land premium prospects in return, leaving a familiar question hanging over the front offices new approach: how aggressive is it willing to be when the time comes to turn this collection of pieces into a real contender? [Read more 🡒]