The Washington Nationals got a strange kind of pitching night against the Phillies - one that mixed damage control with a flood of free passes.
The bright side came from the bullpen, which covered 8⅔ innings and allowed one run on four hits while striking out seven. But that was only part of the story. Jared Simpson lasted just one out in his start after walking four batters, and the staff as a whole handed out 13 walks to match a dubious Nationals record.
That number framed everything that followed. Luis Perales was hitting 100.7 on the radar gun and Yovanny Cruz touched 100.9, but the velocity didn’t translate into command. Even an umpire’s help couldn’t save Perales after an ABS challenge turned that 100.7 into a ball.
The walk problem has been part of the bigger picture for Washington this year. As an organization, the Nationals are the fifth-worst team in MLB in walks with 572.
Last season they were fourth-worst with 566. The minor league side has gone the other way in the ABS era, sliding from 19th worst in walks last year to 22nd worst this year.
On the flip side, the farm system made a major jump in strikeouts, moving from 28th last year to 10th this year.
The big-league pitching staff has improved in that category too, but only a bit. After finishing with the third-fewest strikeouts in baseball last season at 1,248, the Nationals are now sixth-worst with 1,197, ahead of the playoff-bound Cubs.
After the game, manager Blake Butera went straight to the point.
“Well, I think you guys know the story to tonight’s game - 13 walks. Honestly, we’re fortunate that it was only a 3-0 game when you walk 13 guys. That’s what it comes down to.”
He added: “If you are going to walk some guys, you’ve got to strike guys out. I think when your stuff isn’t great and you’re walking guys, that’s when you need to get punchouts and you need to make big pitches to put guys away to work around that. I think our guys that we threw tonight are able to do that, but I think we need to make it a lot easier on ourselves by throwing more strikes.”
The old-school view on pitching still has a place in this conversation. Former Nationals pitching coach Steve McCatty, who coached the club from 2009 to 2015, was known for valuing quick outs and efficiency.
“Outs are outs,” McCatty said. “If you don’t need the strikeout, why use all the pitches to get one?
I’d rather win 2-1 and have our pitcher strike out two and walk four than lose 2-1 and have our pitcher strike out 13 and walk one. ”
That debate sits right alongside the organization’s current emphasis on velocity. Paul Toboni was on his radio show yesterday talking about the desire for starter Andrew Alvarez to add 2-to-3 mph to his fastball.
Alvarez, a finesse pitcher by today’s standards, has a 3.35 ERA, which the source described as effectively the 30th best among MLB pitchers with at least 100 innings. The question raised was whether he would be better served by developing a split-finger, cleaning up a slider that posted a .438 SLG this year, or using a cutter like Foster Griffin’s.
The slider, the source noted, was Alvarez’s best pitch last year.
The point wasn’t that velocity doesn’t matter. It’s that speed alone doesn’t solve anything if the fastball isn’t being thrown for quality strikes. The comparison reached back to pitchers like Mariano Rivera, who didn’t need overwhelming velocity to dominate, and to Sandy Koufax, whose command and movement made him nearly impossible to hit.
“ Trying to hit Koufax,” Willie Stargell said, “was like drinking coffee with a fork.” Koufax once said, “I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make them miss the ball and started to trying to make them hit it.”
The Nationals did have some bright moments, including a few strikeouts and a double play ball that were clipped into short videos. But the night still came back to the same issue: too many walks, not enough strikes, and too much of the game handed away for free.
And that’s what made the final result sting a little more. If Washington’s offense had scored four runs, the conversation would have shifted entirely. Instead of walks, strikeouts, and velocity, it would have been about a five-game winning streak.
Instead, the lesson was sitting right there in the numbers: throw quality strikes and win games.
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