For a while there, all Nationals fans had to get excited about were debuts. Or, to parrot the social media hype machine, all they had to get excited about were DEBUTS. There was Keibert Ruiz and CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore and Cade Cavalli, Jackson Rutledge and Brady House, James Wood and Dylan Crews, DJ Herz and Robert Hassell III, Daylen Lile and Jake Irvin.
For the darkest days, there was Blake Rutherford.
For the waiver nerds, Alex Call.
For the sickest of sickos, Jake Alu.
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But before all of them was Josiah Gray, who debuted for the Nats on Aug. 2, 2021 — when, maybe more than ever, fans needed a sign that things might eventually be OK again (heavy emphasis on might). Three days earlier, he had arrived in the Max Scherzer-Trea Turner trade, which had capped a deadline fire sale that saw eight veterans go out and 12 unproven players come in. Gray was, in turn, the roster’s first public face of the rebuild. And because of that, he would answer so many questions about patience, about sticking with a broken club, about what it would take for an odd collection of dreamers and has-beens to eventually play respectable baseball.
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And he pitched, of course, at one point so well that he was an All Star in 2023. And then he basically disappeared.
“Man, where to even begin …” Gray said to me over the phone last week. He picked up the call from South Florida, where he’s spent the better part of the last two years and three months, stretching and throwing and eating quiet breakfasts at the Nationals’ team facility, marooned. Because for that entire time, he’s been trying to get back from injury, first with a long recovery from Tommy John surgery, now after a devastating setback at the end of spring training. He last pitched in the majors on April 4, 2024, when some of the fielders behind him were Joey Gallo, Jesse Winker, Trey Lipscomb and Ildemaro Vargas.
But after throwing off a bullpen mound in West Palm Beach on July 10, Gray, 28, feels closer to a return than he has in a good while.
“When it’s been this long, it can be hard not to feel like you’re forgotten about,” Gray said. “But that’s one of the things that you just try to not let build up in your head. I’m trying to have a fresh mindset and put all the work in behind the scenes, so that when my name is called I’m ready. I mean, it’s been time to make new baseball memories.”
One big question, should Gray keep progressing, is if he can still fit into the Nats’ future, especially with a whole new front office and coaching staff. And another is how different a pitcher he might be if he gets back to a major league mound.
After missing the first half of 2024 with elbow and forearm strains, Gray underwent Tommy John surgery that July. He rehabbed for the rest of that season, then all of 2025, finishing that year with three short appearances in the minors. The goal was to compete to reclaim his rotation spot this spring, which resulted in the team telling him he needed some more time. He was optioned to Triple-A Rochester in late March. The plan was for him to start during the Red Wings’ opening series in Jacksonville. But then, during a final tune-up in West Palm Beach, his elbow didn’t feel right. Tests revealed another flexor strain, the same issue that first slowed him down two years before. It was straight back to the injured list.
“I was so close to escaping that rehab mindset,” Gray said. “You know, that was a tough one.”
No cliché is off limits when you’ve spent more than two years rehabbing your arm, far away from your teammates, worlds away from your major league life. And so Gray uses a lot of them. He is just stacking one good day on top of another. He has learned a lot about himself. He is enjoying the process, at least as best he can, and appreciating how many people are invested in getting him back to the show. That’s no small thing, he says. It is its own kind of blessing.
But none of that means there isn’t a real, aching itch to help the Nats however he can. They have been short on arms all year, cycling through options in a tortured effort to find the 27 outs needed to win. And Gray is also eager to work more with the new staff, which is much more data-minded than his previous coaches in D.C.
Gray has always pored over his metrics, the kind of guy who throws a pitch in the bullpen and immediately turns to an iPad to look at how it spun and moved. At his best, he’s ridden his plus slider as much as possible, working it off four-seam fastballs at the top of the zone. At his worst, those high fastballs have been way too friendly to power hitters, which is why he led the league in homers allowed in 2022 and part of why underlying numbers have never considered him a top-of-the-rotation arm. But in 2023, his All-Star year, he performed above average across six months, showing that, before the injuries, he could have contributed to a winning club.
When he talks about doing that now, Gray says it could be as a starter, as a reliever, whatever is needed for a Nationals team that’s still overachieving at 50-50. He expects to have a better idea of how he’s changed — or, ideally, how he hasn’t — once he pitches in minor league games in the near future, which would be the next step in his comeback.
But until then, he’ll stay in the same routine for at least a bit longer. He’ll show up at the facility between 8 and 9 a.m. He’ll eat his breakfast, warm his arm with plyo balls and then work off the mound. Then, back at home, he’ll hang with his wife and their dog, Cowboy, an Australian shepherd. He might fire up the grill. And then they’ll probably turn on the Nationals game.
“I wish I was a bigger part of it,” Gray said. “But with time left in the year, I think I could still make an impact.”
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