Baseball’s deadline was Thursday at noon to submit Opening Day rosters to MLB. The Washington Nationals basically set their roster today with only IL move(s) remaining and possibly a retirement announcement on Stephen Strasburg. Unfortunately, Trey Lipscomb did not make the Opening Day roster as he was certainly one of the best players in Spring Training camp.
As expected, Derek Law did make the roster. Since Law was an NRI, the team moved Cade Cavalli as expected to the 60-day IL to make room for Law on the 40-man roster. This was the fifth round of cuts and most likely the final round of cuts barring any surprise trade, free agent signing, or waiver claim. The Nats will need to make official moves to deal with injured players on the 40-man roster like Strasburg and Stone Garrett. The other player who is coming off of TJ surgery, Zach Brzykcy, was listed on the minor league transaction log as placed on the 60-day IL — however, that could have been in error as it was not on the MLB transaction log.
While the dream was still alive for Lipscomb until today, his Spring Training finished at a .400 batting average and a .995 OPS. That wasn’t good enough? Well, James Wood had a 1.214 OPS to lead all of baseball. Both will head to Triple-A to play for Rochester.
Here are your 13 pitchers on the roster: Matt Barnes, Patrick Corbin, Kyle Finnegan, Dylan Floro, Robert Garcia, MacKenzie Gore, Josiah Gray, Hunter Harvey, Jake Irvin, Derek Law, Tanner Rainey, Jordan Weems, and Trevor Williams.
Here are your 13 position players: Riley Adams and Keibert Ruiz for the catchers. For the infielders, CJ Abrams, Luis Garcia Jr., Joey Gallo, Joey Meneses, Nasim Nunez, Nick Senzel, and Ildemaro Vargas remain. The outfielders are Victor Robles, Eddie Rosario Lane Thomas, Jesse Winker. Many of the infielders can also play the outfield except Abrams and Garcia, and Winker can also DH.
Here is a stats guide to help you out for the position players. Here is one for the pitchers too. A word of caution on the stats is that they are still small sample sizes, and we have seen many questionable umpire and official scorer calls that greatly affect these small sample sizes.
With today’s roster moves the AAV salaries before bonuses, fringe benefits, and 40-man costs are just over $115 million. Opening Day is just two days away.
