ATLANTA | A day after announcing that promising right-hander Jordan Zimmermann will miss the rest of this season and most of next season while rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, the Washington Nationals went back to work trying to figure out what that will mean for their pitching staff the rest of the year.
Interim manager Jim Riggleman said he talked with Zimmermann in the past few days, trying to reassure the 23-year-old that the surgery won’t compromise his future.
“He’s very upset,” Riggleman said. “We’re just encouraging him that this is something so many pitchers go through now. The upside is the doctors have perfected these operations to the point that most guys come back as good, if not better, than ever. We feel like he’s young and that’ll be the path that he takes.”
The larger question for the Nationals the rest of the season is what Zimmermann’s absence will mean for the rotation. They had called up three starters since the All-Star break - Garrett Mock, J.D. Martin and Collin Balester - and two were promoted from Class AAA Syracuse because of injuries to Zimmermann and Scott Olsen.
None has been particularly effective; Balester’s ERA is the best of the bunch at 5.21. But it appears all three are fairly safe in the rotation at this point.
Had the Nationals’ starting rotation stayed intact, all three pitchers probably would have been called up at the end of the year once Washington’s original starters hit preset innings limits for the year. Now these starters might give way to other replacements.
“The thing that will affect it is the number of innings we were going to let them go anyway,” Riggleman said. “Whatever they had last year, we were only going to let them exceed that by so much. … They were going to get the ball every fifth day regardless.”
Riggleman also said that the Nationals’ eight-man bullpen alignment, which began when they called up Saul Rivera from Syracuse on Aug. 5, probably will be short-lived.
Washington needed an extra reliever to finish a 25-day stretch with 25 games but was helped by a pair of strong starts over the weekend from Mock and Martin. That probably will mean calling for an extra position player sometime this week.
“It wasn’t that long ago that pitching staffs were 10-man pitching staffs, and it went to 11,” Riggleman said. “Almost everybody goes with 12 now, and here as of late we’ve had 13. You really shouldn’t have to carry 13 pitchers, so hopefully we’ll be able to get away from that.”
Minor leaguer suspended
Major League Baseball suspended Nationals minor leaguer Stephen Englund, an outfielder for the team’s rookie affiliate in the Gulf Coast League, for 50 games Tuesday for using amphetamines. The suspension comes just five days after two Class AA Harrisburg players - shortstop Edgardo Baez and outfielder Ofilio Castro - were suspended 50 games for the same offense.
Pair of promotions
The Nationals promoted a pair of minor leaguers Tuesday, moving starting pitcher Clint Everts from Harrisburg to Class AAA Syracuse and reliever Drew Storen from Class A Potomac to Harrisburg.
Everts, the organization’s first-round pick in 2002, had never pitched above Class A ball before this year. But he had a 1.53 ERA at Harrisburg after posting a 0.90 mark at Potomac.
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