Williams' rehab includes two-week shutdown from throwing

Trevor Williams will be shut down from throwing for two weeks after an MRI revealed a flexor muscle strain in the right-hander’s forearm. How much time the Nationals veteran starter will need to return after that remains an open question.

“There’s positive news from it: Everything structurally looks good. It’s just going to take some time,” Williams said this afternoon. “That’s the positive news. I wish it was just one start that I was skipping to be able to let my body recover. But unfortunately, it’s not that way.”

The Nats placed Williams on the 15-day injured list today, calling up left-hander DJ Herz from Triple-A Rochester to make his major league debut tonight against the Mets. The IL move is backdated to June 1, so Williams technically will be available to return as soon as June 16. But there doesn’t appear to be any reason to believe he’ll actually be ready that soon.

Williams said he felt fine during his last start Thursday in Atlanta, when he held the Braves to one run over 5 2/3 innings, throwing 95 pitches (his second-highest total of the season). But when he went to play catch the next day in Cleveland, he said his arm didn’t respond the way it usually does. And when the discomfort lingered through the weekend, the Nationals had him get an MRI to determine if there was an injury.

That MRI showed no issues with Williams’ elbow ligament or tendons, so the injury is purely muscular. Manager Davey Martinez called that diagnosis “best-case scenario.”

The terminology – flexor strain – of the injury is the same as the one Josiah Gray suffered in April, and club officials likewise breathed a sigh of relief that was not a more severe issue. Nearly two months later, Gray is finally ready to begin a minor league rehab assignment after he threw 65 pitches in a three-inning simulated game this afternoon.

Asked if it’s appropriate to put these two flexor injuries in the same category, both Williams and Martinez cautioned against making the comparison.

“I don’t know what he felt. He doesn’t know what I feel,” Williams said. “I think everyone’s different with different elbow injuries.”

“We’ll see after the two weeks,” Martinez said. “I think for the most part, we lucked out.”

This is the first arm injury for Williams during a career that began in 2016 with the Pirates and includes 916 1/3 innings pitched for four franchises.

“I’ve gone up until this point, thankfully, with no shoulder injuries or elbow injuries my entire career,” he said. “For me, I’m very lucky in that sense. It took almost 1,000 innings in the big leagues for it to finally hurt.”

Williams had been enjoying by far his best sustained stretch since joining the Nationals last year, arguably one of the best stretches of his career. After a miserable 2023 season in which he went 6-10 with a 5.55 ERA and a league-high 34 homers surrendered, he was 5-0 with a 2.22 ERA and only two homers allowed through 11 starts.

That performance has helped bolster a complete turnaround of the Nats rotation. The group enters tonight’s game with a collective 4.03 ERA, 1.30 WHIP and 0.9 homers allowed per nine innings one season after ranking near the bottom of the league with a 5.02 ERA, 1.50 WHIP and 1.6 homers per nine innings.

“It’s frustrating that I’m not going to be able to help this team for the next few weeks,” Williams said. “The guys in the rotation were on a roll. And when you’re on a roll with a rotation, the games fly by, the days fly by, the summer flies by. The best times I’ve had in baseball during my career is when those summers fly by, and you look up and it’s September and you’re fighting for a playoff spot. I was looking forward to doing that with these guys.”

Williams’ absence also could throw a wrench into the Nationals’ plans later this summer. Making $7 million this year and set to become a free agent in the fall, Williams is a prime candidate to be traded before the July 30 deadline. If his rehab process takes a while, though, teams may be reluctant to pursue him or make the same kind of offers they would when he was excelling to this point.