If this article is your first time hearing of Julian Fern\u00e1ndez, I can\u2019t blame you. The 30-year-old right-handed reliever was acquired in August off waivers from the Dodgers, and in 12.2 innings pitched with the Rochester Red Wings, he posted a 7.82 ERA and 5.47 FIP. He made his Nationals debut at the end of September in 2025, posting a 3.00 ERA and 5.80 FIP in 3 outings.<\/p>\n
On the surface, Fern\u00e1ndez\u2019s Triple-A and major league numbers don\u2019t suggest he is due for a major breakout in 2026. And yet, Fangraphs projects Fern\u00e1ndez not only to be better in 2026, but to be one of the better rookie relievers in all of baseball, with Steamer projecting him to post a 3.72 ERA and 16 K-BB% in 59 innings.<\/p>\n
Some other projection metrics, such as ZiPS and THE BAT, aren\u2019t quite as high on Fern\u00e1ndez, projecting him for an ERA in the low 4s, but the sentiment remains: Julian Fern\u00e1ndez will be better in 2026 than his past performance dictates.<\/p>\n
So what exactly does Fern\u00e1ndez do so well that has the projection systems so high on him? It starts with the swing and miss stuff, as he struck out over 11 batters per 9 innings in 54 innings at Triple A in 2025. Fern\u00e1ndez has a very intriguing pitch arsenal, throwing only 2 pitches: a fastball about 60% of the time and a changeup about 40% of the time.<\/p>\n
The fastball is loud, sitting 97 MPH with the pitch in 2025, but gets hit around quite a bit, with a 46% hard hit rate in Triple A. The changeup, on the other hand, is lethal, with a 43% whiff rate and .162 opponents\u2019 expected batting average on the pitch in Triple A.<\/p>\n
Fern\u00e1ndez also does an excellent job of limiting free passes, with a 77th percentile walk rate in Triple-A in 2025. Not many pitchers are able to combine strikeout stuff with strike-throwing ability like Fern\u00e1ndez, and that\u2019s why he ranked 10th in K-BB% among all Triple-A pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched.<\/p>\n
The key culprit to Fern\u00e1ndez\u2019s struggles in 2025 was his unbelievably high home run numbers. In his 54 Triple-A innings in 2025, Fern\u00e1ndez had a home run to fly ball ratio of 14.5%, including an unreal 30.8% HR\/FB ratio as a National.<\/p>\n
For reference, the average HR\/FB is generally around 10.5% league wide, far below where Fern\u00e1ndez was last season. While some of that was his tendency to give up loud contact, with a 23rd percentile barrel rate in 2025, he\u2019s bound to see some positive regression in the home run department in 2026, which will lead to better results overall.<\/p>\n
If I were Simon Mathews, the Nationals\u2019 new pitching coach for 2026, my main focus for developing Julian Fern\u00e1ndez into a plus big league reliever would be to start throwing his nasty changeup much more often, as well as looking to add a third pitch to his arsenal to keep hitters guessing.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s shown that he can miss bats with his stuff at Triple-A, and the addition of a new pitch, such as a sinker (which he did tinker with at the end of 2025, throwing it just 0.3% of the time overall) to help induce more groundballs could help him take him from an \u201cif\u201d to a sure thing in a currently shaky Nationals bullpen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If this article is your first time hearing of Julian Fern\u00e1ndez, I can\u2019t blame you. The 30-year-old right-handed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2398],"tags":[5,4,415,414,71,72893,4222],"class_list":{"0":"post-575774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-washington-nationals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-nationals","11":"tag-washington","12":"tag-washington-nationals","13":"tag-washington-nationals-analysis","14":"tag-washingtonnationals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116081186263782103","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}