With two positive steps forward, Doolittle can smile again

If you're looking for silver linings from Nationals losses - and lord knows that's fast becoming a nightly pursuit - Sean Doolittle is your man.

The left-hander's return from a two-week stint in Fredericksburg to rehab his knee and get his mechanics back in order has gotten off to an especially encouraging start.

Sunday's relief appearance in Boston - four batters faced, two outs recorded, two weakly hit singles allowed - was a nice step in the right direction. Monday's 1-2-3 bottom of the eighth in Philadelphia was a significant leap forward.

"Today was awesome," manager Davey Martinez said in his postgame Zoom session with reporters. "I'm proud of him. He's been fighting to get back and help us. And today I was real happy to see him. He had a smile on his face when he came off the field, and he looked good. He's going to be OK."

Doolittle will need to keep pitching like this over time before anyone can definitively say he's going to be OK, but neither should his back-to-back performances be overlooked. Not just for the results, but for the process by which he earned the results.

Sunday's outing at Fenway Park featured four weakly hit balls, two of them falling in for hits. Monday's outing at Citizens Bank Park featured swings and misses on well-located pitches.

His fastball velocity down to 90-91 mph from the mid-90s he used to be able to count on every single night, Doolittle showed Monday how he can still enjoy success. Though he went up in the zone at times, he was most effective when he located his fastball down and on the corner of the plate. That's how he struck out both Didi Gregorius and Jay Bruce, his first strikeouts since Aug. 8 and only his third and fourth strikeouts in seven appearances this season.

"That's something that we've talked about, and he's getting it," Martinez said. "He still has a lot of carry on his fastball. Even though the velo's not there, the spin rate is still pretty good. If he can dot the outside corner like that to lefties ... he can be effective. And he can still go up with two strikes when he wants to."

Doolittle also broke out his rarely used slider three times, getting one whiff and one foul ball off it.

Consider this the first positive evidence of a former All-Star reliever now trying to reinvent himself after a horrendous start to his season.

"There were some dark times, man. I'm not going to lie," Doolittle said after Sunday's game. "I was searching. I didn't have a lot of answers. I had a lot of ideas of things that I was trying to fix, ideas about adjustments I needed to make. But then my body wasn't cooperating, and certainly not on the time that I wanted it to.

"A lot of doubt starts to creep in, and stuff that has been second nature for my whole career - eight, nine years - all of a sudden are things I have to think about for the first time in a long time."

Doolittle still has a ways to go before he's entrusted to pitch in high-leverage situations late in games. But as he walked off the mound Monday night with a smile on his face and glove-tap from catcher Yan Gomes following his best inning of the year, baseball felt normal again to the veteran lefty.

"There's a tendency to try to do more, to over-correct, to overemphasize certain things when all you want to do is to just get back to being you," Doolittle said. "It took a long time to kind of sift through that and realize that the biggest thing to do is just to simplify things. I was trying to do so many things and trying to make so many adjustments and trying to throw so hard that going back to simplifying it, really I think over the last week and a half or so, things have really started to fall back into place."