five whiffs<\/a> on the slider and threw it just as much as his fastball. Despite added velocity, Cornelio seems to be moving away from his fastball, a common trend in Nats camp.<\/p>\nLike Lord, Cornelio can pitch in multiple different roles, but I think he would be best suited to the bullpen. His fastball tends to lose steam as the game goes on and he is mostly a fastball-slider guy. That feels like a bullpen arm to me, but he can also start. Cornelio has proven to be durable in the minors, so he can serve as an innings eating starter.<\/p>\n
If the Nats wanted to be creative, Lord and Cornelio could be a tandem. Both are at their best in two to three innings spurts. Maybe they could piggy back each other and each go three or four innings. Instead of having one person take up a rotation spot, it could be a duo.<\/p>\n
Cornelio still has to keep up the strong performances if he wants to make the team. There are guys ahead of him in the pecking order, so he will have to out-perform them. He also was not totally perfect last night. Cornelio made a fielding error, which probably frustrated manager Blake Butera. So far this spring, Nats pitchers have been shaky defensively.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, Blake Butera is probably going to amp up the PFP work. The Nats already have defensive question marks, so they need their pitchers to be able to field their position. That is a secondary concern though.<\/p>\n
Overall, it is great to see an arm really impress early in camp. In this new regime, there are going to be some unexpected pitchers who find lightning in a bottle. We are already seeing a new pitching philosophy from the Nats. The team is dialing back fastball usage in a big way.<\/p>\n
Even with the team moving away from fastballs, velocity remains important. It is still very helpful. Fastballs are not the only pitch that benefits from extra velocity. Adding velocity to breaking balls also helps improve those pitches. Riley Cornelio has added velocity, and that added heat could win him a roster spot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year the Washington Nationals had one pitcher who was the story of camp, and that was Brad…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592376,"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-592375","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\/116132123431892706","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592375","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=592375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}