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Despite a middling second half, the Nationals have been one of this season’s pleasant surprises. After years of feeling both directionless and punchless, they’ve put together a spectacular offensive group and have won more games than in any year since their 2019 World Series championship. They’ve scored more than five runs a game on the season, the third-best mark in the majors, and it has been a team effort. Unfortunately, the pitching staff hasn’t followed suit; they’ve allowed the third-most runs in baseball themselves. But there has been one shining light in that group: Cade Cavalli, the team’s oft-injured first round draft pick from 2020. And they weren’t about to let a good thing go. Last Friday, Cavalli and the Nationals agreed to a four-year, $47 million contract extension with a club option for a fifth year, as Spencer Nusbaum first reported.

Cavalli is a fascinating pitcher – so fascinating that I wrote about him in late July. I think that piece is worth a read – hey, I wrote it – but if you’re looking for the TL;DR, the gist is that two months ago, Cavalli’s career was at an inflection point. His lengthy struggles with injury had limited him to roughly 50 innings before the 2026 season, and he’d scuffled in the minors in 2025 as he worked to build up his workload again. But he was spectacular in the first half of this season, the best arm on the Nats by a fair margin, particularly when taking his underlying numbers into account. What was to come was uncertain, but there were tons of bright outcomes in the distribution of possible futures.

A few months hence, I think we might be living in the best of those outcomes. Cavalli has made nine starts since I wrote about him, and he’s been spectacular, with 70 strikeouts and just 12 walks across 53 innings en route to a 1.87 ERA. He’s been a rare bright spot as the team has sputtered to an 18-23 record since the trade deadline. Thanks in part to the offensive contributors the Nats traded away, they’ve scored only 4.5 runs per game over that span. But they’re looking to the future, not to the past or even the present, and Cavalli’s phenomenal year has made him an indispensable part of that future.

The easiest way to understand Cavalli’s promise is just to watch him pitch a little. He touches 100, throws six different pitches, and snaps off sliders and curveballs that turn legs to jelly. He’s 6-foot-4 and has an easy, powerful delivery. Command is hard to measure, but he doesn’t walk many batters, with a 6.8% walk rate over the past two years combined.

Let’s leave aside health for a minute – don’t worry, we’ll absolutely discuss that part of the contract extension later. When he’s on the mound, Cavalli’s greatest shortcoming is that his fastball plays way down compared to its velocity. He suffers from a lack of standout shape. My former colleague Kevin Goldstein described the “line of normality,” where fastballs play below their velo because their shape looks too much like what hitters have seen their whole lives. Another way of thinking about that is to look at Baseball Savant’s pitch movement plots, which helpfully include shading for league average movement overlaid on an individual hurler’s pitches:

The red dots for Cavalli’s four-seamer almost completely overlap with average big league movement. So do many of his pitches, in fact; the only one that doesn’t really is his sweeper, and that’s partially because it’s basically a variation on his curveball. That explains one of the things that’s been bugging me about Cavalli this year: His pitches look excellent to me, but pitch models don’t love them. PitchingBot, Stuff+, and Baseball Prospectus’ StuffPro all think that he’s just a hair above average in terms of raw stuff. And while he’s stingy with the walks, that appears to be more a function of stuffing the strike zone (he has an 85th-percentile heart-of-the-plate rate) than his ability to dot the edges and put the ball where he wants. Add it all up, and the various models think he’s more good than great.

I’m presenting that in the interest of covering all my bases and looking for places where I might be misevaluating Cavalli. But truthfully, I don’t believe the models here. I understand what they’re saying in general. But I don’t think that they’re excited enough about his breaking balls, and I definitely don’t think they’re excited enough about his potential for figuring out better shapes and a better pitch mix. Cavalli is 28, but this is his first full big league season. Pitchers aren’t fully formed after one year in the majors; pretty much everyone adds new pitches, tinkers with what’s less effective, and leans into what works against big league hitters. And he’s already effective against big league hitters! Seeing is believing for me, and Cavalli has the process stats and actual results to make me think the models are missing something.

I don’t see a guy with an average overall arsenal. I see two wipeout breaking balls in search of a good fastball, and the raw arm talent to pop 100 on the radar gun when he needs it. I see a hard cutter that Cavalli’s still learning, one that might make everything else look nicer together. I see the possibility of swapping out four-seamers for sinkers and cutters and turning into a groundball specialist with two out pitches, something approximating a righty Framber Valdez. Or to put it another way, when a top prospect finally gets his shot in the majors and records a 3.02 ERA, 3.67 xERA, 3.25 FIP, 3.13 xFIP, and 3.19 SIERA – an entire alphabet of acronyms all saying he’s pitching extremely well – you should set your pitch models down for a second and listen.

For the Nationals, further improvement would be a bonus. Heck, Cavalli remaining at his 2026 level would be a bonus – he’s 13th in WAR this season, and he’s now under contract at roughly $12 million a year for the next four years, and with a reasonably priced option beyond that. That would be a bargain contract even if he got meaningfully worse. The deal buys out three years of salary arbitration and a free agent year; those are generally valuable years from a player earning perspective. Even a single year of free agency for a top-30 pitcher will run you more than $20 million, and you’ll have to pay that amount for some decline years to entice them to sign with you. Salary arbitration for a guy who, despite a slow start, just posted a full season with a 3.00-ish ERA would be a tidy sum too. If Cavalli stays healthy throughout this extension, this is a smash hit for Washington.

That means that we’re really talking about an injury hedge here. Cavalli surely signed this deal because he missed the entire 2023 season and most of the 2024 one, and then looked diminished when he first returned. His $3 million signing bonus from the 2020 draft was more money than he’d cleared in the intervening six years, and it doesn’t take a pessimist to worry that you might not have a long and fruitful major league career given that backdrop. Fifty million bucks is mighty hard to turn down in that context.

The Nats are also reducing uncertainty with this deal in a few ways. First, Cavalli’s arbitration hearing this winter would have been a big source of variance. His case would have pitted his extremely short track record against his electric 2026 season, and without a lot of close comps, you could imagine that going a lot of ways, some of which wouldn’t be great for the team from a budget perspective. It also might have made for a contentious hearing, and arguing that your pitcher who just had one of the best seasons in the majors shouldn’t get paid all that much because he’s been hurt in the past and thus didn’t make much in arb last year is not a fun position to take when the guy is going to keep working for you.

There’s also the matter of the upcoming lockout. The rules of salary arbitration are likely to change at least a little bit this winter, and they might change by a lot. No one knows what the competitive balance picture will look like, but there will probably be some kind of minimum spending level, and the Nats are almost certainly below that right now. Because of the way CBT calculations work, giving Cavalli an extension lets the Nats bring forward some of their spending; in 2027, they’ll pay him $5 million, but he’ll count for $11.75 million on the books, the average value of his deal. He’ll also only count for $11.75 million in 2030, when the team will pay him $21 million. This is a good accounting transformation for them; more money towards a potential minimum payroll now when they need it, lower CBT salaries in the future when they’ll likely be spending more in support of a contender.

The Nats also care a bit less about the injury risk side of things because of the portfolio effect. This is Cavalli’s only career, but he’s not the only pitcher the Nats will employ. Every year, they sign many pitchers, and many of those pitchers miss time. The team has six pitchers on the 60-day IL right now, and they’re hardly alone. That’s just how baseball works these days, but it affords the Nats a weird kind of financial freedom.

I’ve talked about this before, so if you don’t need a refresher, feel free to skip this part, but here’s one way of thinking about it. Imagine a weighted coin flip that will lose $50,000 half the time and make $75,000 half the time. This is a good wager in the abstract. I’m not tricking you. The expected value is very clearly positive. But if you have only $50,000 to your name, it’s not a good wager to take. To use the accepted literature term, your risk of ruin is too high. Lose that one coin flip, and you’re broke, bankrupt, out of the game. This is the Cavalli side of the equation. Turning down an extension and betting on himself in arbitration and free agency might have a higher expected payout, but there’s simply too much risk of injury-related ruin for it to be a good idea.

Now, imagine that you get another chance to play that same game: lose $50,000 or make $75,000 on the flip of a coin. This time, though, you have $10 million in the bank. Now, this is an incredible game! There’s no risk of ruin anymore. Sure, it’s a bummer to lose the coin flip, but sometimes you make a smart wager and it doesn’t pan out. That’s just business. This is how the team should be looking at things. They have so many contracts to hand out, so much budget to allocate, that even if an individual deal is risky to them, the expected value is more important because the risk washes out in the aggregate. If they sign 20 contracts, it’s not like every single one of them is going to end with the player getting injured, and there’s not much (if any) correlation between one pitcher and another pitcher getting hurt.

You can squint and see the start of a pretty decent Washington rotation in the years to come. Cavalli looks like he’s going to be very good when available. Connelly Early, a deadline acquisition, is set to debut in DC later this week, returning from an elbow injury. DJ Herz is slated to start today after missing most of the last two years thanks to TJ, and while I’m not sure if he’s good, I think he might be. Andrew Alvarez was a revelation this year. I’m not saying this is one of the best rotations in baseball, but it doesn’t have to be; average would be a massive improvement from what the Nats got in 2026.

That makes this deal one of the cleanest, most win-win extensions I’ve seen this year. The Nationals are doing a bunch of things they need – adding years of control for one of their best pitchers, building out the rotation to match their exciting lineup, and improving their salary cap picture. Cavalli is getting exactly what he wants – a boatload of money, guaranteed against the fact that his own body keeps betraying him. It’s the platonic ideal of an extension, and while the job is nowhere near finished, things continue to look up in Washington. Well, at least on the baseball front.