Cade Cavalli was supposed to start Thursday afternoon for the Washington Nationals, and the fact that he won’t dampened what’s left of excitement as the final month of the season begins. The Nationals have the worst record in baseball. They traded the best hitter in the game. They are in full-on rebuild mode, and a potential centerpiece of that rebuild is on the injured list after one career start. It’s bummer after bummer after bummer.
Cade Cavalli’s injury is a reminder of Washington’s difficult road ahead
But Cavalli’s absence — he was diagnosed with shoulder inflammation over the weekend and shut down for at least two weeks — is a reminder of all this overhaul will require. The Nats’ rise to contention a decade ago wasn’t just about Stephen Strasburg. It was about Jordan Zimmermann and Gio Gonzalez and the players behind them. By the time they won a World Series, it was about Max Scherzer and Patrick Corbin, too.
And so this “reboot,” as General Manager Mike Rizzo keeps calling it, won’t be solely about Cavalli. As long as Rizzo’s in charge — and with a new owner likely to take over after the season, who knows how long his reign will last — the Nationals will be built around starting pitching. That means Cavalli and Josiah Gray. It means MacKenzie Gore and Cole Henry. It means Jarlin Susana and some unidentified pitcher we don’t yet know — maybe a high first-round pick in next summer’s draft. And it means more than that.
Because shoulder inflammation, Tommy John surgery and thoracic outlet syndrome all seem to be a part of pitching, it means there must be a group that’s not just talented but deep. Who knows when the next starter will wake up the day after firing 99 pitches and think, “I don’t feel right”?
That’s what Cavalli did after his Friday night debut against Cincinnati, when he was charged with seven runs in 4⅓ innings — a statistical line that looks lousy but that came with enough flashes to justify the buzz. That start fits right in with where the Nationals’ rotation has been all summer, which is essentially the worst in the game — last in ERA (5.96), last in walks and hits per inning pitched (1.56), second-to-last in batting average against (.282).
Think about that for a second: The average major leaguer this year is hitting .243. Put him up against the Nats’ rotation, and he hits nearly 40 points higher! That’s remarkable, and it’s representative of the fall from what the Nats were less than three calendar years ago.
That October of 2019 ended with a parade because Anthony Rendon and Howie Kendrick went deep against the Houston Astros. But it was built on Strasburg coming out of the bullpen in the wild-card game and Corbin coming out of the bullpen in Game 7 and all those heroic performances from all those starting pitchers in between. The Nats won 12 games that October. I’m not much for pitching wins as a meaningful statistic, but the credit for the win in 10 of those games went to Scherzer, Strasburg or Corbin. That’s not a coincidence. That was by design in organizational philosophy overall and organizational strategy that month.
It only reinforces how those Nats were built — and, if Rizzo’s still in charge, how they will be built again. From 2012 to 2019, the Nats’ rotation was second in baseball in ERA, WHIP and opponents’ batting average. But you could argue Washington’s starting pitchers had a greater impact than any group on any other team because they were used so much. No rotation won more games or pitched more innings — and that has a trickle-down effect on the whole team.
Over that eight-season span, Nats starters averaged 5.93 innings per outing — somewhere between 17 and 18 outs a night. And therefore, over eight seasons, the team with the fewest innings out of its bullpen? You guessed it: Washington.
Over the past three seasons — beginning with the covid-shortened 2020 campaign — not only have Nats starters posted the worst ERA (5.24) and second-worst WHIP (1.44) in the sport, but they’re down to 4.98 innings an outing. That’s almost a full inning less than they pitched in their competitive stretch. Extend that over a season, and it’s 462 more outs a bullpen — actually, an exhausted bullpen — has to get. Put aside the fluky 43-game streak in which a Nats’ starter didn’t record a win. This isn’t the kind of workload Rizzo envisions from a rotation.
Now, the sport is undergoing a change, too, because starting pitchers have never been asked to do less than they are right now. Excluding that shortened 2020 season, the innings for starting pitchers have declined every season since 2014. Yet Rizzo’s mantra is unchanged: “With starting pitching, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is.”
Cavalli is one character who is supposed to open those possibilities.
“He’s really developed into the guy that we’re hoping can lead our staff moving forward in the future,” Rizzo said Wednesday during his weekly appearance on “The Sports Junkies” on 106.7 the Fan.
But it says here that when and if the Nationals contend again, the rotation won’t be Cavalli, the first-round pick in the 2021 draft; Gore, acquired in the trade with San Diego for Juan Soto; Henry, a second-round pick in 2020; Gray, who came back in the 2021 trade that sent Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Los Angeles Dodgers; and Susana, the 18-year-old flamethrower who tops out at 103 mph and was the final piece of the Soto deal. That’s too simple and too smooth, and it doesn’t account for the bumps that are certain to come along the way.
Cavalli’s shutdown, though not believed to be serious, is one of those bumps. So is the fact that Gore hasn’t thrown in a game in the Nationals’ system because he’s working his way back from injury. So is the fact that Henry hasn’t pitched in a game since June and will undergo surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome — the condition that has essentially broken Strasburg. So is the fact that Gray is missing turns in the rotation to monitor his workload.
Cavalli’s starts were supposed to be what amounted to events for the Nats over the season’s final month. His absence just emphasizes the difficulty of what’s ahead because becoming contenders again means not just identifying, collecting and developing starting pitching talent. It means keeping that talent healthy enough to take the ball every fifth day and perform, like Strasburg and Scherzer and Corbin did for the entirety of 2019, including that final, magical month.
Source: WP
