When the team chose to go to war for the 2026 Opening day with a bullpen that featured
- 5 Wavier claims (Poulin, Varland, Waldichuk, Schultz, and yes Lovelady counts here)
- 1 MLFAs (Perez), and
- 2 trade acquisitions with negligible MLB service time (Beeter, Granillo)
… one could probably have been a little concerned about how they’d fare.
Well, 3 weeks in, we have our answer. They’ve already made use of every other reliever on the 40-man at some point (Rutledge, Ribalta, and Fernandez … yet another Waiver claim) plus have made use of two starters (Parker and Alvarez) to eat innings with varying success.
As Mark Zuckerman pointed out, with Fernandez’s ridiculously awful outing last night (where he gave up 2 hits, 2 walks, threw a pitch to the backstop, and bounced so many balls in the dirt that his catcher Millas seemed completely fed up when one of them caught him flush in the hand), the team has now used 21 pitchers already, including one mop-up inning from outfielder Joey Weimer.
21 pitchers. That’s hard to do when you only have 25 arms on the entire 40-man roster, and four of them are on the 60-day DL.
Already, the Nats bullpen is last in the league in fWAR, 29th in FIP, 27th in ERA, 30th in K/9.
Clearly, this isn’t sustainable. But, I’m not entirely sure where they go from here. It’s one thing when you build a bullpen as Rizzo did so frequently in the past, from a combination of holdovers, veteran FAs, and call-ups. At least there you weren’t rolling the dice with 75% of the pen. But with so many trash-heap players, who other teams didn’t even think were worthy of keeping a 40-man spot, let alone a 26-man active roster spot, this was always going to be a recipe for disaster.
There’s zero 40-man help remaining in Rochester; the only two guys they haven’t called up are starters Perales and Cornelio … who aren’t exactly locks to be able to come in and pitch effectively in relief after being on longer rest. There’s a couple more MLFAs there with MLB time who aren’t pitching half bad (Yean and Gott), but the rest of the AAA bullpen isn’t exactly inspiring confidence either.
It could be a long season.