For the Nationals, unwanted history looked a lot like the slow and painful march to it. When the eighth inning began in San Diego on Tuesday night, they had a three-run lead. When it ended, they trailed by a run in an eventual 5-4 loss to the Padres. In between, they blew a save for the 38th time this season, an MLB record that speaks for itself, both loudly and plainly.
This bullpen has not been good at doing the basic job of a bullpen, which is to take leads at some point in the middle to late inning and ferry them into the win column. And this blown save, like many before it, was a team effort, starting when Jared Simpson, a 26-year-old lefty, walked the bases loaded with no outs. Those were the only three batters he faced. Behind him, Erik Tolman, a 27-year-old lefty, allowed a sacrifice fly, then a soft single up the middle — a hit that floated just past his glove — that brought in the two runs that tied the score.
That was No. 38, which felt all too predictable once Simpson couldn’t find the strike zone. How the Nats got here … well, you lived it. There was that eight-run lead that evaporated in San Francisco. There were those crushing games against the Phillies in June, back when the season still had juice. Then, fatefully, there was Tuesday night. The relievers for the 2024 White Sox, the team that lost the most games in modern history, are officially off the hook. Tolman, Clatyon Beeter, Mitchell Parker, Orlando Ribalta, Richard Lovelady, Tom Cosgrove, Brad Lord, Cole Henry, Yovanny Cruz, PJ Poulin, Gus Varland, Matt Krook, Ken Waldichuk, Riley Cornelio, Paxton Schultz and Max Kranick have the watch now.
That’s every reliever who’s blown a save for Washington this season. There are, of course, other ways to illustrate what this Nationals season has dissolved into. After the loss to the Padres on Tuesday, the Nats have dropped six in a row. They have also lost 20 of their last 22 road games. The blown saves, though, have become the billboard for everything wrong with the Nationals in 2026. I get it, too, given that it’s a stat that shows how often a glaring team weakness has directly contributed to losses.
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But the blown saves are not a 2-D story, no matter how simple it’s felt whenever the thin wall between dread and hope has collapsed. Case in point: Now that the Nationals have set the record, it will be tempting to refer to their bullpen as historically bad. But as it stands, their bullpen ERA — 5.09 through Tuesday— is a half run better than where it settled last season (5.59). The 2025 team, however, finished with just 20 blown saves, which was mostly because it had far fewer leads to protect. And this is where the emotional calculus of this year’s pen gets a third dimension, if not a fourth and fifth.
It was immediately clear that in the first year under Paul Toboni, the club’s new president of baseball operations, the bats were way, way ahead of the arms. The blown saves have been the most on-the-nose example of that. They’ve also shown how the Nats’ early, unexpected success has warped the experience of following a team that wasn’t initially penciled in for so many late leads.
In spite of trades and recent injuries to key hitters, the Nationals’ offense still ranks second in runs and homers, a contrast to the team’s record of 67-80. The bullpen, then, has been the heaviest counterweight while pitching the second-most relief innings in the league. Between personnel decisions, in-game strategy and player development, dissecting the team’s pitching process should be a major focus of the offseason, which is to say nothing of the need to spend more across the roster, not just on relievers, to compete more in 2027.
But in the moment, the blown saves feel, at least in part, like a wonky blip of an interrupted growth curve. It was as if the Nats were gifted a fancy grill — stick with me, that’s the offense — while living in an apartment with no outdoor space. (Ownership choosing to live in said apartment for another year is a story for a different day.)
None of that’s to say this Nats bullpen is misunderstood or something. It is perfectly understood as downright abysmal. And what’s that prescient George Orwell bit from 1984? The one that goes … “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” A bit heavy-handed for baseball, maybe, but the point is it’s just not what we’re doing here. That is someone else’s job.
But if the blown saves are to explain what ultimately felled the Nationals’ season, it feels useful — important, even — to point out how so many happened. The biggest reason is that the team’s relievers have struggled with two central goals of pitching: throwing strikes and limiting hard contact. A close second, though, is all those leads existing in the first place. Again, taken together, it’s another way to describe how the first four months of 2026 could shape the entire public perception of the Toboni-Blake Butera era (or at least the start of it). The team wasn’t built to win, then the offense raked enough to hang on the edge of the playoff race through mid-July. But because it wasn’t built to win, the Nats spent no money on the bullpen over the winter, which slowed the whole thing down until the wheels fell off.
If, as a fan, you knew a season was lost from the beginning — if that were somehow a guarantee — you might sign up for a lower bullpen ERA with a higher number of blown saves. The latter, you might figure, would be arbitrary in the grand scheme. But a lower ERA, even by half a run, would maybe portend better for future years, when your team finally spends on its roster again. (That’s just never a guarantee, either, which you know if you live in D.C.)
This summer, though, because of James Wood, CJ Abrams, Luis García Jr. and Curtis Mead, among others, rational and dispassionate started mixing with emotional and reactionary. That’s never not tricky for a fan base, especially when it comes ahead of schedule. If you live in D.C., you also know that to be true now. Because on one hand, many of the rotating bullpen arms, guys like Krook, Kranick and Cosgrove, were always more likely to be trivia answers than actual solutions. This was by design, too, at least in the sense that the front office didn’t expect to have one of the league’s best offenses. But once that offense kept mashing, the blown saves were the worst possible outcome, no matter if another form of torture would have painted an even bleaker statistical picture.
The real question, then, has little to do with blown saves or ERA or (fill in your advanced pitching analytic of choice). It’s whether a problem born of unforeseen expectations is better or worse than having no immediate problems at all.
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