Nats will win again when rotation is ready to lead the way again

It had been the one constant around these parts for the better part of the decade. When you thought of the Nationals, you thought first and foremost of one thing: a dominant rotation.

Max Scherzer. Stephen Strasburg. Patrick Corbin. Jordan Zimmermann. Doug Fister. Gio González. Aníbal Sánchez. Those are the starters who defined the Nats' consistent pitching success over a prolonged stretch of winning baseball.

And the correlation was legitimate. Take the Nationals rotation's six best seasons by ERA, and you find each of the five seasons they reached the playoffs (2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019), plus one more season when they finished four games short (2013).

Every time the Nats rotation has owned an ERA under 3.80, the team has finished with a winning record. Only once has it still finished above .500 with an ERA higher than that (2018, when the rotation ERA was 4.03 and the team finished 82-80).

So it should be no surprise at all why this year's team struggled to stay in contention for four months, prompting the front office to sell away eight veterans and begin a painful rebuild. There's more than reason for the Nationals' failure in 2021, but a subpar rotation is reason No. 1.

Only Scherzer produced the kind of season that was expected of a member of the original rotation, and now he's doing it for the Dodgers. Strasburg barely pitched and now is out until 2022 following thoracic surgery. Corbin has been healthy but owns the highest ERA (6.04) of any qualified starter in the majors. Jon Lester was a bust. Joe Ross and Erick Fedde were too erratic, and now Ross has a potentially serious elbow injury.

When the Nationals become a winning ballclub again, they almost certainly will do with a top-notch rotation. Which means the onus now is on the organization's top young pitching prospects to live up to their lofty billing.

We've already seen Josiah Gray turn heads in his first three starts for the Nats following his acquisition from the Dodgers. The 23-year-old has a 2.81 ERA, 1.063 WHIP and 18 strikeouts in 16 innings so far, and has looked poised beyond his years. Gray, whose next start is scheduled for Wednesday against the Blue Jays, is going to be a critical part of the team's rebuilding efforts.

Cade Cavalli, meanwhile, continues to put up some eye-popping numbers in the minors. The club's 2020 first-round pick has made 16 total starts for Single-A Wilmington and Double-A Harrisburg and has produced a 2.33 ERA, 1.101 WHIP and 139 strikeouts in only 89 innings.

Cavalli, though, is far from a finished project. Most notably, his walk rate (five per nine innings) is exceptionally high in nine starts since getting promoted to Double-A. And club officials are going to want to see more refinement from the 23-year-old before moving him farther up the organizational ladder.

But there's every reason to believe Cavalli will be pitching in D.C. in 2022, whether right away on opening day or a few weeks or a few months in if he Nationals decide to give him more time and manipulate his service clock. He and Gray will be asked to lead the way, because at the moment the franchise can't count on anyone else to be able to do that.

Could Strasburg return to full health next spring and recapture his elite form? Sure, but there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that happens.

Could Corbin rediscover what made him so effective in 2019 but has eluded him the last two seasons? Sure, but we need to see some actual evidence of him doing that before believing it will happen.

Ross is now a huge question mark, pending his trip to Texas, where the orthopedist who performed Tommy John surgery on him in 2017 will decide if he needs the procedure again. And Fedde needs a really strong finish to this season to prove he deserves a spot in the rotation entering next season.

Which means the Nationals may be in a position this winter where they need to acquire another starter to help fill out the 2022 rotation. Not a frontline guy, not someone who costs big bucks, but a reliable major league arm who can be counted on to make 30 starts and take some pressure and workload off the others.

Then all they can do is sit back, wait and hope Cavalli and Gray and whoever else emerges from their revamped system grow into the franchise's next dominant rotation.