Looking to round out the rotation
Nats seeking consistency from their No. 5 starter
Two days before the All-Star break, the Washington Nationals sent their fifth starter, Austin Voth, to Double-A Harrisburg. They needed a spot on the roster to activate ace Max Scherzer off the paternity list for Saturday’s game, and moving Voth made sense because he had made his last start of the season’s first half the night before.
After an impressive season debut late last month, Voth struggled in his next two outings. The team’s fifth starter spot, which has been shaky all season, stayed that way. So the transaction prompted a question: Will Voth come back?
“It’s definitely something that we’re talking about,” manager Dave Martinez said Saturday. “He’s not going to pitch for a while, so we want him to go down and get his work in, make sure he’s ready.”
The Nationals’ second half starts Friday in Philadelphia, and Martinez intimated he expects Voth to rejoin the team. The manager said the right-hander will pitch Wednesday to keep him on schedule throwing every fifth day, “so that will put him back some time [around the second series].”
The Nationals have a scheduled day off Monday, so they could go without a fifth starter until July 22. Still, the question of who the fifth starter will be for the long term remains pressing because, for all the strides the Nationals made to end the first half 47-42 and atop the National League wild-card standings, the spot seems as far from settled as it has ever been.
At first blush, this might look like a non-problem. The Nationals have one of the best and highest-paid tops of a rotation in baseball, with Scherzer (2.39 ERA in 129 innings), Stephen Strasburg (3.64 in 116 Patrick Corbin (3.34 in 113 and Aníbal Sánchez (3.66 in 83 Even Martinez acknowledged that he is blessed to have four dependable starters.
Yet the instability beyond the top four has already been costly. Since May 27, the Nationals have won 24 games and lost 10, and five of the defeats were started by the fifth spot in the rotation.
To continue winning, to push for the playoffs as aggressively as they seem poised to, the Nationals need stability to lead to improvement. Continuing to ride the hot hand in the fifth starter spot doesn’t allow the pitcher or the team behind him to find the consistency that players covet.
After his past two starts, it’s fair to wonder whether Voth’s first outing — six innings, two runs, no walks and seven strikeouts against the mighty Braves — was an aberration. He lacked the same crispness in his two most recent starts, and his fastball velocity, which shot up to touch 96 mph against the Braves, dipped back to the normal low 90s. His command faltered, too.
In 4 innings against the Tigers, baseball’s worst offense tagged Voth for six hits and three runs. In 4 innings against the Royals, baseball’s sixth-worst offense tagged him for five hits and four runs. Both times, the 27-year-old described his struggles as a byproduct of feeling “a tick off,” especially when trying to locate glove-side fastballs.
The rotation fluctuation seems urgent because, if the Nationals decide Voth is not the long-term solution, they might be back to square one.
The original candidate for the spot, right-hander Jeremy Hellickson, hasn’t pitched since May and appears to be out of the mix because the Nationals moved him to the 60-day injured list last week with right shoulder stiffness.
The right-hander whoreplaced Hellickson, Erick Fedde, looked strong in his first four starts, compiling 20 innings and a 2.70 ERA, but then command problems derailed him. Fedde allowed seven runs in 9 innings over his last two starts while throwing just 56 percent of his pitches for strikes.
Another potential successor, righthander Kyle McGowin, auditioned in late May and allowed five runs in four innings to baseball’s second-worst offense, the Marlins. He has not started in the majors since, though he has started twice in Fresno and allowed three runs over 13 innings.