MacKenzie Gore was aces for the Nats on Wednesday night, throwing 6 1/3 innings of one-hit ball, with seven strikeouts and two walks, against Boston. The problem, however, was that he left when it looked like he still had more in the tank, but team trainers came out and decided to take him out of the game.
Luckily, as he told Grant & Danny when he joined the guys in Section 106 Thursday ahead of the Nats-Sox series finale, it’s just a blister, and he’s good to go.
“Yeah, just a little blister popped up; there was blood on the finger, but we should be fine for the next one,” Gore said. “I don't know if it was on the ball or not, but just a little blister. We’ll be okay.”
There’s apparently a maintenance art to keeping blisters at bay, and that’s something Gore has had trouble with – he missed most of 2018 due to nail and blister issues with his right hand, so he’s had to find a way to make it work.
“I have bad skin for whatever reason, and when you’re sweating, the skin tends to kind of get soft,” Gore said. “It got soft last night and the blister happened.”
Too bad, because he was rolling, putting a rough last start in Philly behind him pitch-by-pitch.
“I always want to think I'm gonna be nasty that day, but it's just kind of one of those things I felt good, and it kept going,” Gore said. “It was one of those days where I was just executing pitches and we were rolling. The biggest thing is their swings were a lot worse yesterday. I threw strikes in Philly, they just hit the strikes, but yesterday, I was getting ahead of guys, and they weren’t putting good swings on it. It’s a lot easier to pitch with two strikes when you know.”
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Gore has had little success in Philadelphia this year – he’s 0-3 with a 10.54 ERA in three total starts against the defending NL champs, but has allowed 13 runs in 7 2/3 innings in two starts at Citizens Bank Park – but, it’s just one of those things.
“I feel comfortable there but for some reason I, I've given up a couple of touchdowns in Philly this year,” Gore laughed. “It’s just the way it's happened which, you know, that's a lot of runs. But stuff happens, and good or bad, you have to get ready for the next one.”
Otherwise, Gore has had a strong first full season in DC and MLB overall, now sporting a 4.38 overall ERA in 123 1/3 innings of work. There have been struggles along the way (see above), but Gore is taking the bad with the good and trying to learn from it.
“I'll start on the positive things just, we're striking guys out and the walk rate has gotten better as the season has gone on, but the thing that you kind of circle is that the big outings where I've given up the big numbers of runs,” Gore said. “Those are kind of frustrating, because it hasn't necessarily been as consistent as any of us would have liked for it to be. But it's really just those blow up outings that have kind of hurt the numbers per se.”
Gore is confident that despite the struggles, he still has the capability to be that ace-caliber pitcher the Nationals are counting on…but with that comes limiting those blowups.
“I don't want to say this and just come off the wrong way, but I feel like I could be that coming in going into this year,” Gore said. “I'm honest with myself, I, but I also watch baseball and I understand I do have good stuff and I can do things on the mound that the good pitchers do in this league, but they don't have as many six run outings as I've had this year, and that's the biggest difference. I've been really good and then the next one will just kind of not be great; that’s how it's been up this point, so let's minimize the damage a little bit, and we should be alright.”
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All part of a rebuild, but the Nationals are 18-13 since the break entering Thursday, and well on the right path ahead of schedule.
“I feel like we've been doing things the right way all year, but we had a group that's young. That's not an excuse, but it's reality, that's what it was,” Gore said. “But I think we've just gotten better. Everyone in the clubhouse has gotten better, not just the young guys; I think everyone's playing better than they did a year ago, and we just get along and have fun and pull for each other.”
A win Thursday would be the Nats’ 55th of the year, matching their 2022 win total, far exceeding what so many have expected going into the year – but again, part of the rebuild.
“When we started this year, it was like, look, nobody expects us to win, but we are capable of winning. We have talent in the clubhouse, but there's also a development part of learning to win,” Gore said. “Now, we’re doing that. We lost a lot of close games, but is it a matter of just going through losses and just learning from mistakes, why we won or lost a close game? We’re winning those now, because we're just doing the little things better, and not doing things to hurt ourselves and lose games.”
Gore will be a big part of that for the rest of the season and beyond…and he credits his own development, at least, to that bulldog mentality he has, going back to how he felt coming into this year he had the ability to be an ace, and how it can look like he is standoffish on days he pitches.
“I'm definitely a lot quieter than I am the other four days, I don’t know if that's just the southeastern North Carolina in me that comes out when I pitch, or what, but that's something else that I have to control at times,” Gore said. “I just like to compete. Most of that (angry energy) is toward myself. Even the big innings I’ve had…I still think about one game in Philly where the game sped up on me and I didn’t cover first. It’s one of those little things that snowballed. At times I get frustrated, but I don't necessarily think that's why some of my innings have been the way they are. I think sometimes I'll just given up hits at really bad times and they've scored some runs.”
Take a listen to Gore’s entire chat with Grant & Danny above, including some thoughts on how he uses advanced analytics to improve between starts, and, of course, Danny’s favorite game of random questions to get to know the man inside the uniform!
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