Nationals Recall Abimelec Ortiz For MLB Debut, Designate Matt Krook
The Nationals announced that they have recalled first baseman Abimelec Ortiz from Triple-A Rochester. Ortiz will be making his major league debut when he gets into a game. Left-hander Matt Krook was designated for assignment to make space on the active roster. With Krook’s designation, the team has an open spot on their 40-man roster.
Ortiz was acquired along with four other prospects when the Nationals dealt MacKenzie Gore to the Rangers in January. MLB.com counts Ortiz as one of Milwaukee’s Top 30 prospects, and he’s earned that reputation with his production at Triple-A this year. In 304 plate appearances there, he’s hit 16 home runs while striking out less than 20% of the time and walking at an above-average 10.2% clip. All told, Ortiz’s line of .235/.332/.481 amounts to a 107 wRC+ despite a .243 average on balls in play, so he’s proven himself well against Triple-A pitching.
Ortiz has played 46 games at first base this year and another 26 as a DH. He’s also played 441 innings in right field dating back to 2024. Ortiz is currently blocked at first base by Luis García Jr., whose 135 wRC+ makes him one of the Nationals’ best hitters this year. Right field and DH are the clearer paths to playing time at the moment. Apart from his usual right field, James Wood has served as the DH in 19 games this year. Ortiz could theoretically cover for Wood in the field if the latter needs a half-day off, or slot in as the DH himself when Wood plays the field.
It’s also possible that Ortiz, who hits left-handed, could form a platoon with the righty-hitting Dylan Crews. In 185 plate appearances this year, Crews has just a 73 wRC+. That includes a 35 wRC+ in 126 PA against right-handers compared to a 156 wRC+ in 59 PA against southpaws. The long-term arrangement will need to be sorted out after the All-Star break. With Ortiz’s promotion, the Nationals have 14 position players and 12 pitchers on the active roster. They’ll need to option a position player in order to carry eight relievers in their bullpen. If they want to give Ortiz an extended look, Crews can be optioned down to Triple-A.
Krook was claimed off waivers from the Athletics on July 4th. He appeared in three games out of the Nationals’ bullpen, allowing two earned runs in 2 2/3 innings. Adding in his previous work with the Athletics, Krook has a 12.79 ERA in just 6 1/3 big league innings this year. Since debuting in 2023, he’s thrown just 14 2/3 big league innings with poor results. He’s been serviceable at Triple-A this year, posting a 3.72 ERA with an above-average 30.9% strikeout rate in 29 innings for the Athletics’ top affiliate.
Krook has been designated and outrighted in the past, so he has the right to reject an outright assignment in favor of free agency if he clears waivers. It’s also possible that he’ll get claimed by a club looking for no-cost bullpen depth, as was the case when the Nationals took him from the Athletics.
Photo courtesy of Jim Rassol, Imagn Images
Nationals Notes: Herz, Alvarez, Henry, Ortiz
Nationals lefty DJ Herz tossed two scoreless innings in the Florida Complex League on Friday. It’s the southpaw’s first game action in almost two years, as Herz underwent Tommy John surgery at the beginning of the 2025 season.
It’s the start of what’ll likely be more than a month-long buildup. Acquired from the Cubs as a prospect in the 2023 Jeimer Candelario deadline trade, Herz started 19 games for the Nats a year later. He posted a solid 4.16 ERA while striking out nearly 28% of batters faced as a rookie. He was the top swing-and-miss arm in the rotation that year.
Washington starters are middle of the pack in strikeout rate this season. They’re nevertheless in the bottom third of MLB with a 4.59 earned run average, largely thanks to one of the sport’s highest home run rates. The rotation has been better of late, albeit with the aid of a heavy usage of openers.
Their actual rotation has been fairly settled all season, however. Cade Cavalli, Foster Griffin, Jake Irvin, Miles Mikolas and Zack Littell have gone every fifth day as either a starter or bulk arm behind an opener for most of the season. The Nats lost Irvin to a shoulder strain in late May, necessitating their first real change of the year.
Lefty Andrew Alvarez appears to have that job for the time being. The 26-year-old made his first start of the season on Wednesday, working 4 2/3 innings of one-run ball against the Marlins. He’s slated to start the second game of their ongoing series in San Francisco tomorrow.
Alvarez was on and off the active roster twice early in the season. He has worked as a starter in Triple-A but had pitched long relief at the MLB level in 2026 until last week. Alvarez only sits in the low-90s, but he has recorded a 27% strikeout rate over 20 1/3 big league innings this year. He had some of the best swing-and-miss stuff in Triple-A as well, relying mostly on his slider and curveball to compensate for the mediocre fastball.
“Right now, we have our rotation set,” manager Blake Butera said over the weekend (link via Jessica Camerato of MLB.com). They are carrying Mitchell Parker and Brad Lord on the big league roster, but they’ve been full-time long relievers this season after holding rotation spots for a good chunk of 2025. Rookie righty Riley Cornelio is also in a multi-inning relief role despite working as a starter with Triple-A Rochester.
Cornelio just came back up over the weekend. Washington optioned righty reliever Cole Henry in a corresponding move. Henry goes back down for the first time since his MLB debut last April. The former second-rounder tossed 52 2/3 innings of 4.27 ERA ball as a rookie. He has been limited to 12 frames this year by a rotator cuff strain that cost him six weeks. Henry has surrendered 10 runs (eight earned) on 14 hits and six walks.
While they’ve tinkered on the pitching staff, the Nationals have not made any roster moves on the position player side in almost a month. They’ve carried the same 13-man hitting group since they optioned Brady House and Joey Wiemer to recall Dylan Crews and Andrés Chaparro in the middle of May. House’s demotion opened the third base job, which Curtis Mead has seized.
Mead, acquired from the White Sox after failing to break camp with Chicago, has hit .247/.356/.487 with nine home runs through 180 trips to the dish. He’s making contact at a career-high rate and chasing fewer pitches off the plate. The 25-year-old former top prospect has played his way into the middle of the lineup. He’s mostly at the hot corner after beginning the season in a first base/designated hitter role (though he was back at first base tonight).
Luis García Jr. has been the primary first baseman all season. He has a league average .256/.284/.442 slash through 208 plate appearances. 24-year-old Abimelec Ortiz, one of five prospects acquired from Texas in the MacKenzie Gore deal, has 10 longballs with a .263/.361/.514 line in Rochester. Although there’s a case for giving Ortiz a look, Spencer Nusbaum of The Athletic wrote last week that the Nationals are unlikely to call him up until after the All-Star Break.
That seemingly suggests they’re content with García, whose bat picked up in May after a rough April, continuing as an everyday first baseman. García has plenty of second base experience in his career but seems to have firmly moved off the position. No team has gotten less offensive production from the keystone, where Nasim Nuñez and Jorbit Vivas (plus a few scattered at-bats from Mead and José Tena) have combined to hit .185/.279/.208.
Rangers Acquire MacKenzie Gore
The Nationals have sent left-hander MacKenzie Gore to the Rangers for a package of five prospects, per announcements from both clubs. The five players are shortstop Gavin Fien, right-hander Alejandro Rosario, first baseman/outfielder Abimelec Ortiz, infielder Devin Fitz-Gerald and outfielder Yeremy Cabrera. Gore and Ortiz were the only players with 40-man spots, so the deal is 40-man neutral and no corresponding moves were required.
Gore, 27, has been one of the more obvious trade candidates of this offseason. Back at the start of November, MLBTR’s list of the top trade candidates of the winter had him in the #1 spot. That was partly due to Gore’s appeal as a potential budding ace and also the team’s situation.
The Nationals have been stuck in a rebuild for quite a while now. They won the World Series in 2019 but haven’t finished above .500 since then. They traded players like Max Scherzer, Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber and Juan Soto in 2021 and 2022. It was hoped that Washington could be back to relevance by now but the rebuild stalled out. Things dragged to such a degree that heads rolled. President of baseball operations Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez were both fired during last season.
Paul Toboni, previously an assistant general manager with Boston, was hired to replace Rizzo as the front office leader. The general expectation in the industry is that he will get some time to turn the ship around and get the Nats into contention again, as opposed to having the pressure of trying to win immediately. Gore is only two years away from free agency, making him a trade candidate in those circumstances. As a Boras Corporation client, a contract extension was probably going to be hard to put together.
On top of all that, there’s Gore’s track record and affordability. He was once a top prospect, getting selected third overall by the Pades in 2017. He was flipped to the Nats as part of the aforementioned Soto trade. Gore hasn’t quite lived up to his potential yet, with a 4.19 earned run average in 532 1/3 innings. However, he looked on the verge of a huge breakout for most of 2025.
Last year, Gore made 19 starts for the Nats through the All-Star break. He logged 110 1/3 innings in those with a 3.02 ERA. His 7.7% walk rate was a bit better than average and his 30.5% strikeout rate was quite strong. That strikeout rate was behind just four other qualified pitchers in baseball at that time. Tarik Skubal led the pack at 33.4%, followed by Zack Wheeler, Garrett Crochet and Hunter Brown.
Unfortunately, Gore wasn’t able to stick the landing. He went on the injured list at the end of August due to shoulder inflammation. He was reinstated about two weeks later but then returned to the IL late in September due to a right ankle impingement. Around those IL stints, he tossed 49 1/3 innings with a 6.75 ERA. That bumped his season-long ERA to 4.17.
Despite the poor finish, Gore remained an enticing player. The strong run to the All-Star break showed his ceiling and it’s an appealing arsenal. He averaged over 95 miles per hour with his four-seamer last year while mixing in a curveball, slider, cutter and changeup. He’s also quite affordable. He’s going into his second of three arbitration seasons and will be making $5.6MM this year. He’ll be due another raise in 2027 before he’s slated to reach free agency.
The trade market for starting pitching has been robust this winter. The Orioles sent four prospects and a draft pick to the Rays for three years of Shane Baz. The Cubs sent three players, including their top prospect, to the Marlins for three years of Edward Cabrera. Last night, the Mets sent two of their top prospects to the Brewers for one year of Freddy Peralta.
Gore’s track record of success isn’t quite as long as Peralta’s but Gore offers an extra year of control. Baz and Cabrera offered one extra year compared to Gore but haven’t shown the same kind of ace upside and both have checkered injury histories. Given the difficulty in evaluating the future outcomes of prospects, it’s impossible to say which package will provide the most long-term value.
For the Rangers, it’s understandable that they would prefer the trade route to free agency this winter, as there have been signs that money is tight. The team and manager Bruce Bochy parted ways at the end of last year with the club’s financial uncertainty cited as playing a role in that break-up. Pitching coach Mike Maddux departed for the Angels, with some suggestion that may have been financially motivated as well.
In terms of the roster, the Rangers traded three years of Marcus Semien to get five years of Brandon Nimmo, with Nimmo making less annually. Various reports from December suggested that the club couldn’t even afford mid-market free agents like J.T. Realmuto or Luis Arráez.
But upgrading the rotation was still on the to-do list. The club saw Merrill Kelly, Jon Gray, Patrick Corbin and Tyler Mahle all depart via free agency at season’s end. They went into the winter with a strong one-two of Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, but a drop-off after that. Jack Leiter seemed to earn himself a rotation job with a 3.86 ERA last year but his strikeout and walk rates were only average-ish. Jacob Latz had a good season in a swing role but hasn’t been a full-time big league starter yet. Kumar Rocker is a former top prospect but hasn’t put it together in the majors yet.
Gore immediately upgrades the group, especially if he can get back to his first-half performance from 2025. He slots into the front three with deGrom and Eovaldi, bumps Leiter to a back-end role for now and perhaps creates a competition for a fifth spot between Latz, Rocker and others. There is a cliff over the horizon as Eovaldi and Gore are both slated for free agency after 2027. deGrom’s deal has a club option for 2028, with the value conditional on Cy Young voting and inning tallies, though he’ll be 40 by then. But for the next two years, the rotation has a strong core three.
To get that rotation upgrade while avoiding the free agent market, the Rangers have had to part with a notable pile of prospects. Fien appears to be the headliner here. The Rangers just took him 12th overall in the 2025 draft. They gave him a $4.8MM bonus to get him to forgo a commitment to the University of Texas. Still just 18, turning 19 in March, he’s a long-term play.
Baseball America lists him as the #3 prospect in the Texas system. He gets high praise for his offense but with bigger questions about his defense. Most evaluators expect him to be moved off shortstop in the long run, with third base or the outfield corners potential outcomes.
Kiley McDaniel of ESPN writes that the Red Sox really wanted Fien in last year’s draft but they didn’t pick until 15th, three spots behind Texas. Toboni was running Boston’s draft as assistant general manager at the time. Now that he is running his own front office, he apparently made Fien a priority and has used Gore as a means of getting his guy.
Fitz-Gerald, Rosario and Cabrera are a few spots behind Fien on BA’s list, coming in at #8, #13 and #14 respectively. Fitz-Gerald is a 20-year-old infielder who was drafted in the fifth round in 2024. He got into 41 games between the Complex League and Single-A last year, slashing .302/.428/.482. A left shoulder strain prevented him from taking on a bigger workload. He seems to do a decent amount of stuff well without a standout tool. BA suggests a future as a multi-positional player with a bit of pop and speed.
Rosario, 24, was a fifth-round pick in 2023. He had a strong season in 2024, posting a 2.24 ERA between Single-A and High-A, but has been on the shelf since then. He missed 2025 due to an elbow injury and is soon set to undergo Tommy John surgery, so he’ll miss the entire 2026 season as well. His strong 2024 campaign made him a top 100 prospect, with BA having him at #49 going into 2025, but he’ll be a long-term question mark after two entirely missed seasons. He’ll be Rule 5 eligible this coming December.
Cabrera, 20, was an international signing out of the Dominican Republic. He spent last year in Single-A with a strong walk and strikeout profile but only eight home runs. He’s considered a strong defender in the outfield and he stole 43 bases last year.
Ortiz, 24 next month, has the least prospect hype of this group but is the one closest to impacting the major league club. He split last year between Double-A and Triple-A, hitting 25 home runs and walking in 11.7% of his plate appearances. He had a combined line of .257/.356/.479 and a 124 wRC+. He was added to the Texas 40-man roster a couple of months ago to keep him out of the Rule 5 draft.
Though his numbers in the minors look good on the surface, he has a propensity to chase breaking balls. Evaluators fear that will limit him to being a platoon bat in the majors. He’s also not a strong defender or baserunner, so he needs to hit to carry the profile. Washington has a pretty wide open first base/designated hitter mix, so he can force his way in there if he hits. He also has three option years and can be kept in the minors if he doesn’t.
With four of the five players being long-term plays, it would appear that Washington is just trying to grab whichever players it considers the most talented, as opposed to trying to rush a move towards contending in the near term. Perhaps that was isolated to this deal of their biggest trade chip but it could perhaps indicate that the club is generally operating with a long lens. For the Rangers, losing most of these players won’t hurt them in the short term but it does cut into the system more broadly. As of August, BA ranked them 26th in the league in terms of overall system talent.
CJ Abrams has also been floated as a trade candidate for Washington but with less certainty than Gore as he has three years of club control remaining. The Nats could now pivot to marketing him but his stock is also down a bit due to a poor finish to his most recent season, and in 2024 as well. Perhaps they will hold him for another season to see if he can raise his trade value.
It is clearly an offseason about loading up on future talent for the Nats. They also traded reliever Jose A. Ferrer to the Mariners for catcher Harry Ford and right-hander Isaac Lyon. This deal adds five more intriguing young players to the pipeline.
It also opens up more rotation chances for their other pitchers. As of now, they project to have Cade Cavalli, Foster Griffin, Josiah Gray, Brad Lord, Jake Irvin and Mitchell Parker in the mix for starts. Arms like Jake Eder, Luis Perales, Riley Cornelio and Andrew Alvarez will be looking to push in there as well. Perhaps the Gore deal with be followed by the Nats signing a veteran to eat some innings but they could also leave space for the guys in that group.
Due to Gore’s appeal, he reportedly drew interest from half the teams in the league. Some of those clubs moved on to other trade candidates or signed free agents. For those still on the hunt for starting pitching, the market is drying up but they may still have options. As mentioned, a lot of the trade candidates have already changed hands. The Red Sox may have enough depth after their Ranger Suárez signing to flip someone else. The Royals may be willing to part with someone. Free agency still has Framber Valdez, Zac Gallen, Chris Bassitt and a few others.
Jon Heyman of The New York Post first reported Gore was headed to Texas. Jeff Passan of ESPN first laid out the five-for-one framework. Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News first reported Fien’s inclusion. Spencer Nusbaum of The Washington Post first mentioned Rosario. Grant then reported Ortiz and Fitz-Gerald, followed by Andrew Golden of The Washington Post adding Cabrera.
Photos courtesy of Brett Davis, Eric Hartline, Kevin Jairaj, Joe Camporeale, Imagn Images
Rangers Select Three Players To 40-Man Roster
The Rangers announced that they have selected the contracts of right-handers David Davalillo and Leandro Lopez, as well as first baseman/outfielder Abimelec Ortiz. That protects those three from being selected in the Rule 5 draft next month. The club’s 40-man roster count climbs to 38.
Davalillo is the most highly-regarded prospect of the trio. FanGraphs had him at 11th in their midseason update. MLB.com had him at seventh by the end of the year. The Rangers signed Davalillo as an international free agent in 2022. He opened 2025 in High-A, but made the jump to Double-A by the end of the year. Davalillo tossed 56 innings with a 2.73 ERA after joining Frisco. His strikeout rate wasn’t as lofty as it has been at lower levels, but he kept the walks in check and limited hitters to a .195 batting average.
The 23-year-old Davalillo boasts a four-pitch mix, per FanGraphs. His fastball sits in the low to mid-90s, to go with two breaking balls and a splitter. Texas has a handful of other similarly-ranked pitching prospects around Davalillo’s age, so there will be some competition for a callup, but he could be in line to make his major-league debut as soon as 2026.
Lopez joined the organization as an international free agent in 2021. He’s posted lofty strikeout numbers in each season of his pro career, working as both a starter and a reliever. Walks have been an issue, though. Lopez opened this past season at High-A. He recorded a 2.19 ERA over 14 starts, with a solid 28.2% strikeout rate but also a 10% walk rate. Lopez continued to pitch well after being promoted to Double-A, delivering a sub-3.00 ERA with more than a strikeout per inning over nine appearances (eight starts). Lopez had a 10.6% walk rate with the RoughRiders, and he’s now posted a double-digit walk rate in every season since his pro debut in 2021. Lopez snuck onto MLB.com’s top 30 list, landing at 29.
Ortiz was also added via international free agency in 2021. He’s shown prodigious power at each minor league level. Ortiz launched 33 home runs between Single-A and High-A in 2023, then followed it up with 18 dingers at Double-A in 2024. Ortiz was back with Frisco to open this past season, but a 120 wRC+ helped him earn a promotion to Triple-A. He knocked nine home runs in 41 games with Round Rock, pushing his season-long total to 25. While Ortiz might have the pop to earn an MLB roster spot, FanGraphs cited his defensive limitations and excessive chase rate as red flags.