Notes and quotes on the Nationals heading into the second-half of the 2024 season…
Davey Martinez delivered a simple but important message to his players with the 2024 MLB Trade Deadline only two weeks away (July 30th).
Martinez talked with his team about the additional changes likely to come after the club traded Hunter Harvey to Kansas City this past weekend.
To the players still in the clubhouse, the manager said, “It’s very simple for me: ‘Hey, be where your feet are. Right now you’re a National.’”
While a number of members of the roster might not be part of the team any longer after the 30th of this month, the core the Nationals have assembled will be, and it’s important they continue to develop over the final two-plus months of the season.
“For me it’s about building this core of young players that we have,” Martinez told reporters, “… and getting them to play together. I think it’s important that this year we’ve done a good job of trickling guys up to the big leagues, and getting them to understand — it’s almost a teaching moment this year with these guys, so that over the wintertime they can work on things that they need to work on, and be ready to go in the spring. We’re building a team here to win not only next year, but for many years to come. That’s the goal. We want to get back to those playoffs. We want to get back to the World Series, and our core guys right now that we believe in, they’re going to help us do that.”
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Martinez said some of the pitchers who have “trickled up” over the last year-plus have provided an example of what front office execs and scouts want to see from their minor leaguers. And the message is getting through.
“I think they see their peers having success doing it,” he explained. “We can talk about Mitchell Parker. We can talk about DJ [Herz]. Understanding, hey, they got to throw strikes. For us, if they want to pitch here in the big leagues, they’ve got to throw strikes, and they both did really well with that. We’re preaching that. Especially at Double-A, Triple-A, you got to get ahead of hitters, you’ve got to throw strike one, and then you’ve got to try to finish hitters off. There’s no set-up pitches, there’s no — you just want to compete every pitch.”
Pitchers already in the majors, Martinez said, need to prepare for the stretch run, as well, so they are ready to compete in the near future when the team is back in the hunt . He was asked about the starters in the rotation who struggled going into the All-Star break and if they are wearing down deep in the season.
“This is part of the learning process, right?” he said. “I mean, they got to continue to stay engaged. We got to keep building their innings up, because if they’re only going 130 innings, 140 innings, when we need them in September they’re not going to be able to make it. We’re going to push them a little bit.”
GM and President of Baseball Ops Mike Rizzo told 106.7 the FAN in D.C.’s Sports Junkies last week their will be peaks and valleys, but it’s an important moment for the organization at this point in the club’s reboot.
“There’s some dips in the road,” Rizzo told the Junkies. “There’s slumps, there’s base-running slumps, there’s defensive slumps and you’ve gotta navigate your way through these things to this 162 [games] in 185 days. And that is to me, the key developmental aspect when you get the big leagues.
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“You get to the big leagues, you still have to improve, you still have to play better, you still have to make adjustments… but the adjustment of playing 162 games in 185 days it is the separator from average to good, good to great, great to Hall of Fame.”
Martinez and Co. on the Nationals’ staff, and their player development people in the organization are preparing all of the players in the system for what’s to come if things go to plan.
“You’re seeing these guys learn each and every day and get better each and every day with back steps and some sidesteps along the way and some hiccups,” Rizzo said.
“But you can’t tell me you that you can’t see the ascension to all these young players. When you factor that in and our young pitching the way it’s pitching and the players that we have coming up and payroll flexibility, you can’t be [unenthusiastic] about where this franchise is going and the future.”