Three First Times

Three men played their first major league game Tuesday night at Nationals Park. Two of them beat the Braves.

Yohandy Morales homered in his, a solo shot off AJ Smith-Shawver in the third that was not even the most damaging thing Washington had done by then. Jared Simpson threw three hitless innings in relief and got the win in his. Blake Burkhalter, whom Atlanta added Tuesday when September rosters expanded to twenty-eight, pitched the sixth and gave up a run in his.

Washington won 9-5. The Associated Press led its account with the two Nationals debuts, which also explains the arithmetic in the box score: Morales at .600 and Simpson at 0.00 are one-game numbers wearing a season's clothes.

The fourth young arm in the game had been here before, though not by much.

AJ Smith-Shawver is twenty-three. He had Tommy John surgery in June of 2025, and when he took a major league mound again on July 29 of this year, it had been four hundred and twenty-six days. Tuesday was his fourth appearance of the season. Washington scored four in the second on two-run hits by CJ Abrams and Brady House, added Morales in the third, and he left after four innings with five earned runs, three walks and eighty-six pitches on him. His ERA is 7.13.

Six days ago, in this space, I wrote that his ERA was "not a large-sample disguise but a small-sample costume," that there was "barely enough pitcher underneath the number to evaluate," and that if you have ever tried to draw a trend line through two points, you understand the limitation.

There are four points now. The line has not moved.

The tempting move is to call Tuesday the night the number became true. But a person who wrote that sentence six days ago does not get to declare the sample settled the first time it breaks his way. Four outings is four outings. The honest version is narrower: the thing I said could not yet be evaluated still cannot be, and it has now declined to improve twice more. I also noted that the small sample cut both ways. Tuesday it cut one way.

It is worth being precise about why he is out there, because the easy explanation is wrong. Smith-Shawver is not a patch over the rotation that came apart last week. Atlanta recalled him from Gwinnett on August 18 and went to a temporary six-man rotation to make room. He is an addition, not a repair.

What Walt Weiss said that day reads differently now. "You've got to pay the piper in the 'pen, right? Because you're a man short there, and that's just not sustainable for very long."

Tuesday the starter gave them four innings, and the bullpen covered the other four.

The rest is noise, and should be labeled as such. Atlanta scored three in the eighth on a wild pitch and a Michael Harris II home run to left center. It was the best inning the Braves played, and it moved their win expectancy from roughly half of one percent to 2.8.

And then there is Ha-Seong Kim, who went 3-for-3.

That is not a typo, and it is not a breakout. Kim is hitting .112. He has ten hits this season in eighty-nine at-bats, which makes Tuesday night thirty percent of them, and no extra-base hits at all — not one, in ninety-nine plate appearances. He singled to center in the third, to left in the fifth, to left in the eighth. Twice, Drake Baldwin followed him up and hit a ground ball that erased him at second base. He reached three times and never scored.

In August I described his .066 as a medical condition wearing a baseball uniform rather than a slump, and the record has since filled in the diagnosis: a torn ligament in his right middle finger, suffered slipping on ice about a month after he signed, six weeks of the season gone before he played a game, then back on the injured list in July with inflammation in the same hand. Last winter he turned down four years and forty-eight million dollars from the Athletics to take one year and twenty million from Atlanta and bet on himself. His walk-off single against the Dodgers on August 27 was his first hit since June.

Three singles was the best night he has had all year. It produced nothing whatsoever.

Atlanta is 82-57. The lead in the National League East was three and a half games when the final out was recorded, with Philadelphia still playing in Arizona, which means the number in Wednesday morning's standings may be smaller than the number in this sentence.

Twenty-three games remain. Seven are against the Phillies — four at Citizens Bank Park starting Friday, three at Truist Park the following weekend — and there are no others anywhere on the schedule. Whatever the division turns out to be, it gets decided by September 13.

None of what happened Tuesday settles any of it. Friday, in Philadelphia, something starts to.