Washington Nationals news & notes: Josiah Gray to IL with elbow/forearm flexor strain

Notes and quotes from the second game of three with the Giants in Oracle Park…

GRAY TO IL WITH RIGHT ELBOW/FOREARM FLEXOR STRAIN:

“Josiah Gray has been placed on the 15-Day Injured List (right elbow/forearm flexor strain),” the Nationals wrote on X/Twitter, with the 26-year-old scratched from his scheduled start against the San Francisco Giants last night.

Joan Adon, Gray’s replacement for the second of three for Washington in Oracle Park, was already with the club, having joined the team on Monday as part of the taxi squad for their current road trip, and as Gray and his manager told reporters after the news came out, the issue came up as he began to throw again after his second start of the season.

“After my last start against Pittsburgh, just felt a little more banged up than usual, so worked through it,” Gray explained to reporters on Tuesday, “… threw a bullpen, and still didn’t feel right, so I alerted the training staff, and went through tests and whatnot, and everything came back good, but just to be on the safe side of things, we got an MRI and it showed a little flexor pronator strain.

“So that was kind of the build-up. It more or less happened right after my start against Pittsburgh, and that’s where we’re at.”

According to Manager Davey Martinez, his young starter spoke up immediately when he didn’t feel right.

“It was great. We watched him, we talked to him. He said he didn’t feel right. He tried to play catch, and we said, ‘Hey, we want to get this checked out,’” Martinez recounted.

“But he was great about it, he really was. As you know Josiah, he’s going to do whatever he can to get better. But he was very, very positive. And he said, ‘I’m going to get back and help win,’ and I told him, I said, ‘I know you are, so let’s just make sure that we do our due diligence and do everything the right way so that when you come back we just keep going forward and this doesn’t become an issue.”

Asked how it felt, Gray said, it’s, “… sort of just like a dull, sort of linger on the muscle, on the pronator flexor mass muscle. It’s sort of a common thing for pitchers, so the training staff is going to take care of it and take care of me.”

“We’re going to let him rest a little bit,” Martinez added. “We’re going to just go through the process and check all the boxes before he even gets on the mound. We want to make sure that we keep everything — especially everything around the [injury], especially the muscles, strengthen those muscles back up, keep that tendon strong, and then we’ll go from there.”

All things considered, Martinez and Gray said, the diagnosis was a positive.

“It’s a flexor strain,” the skipper said.

“The tendon looks good. So, he’s just going to take some time off and build back some strength and then we’ll try to get him back as soon as possible.”

“The MRI was a good result,” Gray stressed. “Everything was intact — UCL was intact, all the other forearm muscles were intact. So, obviously a positive result from that. But, obviously, having the inflammation you’ve got to kind of wait for that to go down and have stuff respond to that, so overall, a positive outlook.

“Obviously it sucks to miss time, and not be out there helping the guys and winning games, but it’s a part of what pitchers are and what we do, just going to take it on the chin and take it day by day.”

In his first two outings this season, including the Nationals’ Opening Day start, Gray gave up a combined 15 hits, five walks, and 13 runs, with a .405/.455/.703 line against in 8 ¹⁄₃ innings.

ON THE FIELD IN ORACLE PARK – NATS 5 GIANTS 3:

With Josiah Gray unavailable, 25-year-old starter Joan Adon got the nod for the second of three with the Giants in Oracle Park, and the right-hander held the home team to a run on three hits and three walks in four innings, striking out two in a 72-pitch effort, in which the pitcher generated just two whiffs, though he did pick up 15 called strikes (spread out over four pitches).

CJ Abrams, who returned to the lineup after missing three games with a bone bruise on his left pinky, picked his starter up with a two-run home run (a 423 ft. blast) which put the Nats up 2-1 after two and a half, and it was 3-1 after an RBI single for Abrams in the fifth, and after the Giants rallied to tie it with two in the sixth, Trey Lipscomb drove one in with a sac fly in the seventh, and Riley Adams drove in another run in the eighth, 5-3.

Kyle Finnegan took over after Hunter Harvey took a line drive off his glove hand on a seeker back to the mound with two out in the eighth, then returned to the mound in the ninth and worked his way into and out of a bases-loaded, no-out jam, with a force at home on a weak grounder and a rally-killing, game-ending 6-4-3 DP. Nationals win, 5-3.