Washington Nationals reliever Jorge López was tossed from a game Wednesday night. He came on in relief in the seventh inning and—in the fashion preferred by members of this insanely terrible bullpen—immediately immolated his own team’s chances of winning what had been a one-run game. First he allowed two singles and an RBI groundout; with two outs, he threw a first-pitch sinker up and in and plunked Bryan Reynolds. Three pitches later, López fired a fastball at the ear of Andrew McCutchen, which McCutchen avoided only by throwing himself onto the ground. While the umpires conferenced, López and McCutchen began to shout at each other, and soon the benches emptied.
Home plate umpire Ron Kulpa signaled that López had been ejected from the game. Nationals manager Davey Martinez naturally says the umpires went overboard. “I don’t necessarily think it was warranted, but the umpires saw it differently,” said Martinez, suggesting perhaps that Kulpa saw malicious intent in López’s chin music. López disagreed enough with this characterization that he bolted from the dugout to shout some more, this time at Kulpa, and had to be restrained by bench coach Miguel Cairo.
There’s reason to believe López was targeting Reynolds and McCutchen. All it takes is a willingness to accept that a given professional baseball player is a hyper-competitive grudge-holding maniac, an easy leap to make when by baseball tradition it is sometimes the expressed duty of relievers to act as grudge-settling head-hunters. For one thing, Paul DeJong, López’s teammate, was injured Tuesday when a fastball thrown by Pirates starter Mitch Keller smacked him in the face. This is the kind of thing that baseball has long settled at this level with retaliatory beaning, even when the incident is caused by an obvious accident, as it was with Keller’s heater. It’s easy enough to believe that López was going vigilante mode when he threw inside on Reynolds, even if the circumstances—a 1–0 score in the seventh inning—extremely did not call for it.
But López also has history with Reynolds and McCutchen. Back in September, López, then with the Cubs, was brought on for the eighth inning of a three-run game in relief of Jameson Taillon, who’d shut down the Pirates over seven strong innings. Then as now, López immediately gave up a pair of singles. He then grooved a 1–1 fastball to Reynolds, who tied the game with a huge dinger to center. Two batters later, McCutchen smoked another 1–1 pitch over the wall in left-center to put the Pirates ahead, and López went on to take the blown save and the loss. That was López’s last appearance against the Pirates. It would be weird and ill-advised and possibly fireable for a relief pitcher to bean two opposing batters late in a one-run game in pursuit of a grudge traced to an entirely different season, when he was playing for a different team, and that was formed when the targeted players defeated him entirely within the rules of the sport. This being baseball, you can never rule it out. The league office announced Thursday that it has suspended López three games for throwing at McCutchen; hats off to Bob Nightengale for referring to the Pirates veteran as “Lawrence McCutchen.”
It’s perhaps more possible to accept the head-hunting explanation due to López’s recent history of being a weirdo. In May of 2024, López was pitching for the New York Mets when he was ejected for griping at third base umpire Ramon De Jesus about a ruling on a checked swing. López chucked his glove over the netting and into the crowd, struck a defiant tone in postgame interviews, and briefly seemed to have described the Mets as “the worst team in probably the whole fucking MLB,” before clarifying that in fact he was only referring to himself as “the worst teammate.” López is aware that sometimes his emotions run away on him. “Just something out of emotions,” Lopez said that night in May, of his blowup with De Jesus. “I just don’t give a fuck, anything.” That night, the Mets held a players-only meeting; later that night, the team designated López for assignment. He joined the Cubs a couple weeks later on a minor league contract.
An umpire shouldn’t necessarily have to detect a homicidal impulse in order to deem a pitcher unfit to throw baseballs at people. López also just stinks real bad right now. “I apologize for everything,” said López after the game Wednesday, explaining that he’s been shifting around on the rubber lately and adjusting his plan of attack in order to improve on the woeful 6.43 earned run average he brought into the game against the Pirates. “I didn’t make any purpose pitch right there. I’ve been trying to find my way with my delivery, been trying to find my way through the whole season. It’s really miserable to have that happen. I regret what just happened.”
It would not be weird at all this season for a Nationals reliever to be so bad at throwing a baseball—so honestly, earnestly inept and incompetent—that an umpire has to protect the opposition by way of removing him from a game. Nationals relievers have a combined earned run average of—get this—7.21, the worst in baseball, and more than a full run lousier than the second-lousiest outfit. Their combined WHIP is a hysterical 1.89. They’ve pitched the fourth-fewest innings of any bullpen in baseball, but somehow have allowed the fourth-most hits and have issued the fourth-most walks. They stink so bad! It’s already a crisis, and the calendar is insisting to me that it is not even May yet.
After a couple of seasons in tanking hell, this was supposed to be the season when the Nationals got serious about competing again. Whatever noise the team’s leadership made about wanting to win games quickly turned out largely to be a crock: The team spent $44 million in free agency, which maybe sounds substantial until you realize that it is approximately half what was spent by the Transient Athletics, and is less than five percent of what was spent by the New York Mets. Washington gave out only one deal worth eight figures in value, and only two that covered more than a single season. Their biggest bullpen commitment was to their own longtime closer, Kyle Finnegan, who they’d thrust into free agency after last season by declining to extend a qualifying offer, and then brought back for at least $2 million less than he would’ve earned in arbitration. López, like basically everyone else in their pen, was signed ahead of spring training on a relatively cheap one-year deal, not because the Nationals went out and got him, but because theirs was the least bad of a bunch of shitty offers from the four-fifths of MLB teams that refuse to spend real money for good players.
So maybe López threw at Reynolds and McCutchen in a startlingly bone-headed play for vengeance, or maybe he just stinks so bad that opposing hitters should start doubling up on headgear. Either explanation feels sufficient, which is sad enough to make a Nats fan cry. Maybe they do want a contender, but for now they are instead getting what they paid for.
