When last he spoke to reporters, after Sunday’s win over the Philadelphia Phillies, Dusty Baker was still not sure which starter Washington would turn to in the series opener with the NL East’s second-place New York Mets.
He wasn’t giving any hints as to the thinking either, or who was under consideration.
“If I told you that, there would be a process of elimination, you’d figure it out,” Baker joked.
“We haven’t figured it out yet. We’ll see. Got to talk to Mike Rizzo, Mike Maddux and then we’ll come up with who we think is the best against the Mets.
“We do have a couple of young guys who have gotten roughed up a little bit by the Mets, so we’ll make a decision if we go with those same guys or other guys.”
The decision, which actually came a few hours after the finale with the Phillies, was to go with veteran right-hander Mat Latos, who signed a minor league deal after he was released by the Chicago White Sox.
It will be Latos’ first start since in the majors since June 7th.
He did, however, make six starts in the Nats’ system after signing as he worked to get in better shape.
So how did Baker make the decision to go with Latos? It wasn’t his decision alone.
“It was a group decision where I know — Lopez, they’ve seen him before, and I think they’ve seen Giolito before also,” Baker explained.
“They haven’t seen Latos in a while. He’s been down in the pressure cooker with me before, and so we’ll go with him. There is no pitch count, there’s a performance count, and we’ll use the whole bullpen if we have to, because we have an off day on Thursday, so this is his start, but hopefully he gets a victory, but it could be somebody else’s victory.”
Baker and Latos did, of course, spend time together in Cincinnati in 2012-13, when he had back-to-back 14-win campaigns.
So, Baker was asked, is he interested to see what Latos has stuff-wise now, three-plus years later?
“I’m past curiosity,” he said. “I’m about excellence and performance. That’s why we got him. Curiosity killed the cat, like they said, I’m not curious at all. I want to see — hopefully he does well, that’s why we signed him, and that’s why we signed Bronson Arroyo as well, for these kinds of situations, but Bronson didn’t work out, health-wise. Who knows, if we had a healthy Bronson Arroyo, then he might have been the guy for this situation. We just cashed in an insurance policy, so to speak, because both of them were insurance.”
Baker said that ultimately, they decided that Latos was the best option right now.
“Latos has a pretty good assortment of pitches, and he’s the best that we have, we think, for today,” he explained. “Now for the next start or whenever it is, we’ll see.”