Nats hope deeper bullpen pays off at season's end

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – When Hunter Harvey landed on the injured list for a month last summer with a right elbow strain, the Nationals had plenty of reason to be concerned. Concerned not only for the well-being of Harvey, whose lengthy injury history is too well known. But concerned also for Kyle Finnegan, who suddenly was the only late-inning reliever Davey Martinez knew he could rely on.

Turns out Finnegan delivered his best stretch of the season while Harvey was out, making 14 consecutive scoreless appearances from mid-July through mid-August, notching the save or the win in 10 of those games and allowing only eight total batters to reach base.

Finnegan’s downfall came not while Harvey was out, but rather after Harvey returned. Over his final 16 appearances of the year, he surrendered 15 runs, allowing nearly two batters per inning to reach base.

The reasonable takeaway from all that: All the work asked of Finnegan earlier in the summer caught up to him by September.

“Yeah, they were a little worn down,” Martinez said, referencing both Finnegan and Harvey, who was scored upon in three of his final seven appearances. “They did a lot. Especially Finnegan, we really pushed him. But he’s a horse, and he wants the ball and doesn’t ever complain. To keep these guys healthy and fresh, we’d like to maybe stay away from them some days. And now we have an opportunity to do that.”

The Nationals hope they have the opportunity to give their top relievers more days off this season because they believe they’ve added two more quality late-inning arms to what now looks like one of the deepest bullpens they’ve had in years.

With Tanner Rainey fully back from Tommy John surgery, and with veteran Dylan Floro signed over the winter, the Nats now have four right-handed relievers with considerable late-game experience.

“It’s great to have as many options as possible,” Finnegan said. “We’ll be able to give each other breathers. When one guy is down one day, another can step up and feel like we’re not skipping a beat.”

None of these four is a sure-fire, lockdown closer with a long track record of success. Finnegan has 50 career saves but a modest 3.53 ERA and 1.315 WHIP. Floro has 32 saves and a 3.42 ERA across 330 major league games, but is coming off his worst season to date. Rainey (15 saves, 12.5 strikeouts per nine innings) and Harvey (10 saves, 1.051 WHIP) have shown the ability to dominate but not the ability to stay healthy for long stretches of time.

Even so, there’s good reason to believe in the possibilities of this group, which has enough depth perhaps to account for one injury or subpar performance.

“I think it’s going to be big, just having multiple options,” Harvey said. “If someone’s getting a little beat up or tired, knowing you have three or four guys who can do it makes everybody’s job a little easier.”

Martinez isn’t declaring any formal roles here during the first week of spring training, but the safest bet has Finnegan retaining the closer’s job he held most of last season, with Harvey the top eighth-inning option and Rainey and Floro setting them both up. The seventh-year manager also likes Jordan Weems (13 straight scoreless appearances last summer while Harvey was on the injured list before he, too, faded) as a multi-inning option and Robert Garcia (whose 3.69 ERA in 24 games was misleading because of one six-run blowup in August) as a good option when the situation calls for a lefty.

Not that any of the affected parties are too concerned with specific roles, a characteristic the best relief corps in the sport seem to share.

“The good ones, everyone’s in there with the same goal. You don’t have a lot of ‘I’ guys,” said Floro, a regular postseason participant with the Dodgers before joining the Marlins in 2021. “At the end of the day, when your name is called, you’ve got to get the out, get out of the jam, whatever situation you’re put in. You’re not worried about which guy it is. Everybody’s got the same goal: To be on the winning side at the end of the ninth inning.”

Martinez’s reliance on Finnegan the last two years has been obvious to anyone paying attention. The manager has felt compelled to ask for more than three outs from his closer countless times, and though Finnegan often delivered, the wear-and-tear seemed clear by season’s end. His career ERA in July is 1.53. His career ERA in August is 1.70. His career ERA in September is 6.12.

“I know I haven’t performed very well at the end of the year, but I felt fine,” the 32-year-old insisted. “My stuff was still good. I wasn’t going out there when I thought I shouldn’t have been, physically. Just for whatever reason I pitch good in the summer, usually, I pitch bad in September. I don’t think it’s (a fatigue issue). I think it’s coincidental.”

Time will tell, of course, but the Nationals would love nothing more than to enter this September with a fresher-than-usual Finnegan, thanks to the consistent presence of Harvey, Rainey and Floro.

Maybe it won’t work in the end, either because somebody gets hurt or somebody else can’t get outs. But for the first time in a long time, this team likes the fact it will enter a season with legitimate bullpen depth.

“We tried to get some guys so if Finnegan needs a day off, Harvey can close, or vice versa,” Martinez said. “Floro has closed before. If Rainey is pounding the strike zone and is healthy, he’s another guy who can pitch the back end of the bullpen. Definitely, we were trying to get guys who can pitch in high-leverage situations, and get guys out in big moments.”