ST. LOUIS — Everyone wanted to talk to Cade Cavalli on Friday afternoon, which is what happens when a player signs a four-year, many-million-dollar contract extension. And yet no one could talk to Cavalli in the visitors clubhouse at Busch Stadium, which was because of one of baseball’s unwritten rules: Leave the starting pitching alone. Act like he doesn’t exist. If you happen to lock eyes with him, look away, even when — or, really, especially when — he just made life-changing money to keep pitching for the team that drafted him.
So the most important person in the room was also the loneliest.
Cavalli, white binder in his lap, flipped through a scouting report of the Cardinals, the club he would face (and shut down) in a 9-1 win for the Nationals on Friday night. The 28-year-old nodded along to the music playing through his earbuds. He wore a red beanie, as he always does before starts, no matter the 98-degree heat outside.
Routines are sacred like that in professional sports, where control is the myth that keeps on giving. Which was also why, as the game crept closer, as his teammates laced their cleats, stretched and talked to one another, Cavalli spun his chair around and stared into his locker. He likes to visualize things before they happen, at least as best he can. He’s been doing this a long time, too, ever since grade school, when he picked up a pencil and wrote on notebook paper: When I grow up I want to be a baseball player.
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Getting there is a giant achievement. Building a career, though, sticking around, that’s a whole other challenge, which Cavalli is now well into solving. About an hour earlier Friday afternoon, the Nats had announced his extension, four years plus a club option for 2031. While he studied the Cardinals’ hitters in the clubhouse, the rest of the details were trickling out on social media. The deal will pay Cavalli $47 million across the next four seasons, according to two people familiar with the terms. If the Nationals exercise their option on the back end, the total value could reach $70 million. That means Cavalli could lead the Nats’ rotation for the next half decade.
“You all have seen it: He’s been one of the most consistent pitchers over the course of the last couple months,” Paul Toboni, the Nationals’ president of baseball operations, said Friday. “I thought he really turned the corner. Early in the year, he was a good pitcher. And I think lately he’s become great — and great in a way that has been extremely consistent.”
A first-round pick in 2020, Cavalli has a 3.02 ERA in 167 ⅔ innings (a durable 32 starts). That included 13 strikeouts against the Red Sox on June 3, a career night clouded by Cavalli shouting “Sit down boy!” after striking out a Latin American player, for which he apologized the next day. His season has also included an eight-inning, no-runs, 10-strikeout gem against the Cubs on Aug. 13, then 11 strikeouts in his next outing. These were the flashes of a shut-down ace, all after Cavalli missed almost three full years with arm injuries.
But his most recent innings — the five he threw in St. Louis on Friday — hit in a different way. There’s just something about a good first impression after a team invests in you. Cavalli struck out the side in the first, his fastball popping at 96 mph. In the second, two batters reached with singles, though neither scored. The Nats, meanwhile, put up three in the first and four more in the third. The temperature settled at a sticky 87. And Cavalli never let the Cardinals think about biting into a massive deficit.
He allowed four hits, walked none and got the Cardinals to whiff on five of the 12 curveballs they swung at. When he struck out JJ Wetherholt to end the fifth, he reached 200 strikeouts for the season, the first Nats pitcher to do that since Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin all did in 2019. That was also it for Cavalli’s night.
Then, afterward, he could finally talk about the ways his life had suddenly changed.
“I knew that I wanted to be in D.C. as long as possible,” Cavalli said. “I’ve had talks with somebody that I really look up to and envy, Ryan Zimmerman. To see him be part of the organization, the loyalty that came with him. He went through some rough years and then you look up and he’s a World Series winner.”
There are other angles to this, about money and roster-building and whether it means the Nationals will keep more young talent in D.C. They have often struggled with that last part, which you intimately know if you own a Juan Soto, Trea Turner or Anthony Rendon jersey. And an extension for Cavalli doesn’t automatically mean the team will find the right years and dollars for, say, Daylen Lile, let alone James Wood or CJ Abrams.
Plus, in the bigger picture, Cavalli’s extension isn’t necessarily breaking the bank. It buys out his last three years of arbitration eligibility and what could have been his first season on the open market. Beyond that, his performance (and health) between 2027 and 2030 will dictate whether a $23 million option is advantageous for the Nationals, who will have a lot of data before making that choice. But if nothing else, the deal signals a willingness — by ownership and the new front office — to shoulder some level of financial risk to start building a real core.
Toboni and manager Blake Butera hope other players notice.
“We want homegrown players to know that if they come here and carry themselves the right way, go about their work the right way, go out and perform, be great teammates and great leaders, there’s a pathway to be here for the long-term,” Toboni said. “Especially when there’s interest on both sides.”
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