Trevor Williams struggles as Nationals get routed by Marlins
For an idea of how the Washington Nationals’ Saturday afternoon went, look no further than Trevor Williams’s pitching line: four innings, 12 hits, nine runs (eight of them earned) and four home runs on 82 pitches. The right-hander struck out three and walked none, but that only let the Miami Marlins keep teeing off on him. And so the Nationals lost, 11-5, to fall to 2-10 against the Marlins on the season.
“I just put us in too deep of a hole, and it was something we couldn’t get out of,” Williams said. “The three-run homers are definite rally killers. So for us, to give those up so early, it’s too hard to try to climb out of that.”
Williams’s fastball averaged 88.4 mph, giving him little margin for error. In the first inning, he threw one up and in to Jake Burger, and Burger launched it out to left. In the third, he threw one middle-middle to Burger — almost straight down the pipe — and the third baseman crushed his second solo shot.
A batter later, Jazz Chisholm Jr. hit a pop fly to the left field line, which shortstop CJ Abrams overran and then whiffed on. The next batter, Bryan De La Cruz, singled to right. Jesús Sánchez, the batter after that, skied a three-run homer to center, ripping the wheels off. And when De La Cruz went deep for another three-run shot in the fourth, Williams had allowed 33 homers on the season, the most in the National League. Lance Lynn, traded from the Chicago White Sox to the Los Angeles Dodgers in late July, is the MLB leader at 37.
“The first Burger one, I think we executed the pitch,” Williams said. “The second one, we thought he’d be sitting spin after he hit a homer, and he wasn’t. The Sánchez one, I thought we executed it fine; I guess he just might have been looking out [over the plate]. And the De La Cruz one [on a low sinker], that’s truly the only one I kind of gave him that homer. But other than that, look, it’s going to happen. Unfortunately it’s a tough spot to put us in early.”
After throwing 89⅔ innings for the New York Mets last season, Williams has made a big jump to 134⅔ (and counting). He hadn’t topped 100 since he was a full-time starter for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2019. He was a swing pitcher with New York in 2022, making nine starts and 21 relief appearances. But when he signed a two-year, $13 million deal with the Nationals, part of the reason was because they promised a rotation spot.
The problem now is that shutting him down — or even limiting his innings in any meaningful way — would be tricky. On that front, Washington’s main priorities are MacKenzie Gore and Jake Irvin. Gore, 24, is close to doubling his innings total from 2022 after he missed half of last year with elbow issues. Irvin, a 26-year-old rookie, passed last season’s minor league innings total when he worked five in a loss to the Marlins (69-67) on Friday. If nothing else, Williams, 31, is supposed to be a reliable innings eater — and his previous two outings were solid. He just appears to be running out of steam.
“This is the most he’s pitched in a while. His innings are up there,” Manager Dave Martinez said. “I get a little worried for him, too. We gave him a little breather there, and he came back to pitch and started pitching well. But this is obviously a lot for him, so we have to try to kind of manage that as well. ... Hopefully we can bounce back for us in his next start. ... But I definitely don’t want to send him home hurt or aching. I want him to be ready to go again next year.”
With another loss to the Marlins, who finished with 18 hits, Washington (62-75) has dropped four in a row and six of seven. Miami has spent the weekend boosting its odds for a National League wild-card spot. Before the Nationals were buried, Riley Adams had an RBI double in the second inning. In the fifth, Dominic Smith, dropped to eighth in the batting order because of his .675 OPS, hit a solo shot off Johnny Cueto. He added an RBI double in the ninth, when the Nationals rallied for a pair of runs.
Earlier, in the sixth, Lane Thomas slugged his team-leading 22nd homer. And in the seventh, Drew Millas, the club’s rookie catcher, poked a single through the left side. It was his first major league hit, a fact acknowledged by the home crowd. Its cheers were a shift in the afternoon’s soundtrack. The ball was tossed to Washington’s dugout for safekeeping, all of it a brief respite from what had come before.
“To hit it by my old college teammate down there [at third], Burger, just pushing it by him, that was pretty cool,” Millas said with a big smile on his face. “I was hoping he wouldn’t get to it. ... Thankfully it got through. It was an awesome, awesome moment.”
