Going Deep with The Nats

No other Washington Nationals player was in the public eye as early as Robert Hassell III at 11 and 12 years old in the Little League World Series. Okay, Darren Baker will never live down being the bat boy who almost got steamrolled and then saved by J.T. Snow in Game 5 of the 2002 World Series when Baker was just 3½ years old. That changed the rules for batboy’s ages going forward. Both players have been competing in this Spring Training camp as NRIs. Hassell is 2½ years younger than Baker, and competing in a crowded outfield for a spot. His tiny chance of making the team vanished with his latest injury: the groin. A source tells us that he will have an MRI on his nagging groin pain, and they hope to rule out that it is a sports hernia or a tear. Baker will continue in camp as he survived the first cuts today.

The players lost an hour’s sleep as daylight savings time kicked in. The team had to be up and at the bus early for that final trip to Ft. Myers of Grapefruit League play. Last week they were there to face the Red Sox, and are back today for a game against the Twins. The trip is over two hours from the Atlantic coast on the east to the Gulf coast on the west. Manager Dave Martinez is kind of going with his 12:05 lineup from yesterday’s first game of the doubleheader.

After the first game of the doubleheader, we got some injury news, both considered minor, that Robert Hassell III is dealing with a tight groin, and Victor Robles has a bruised hamstring. Both are considered day-to-day. In addition to that news, manager Dave Martinez spent most of his postgame meeting with the media to discuss the mistakes and mental errors of Luis Garcia, Jr. who accumulated two fielding errors and one baserunning mistake.

Turn the page on Friday’s game and hope that Josiah Gray and Joey Gallo will bounceback from a game to forget about. Gray had been looking good, but Gallo was slowed by a quadriceps injury and is racking up the strikeouts at a pace that has reached the wrong side of 50 percent. His K rate is currently 53.33. His .071 batting average is the math from just one hit in 14 at-bats. The fans are concerned even though we keep the mantra that Spring Training stats generally mean nothing. Also, Robert Hassell III entered the game in the fifth inning and made a quick exit. What’s up with that? Someone at the game thinks he hurt his leg. Crickets, nobody else reported Hassell’s quick exit but us.

The Washington Nationals are continuing to get promising signs from their players even though the small sample size results are not necessarily there. The team got a very good pitching performance from Jake Irvin over 4.0 efficient innings with good movement and induced swing/miss from batters. The team needed to start seeing progress from Irvin who struggled in his first two appearances. That gives the team six good starts in the past week from Irvin, tonight’s starter Josiah Gray, MacKenzie Gore, Patrick Corbin, Zach Davies, and Trevor Williams.

That 17.18 ERA that right-handed starting pitcher, Jake Irvin, posted over two appearances in Spring Training will be a stat that Irvin won’t miss from his Baseball Reference page when they wipe the slate clean in three weeks. Irvin has to start pitching well to make sure he isn’t the odd man out in the starting rotation. He isn’t an established veteran with a lock on a roster spot.