The Nationals announced Wednesday that right-hander Joan Adon passed through waivers unclaimed after he was designated for assignment last week. He’ll remain with the organization and has been assigned outright to Triple-A Rochester. Washington designated Adon to clear roster space for free agent signee Amed Rosario.
The 26-year-old Adon has logged big league time with the Nats in each of the past four seasons. He’s totaled 132 1/3 innings but sports a 6.66 earned run average in that time. He’s fanned 19% of his opponents, issued walks at an 11.3% clip and kept the ball on the ground at a 45.3% rate. Both those strikeout and walk rates are worse than league-average, but Adon’s grounder rate is a few percentage points above par and he averages about 95 mph on his heater.
Adon has been durable in the upper minors, typically working as a starter, but he’s also gotten some bullpen work in recent seasons as his big league results have been lackluster. Given that he sits nearly 95 mph as a starter when he’s facing lineups multiple times, it’s fair to wonder how high that velocity might trend upward if he were to move to short relief stints.
Adon was out of minor league options, so the Nationals would’ve had to either break camp with him on the Opening Day roster or jettison him from the 40-man by way of trade or DFA at some point during spring training. Now that he’s cleared waivers, he’ll head to big league camp this spring as a non-roster invitee. If he doesn’t pitch his way back into the big league plans, he’ll start the year in Rochester and bide his time while waiting for another opportunity.
Washington’s rotation mix is deeper after signing Michael Soroka and re-signing Trevor Williams. That pair will join MacKenzie Gore, Mitchell Parker, Jake Irvin and DJ Herz — all four of whom delivered some encouraging performances in 2024 (albeit with some late fades as that group surpassed previous career-high workloads). With that group of six starters in the fold and top prospect Cade Cavalli hoping for a healthy 2025 campaign, Adon has been pushed a ways down the depth chart. A full-time look in the ’pen could be interesting, but it’s not yet clear how the Nats will utilize him moving forward.
This guy NEEDS to have “I Love Rock N’ Roll” as his entrance song!!
It’s not pronounced “Jone” (it’s a common Spanish — Catalonian actually — male first name, pronounced more or less joe-on and being equivalent to John). But yeah, that would be fun.
The Nats had a player in their minors system named Joan Baez. I always hoped he’d make it up to see the name on the scoreboard.
The ERA of the beast
His ERA was 6.66.
666 the number of the beast
Hell and fire was spawned to be released
Acoss – Rafaela’s OPS his 2023 first year is .666 and he finished 2024 one hit (or walk) shy of another .666 OPS season.
How about that!
Oh man, he needs that to be his walk up song lol
However his sister Mike is still unsigned.
Remember young P coming up in Jay’s system, name was Isabel Giron. Thought it odd but I guessed they have dudes named Isabel down there. Comes out cpl yrs later that he used his younger sister’s birth certificate to shave few yrs off to help his prospect status. Pretty flagrant. I know they pronounce “J” differently but it’s 1st thought that came to mind seeing young spanish P named Joan.
“Adon has been durable in the upper minors…”
—The food’s terrible, but at least the portions are large.
Adon has to be the worst pitcher who saw 100+ innings in MLB in this decade. Homer-prone, hit suppression is terrible, always over 10/9, walks almost 5 per 9, doesn’t miss bats….
23 innings above A-ball when the Nats decided to let him go 1 and 12 for the MLB squad. How bad was pitching coach Jim Hickey to not be able to do better that year than Corbin, Fedde, Josiah Gray, Aaron Sanchez, and Adon? And WTH is Hickey still there??
I remember he was on pace to lose 20 that year. Patrick corbin was the same. He had 19 losses in 22. He had 2 more starts then came down with a timely back injury. Like I believe that.
Tones for Joan’s Bones.