We're almost two weeks into 2025 MLB Spring Training, and that means we can finally start getting new data on what the future of the Washington Nationals is looking like. The Nationals are in the bottom 10 of games this Spring with Statcast data, but we'll take what we can get.
Let's start with Jarlin Susana, the big 6'6" right-hander acquired from the Padres in the Juan Soto trade. The return for that trade looks better by the day, as Susana recorded all of the three fastest pitches in Spring action on Saturday, topping out at 102.0 MPH. The 20-year-old gets filthier by the day, and despite not having played a game in the upper minors, his path to the Major Leagues doesn't feel so far away.
Someone else who looked good was Michael Soroka. I wrote about Soroka in December and detailed why I think he could be a diamond in the rough for the Nationals, and as Thomas Nestico's model details, he looked real good in his first spring start where he faced the minimum over three innings of work. The velocity has climbed, and none of his four offerings were particularly weak. He picked up three strikeouts for his trouble.
Robert Hassell III is someone I covered ad nauseam in November, but he's back with a vengeance and looking to climb back into the outfield mix for this team. Hassell has hit the living hell out of the baseball through his first six games, picking up 8 hits in 17 plate appearances with a .604 wOBA. Obviously, it's too small a sample size to really be gathering surface level information from, but we can look under the hood and see an increase in flyball rate as opposed to groundball rate from his historical trends thus far. Just 46.2% of his batted balls have been on the ground; he hasn't managed a rate below half since 2021 with the Padres organization.
Andrés Chaparro wants to stay in the big leagues. He's gone right back to slugging, and with ten batted balls in Statcast games so far he's averaging exit velocities of over 101 MPH, the highest on the team. Jacob Young's got 7 batted balls so far in Statcast games and has connected with the sweet spot of the bat on all seven. He hit a ground ball off Miles Mikolas 104.3 MPH on Saturday. The highest exit velocity on the team has actually been Andrew Pinckney, the 2023 fourth-rounder out of Alabama, who smashed a sixth-inning single 113.1 MPH off the Marlins' Justin King on Tuesday the 25th. To keep up with more of this data, the aforementioned Thomas Nestico put out a free and extremely useful tool on Friday to sort through the Spring Statcast batting data we've been given that's difficult to comb through on Baseball Savant! You can check it out HERE.
Someone that's interested me this spring is Alex Call. Call is on the fence to make the Opening Day roster, and the odds of him starting basically hinge on the entire rest of the outfield getting their legs snapped in two. Call's always been an interesting guy: he walks a lot, doesn't strike out much, but there's not a lot going on with that bat when the ball gets put in play which gives him a pretty low ceiling. It's been a strange start to the spring for Call, though: through 10 plate appearances, he has seen 36 pitches--just 13 of them strikes. That's nearly two thirds of all pitches he's seen taken for balls, and it's resulted in him walking in five of those ten PAs. What that actually means for him, if anything, is nebulous, but it's a fascinating look. Again, long shot to really see the majors much this year--he's got two option years left--but someone to keep an eye on.
The last person I want to go into detail on is Cole Henry. Henry told Andrew Golden in the middle of last month that he's focusing on a transition to a relief role after dealing with injuries out of the rotation at Double-A Harrisburg. He's performed excellently in his first two appearances, striking out seven and not allowing a walk yet. Henry won't make the Opening Day roster, seeing as he hasn't pitched at Rochester since '22, but if he can stay healthy and keep throwing like he is, he'll prove why he was worth the $2 million the Nationals signed him for in the second round in 2020.