For six years with the Washington Nationals, Patrick Corbin always showed up and always cared.
Column by Barry Svrluga
September 25, 2024 at 3:05 p.m. EDT
There should be a moment Thursday afternoon at Nationals Park, somewhere in the middle of the final weekday matinee of the season, when Dave Martinez emerges from the dugout and strides to the mound to take the ball from Patrick Corbin.
Corbin’s eyes will almost certainly be downcast. The crowd should rise and thank him. Not for how he has pitched over the past five seasons. But because he pitched over the past five seasons, and because he processes it like this: “I wouldn’t change anything.”
Anything? As Corbin heads into the last of his 170 starts as a Washington National, that doesn’t quite check out, because by so many measures he has been — and it’s hard to type this — the worst starting pitcher in baseball since 2020. There are numbers to back that up, and we’ll get to them.
But that’s also far too simple an evaluation of a pitcher whose six-year tenure with the Nats includes not just nine of the biggest outs in franchise history, but so many moments that were necessary to get to those highest leverage innings. That mattered in 2019, when he fit right into a monstrous rotation that helped win the World Series. That mattered since, when he struggled so often and just kept taking the damn ball.
“A lot has been said about him, obviously, in the last few years,” said Nats legend Ryan Zimmerman, a former teammate. “I hope people remember him for what he did.”
What he did was join Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg atop the most fearsome rotation in the sport. What he did was pitch 202 innings with a 3.25 ERA in helping elevate the 2019 Nats from a wretched start into the postseason as an absolute train. What he did was come out of the bullpen in Game 5 of the division series in Los Angeles, recording the last out of the seventh before Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto homered to tie the game, then pitching a scoreless eighth. What he did was take the ball from Scherzer in Game 7 of the World Series, when the Nats trailed in Houston.
“I remember after each inning, Davey would kinda go, ‘Where you at?’” Corbin said. “And I kept saying, ‘We’re good.’”
The following spring, when the pandemic shut down baseball and the world, Zimmerman helped broadcast a Zoom reunion of the team to rewatch Game 7 not just with each other, but with the entire fan base on MASN.
“I mean, obviously I played in that game,” Zimmerman said. “But I was rewatching it, and at one point I was like, ‘Holy crap. Pat’s still pitching!’”
He pitched the sixth, when the Nats were down 2-0. He pitched the seventh, by which time Rendon and Howie Kendrick had homered to give Washington a 3-2 lead. And he pitched the eighth, at which point the Nats’ advantage had grown to 4-2. The champagne was on ice. Corbin kept mowing down Astros.
“You don’t know when you’re ever going to get back to the postseason or have a chance to pitch in those games,” Corbin said. “So you just try to be available.”
As it turns out, availability is Patrick Corbin’s superpower. He came here, he said, because of Scherzer and Strasburg: “To be part of a rotation like that I thought would be pretty special.” He outlasted them both.
This isn’t to cover for the struggles, which were obvious. It’s to acknowledge that his contribution to the young rotation he’ll leave behind are real. In his six years with the Nats, Corbin not only never missed a start. He never missed a workout, a throwing session, a bullpen.
“No matter how good or bad he felt, mentally or physically, he just went out there and took the ball,” said fellow lefty MacKenzie Gore, who counts Corbin as a mentor. “That’s been something that we’ve been able to learn from him, and I think we’ve done a nice job of that as a staff.”
So often, of course, Corbin took the ball when hope seemed scarce. Of the 173 pitchers who have thrown at least 300 innings over the past five seasons, no one has a higher ERA than Corbin’s 5.61. No one has given up more than Corbin’s 899 hits or Corbin’s 491 runs or Corbin’s 131 homers. No one has allowed opponents a higher batting average than Corbin’s .296 or lost more decisions than Corbin’s 70. In 38 of his 136 starts since 2020, he has allowed at least five earned runs — most in the game. Ouch.
Through that prism, 2019 seems a long, long time ago. He presents every day as the same guy. But no one could be unaffected by that.
“I hated every second of losing and not pitching well,” Corbin said.
But in all that time, only three pitchers in baseball have made more starts. Only a dozen have thrown more innings. He could have feigned injury and hid. “Never crossed my mind,” he said. Maybe you can’t draw a straight line between Corbin’s professionalism and the fact that Gore, 25, and fellow starters Jake Irvin, 27; Mitchell Parker, 24; and DJ Herz, 23, haven’t missed a single turn in the rotation. Maybe.
“That doesn’t happen if we’re not around him,” Gore said.
So as he climbs that Nationals Park mound for the final time before his $140 million contract expires, what’s Patrick Corbin’s legacy?
“I think it’s a complicated relationship between the D.C. fan base and him,” said General Manager Mike Rizzo, the man who granted him that deal. “On one hand, he was a top-shelf free agent we wanted to attract here, and we got him. He was a key component of a world championship, the first one in D.C. in forever.
“And then we go into this rebuild, and he didn’t have nearly the success in wins and losses and ERA. But he posted every fifth day. That’s huge.”
In his six years here, we have grown to know him as a pitcher. But as a person? The bad baseball made that hard. He and his wife Jen had their first son in 2021, their second last July. He has contributed a six-figure gift to the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy, where a scoreboard now bears his name. The 2019 season, he said, “will always be the best season of my career.” But his time in Washington has been more than that.
“Kind of been through it all,” Corbin said Tuesday, sitting atop the bench in the Nats’ dugout. “Really enjoyed it, through the highs and the lows. Doesn’t seem like six years. We started a family, got to love the fans here and living here and everything. I’m definitely going to miss this — this coaching staff, the training staff, a lot of the players, a lot of the behind-the-scenes people that people don’t know about.”
So whenever Martinez comes to take the ball from Corbin Thursday — be it in the second or the seventh — tip a cap and offer some thanks. Every fifth day for six years, he took the ball. Every fifth day, he tried. Every fifth day, he cared. There’s admiration — and an example — in that, whatever the results.