The Nationals’ home opener showcases a lot of new features to the young 2024 season.

As the home schedule on South Capitol Street kicks off, there are new things all around Nationals Park to experience. New concessions. New scoreboard. New lights. And a new lineup in just the fourth game of the year.

The Nationals will take on the first left-handed starting pitcher they've faced this season in the Pirates’ Marco Gonzales, meaning manager Davey Martinez will trot out his first right-handed-heavy lineup of the year.

Left-handed hitters Eddie Rosario, Joey Gallo and Luis García Jr. are on the bench. In their places, Victor Robles is playing center field, Joey Meneses is at first base and Ildemaro Vargas is at second, while rookie Trey Lipscomb stays at third. Catcher Keibert Ruiz is serving as the designated hitter while Riley Adams sets up behind the plate to catch the Nats’ own lefty starter in MacKenzie Gore.

“It wasn't that hard of a decision, it really wasn’t,” Martinez said ahead of this afternoon’s opener against the Pirates. “I want to get everybody in the game and get everybody involved. Keibert, who has swung the bat really well right-handed. Keep Meneses (in the lineup with Ruiz at DH) today. I wanted to get Riley back behind the plate today. Bump Lipscomb up a little bit because he's been swinging the bat well. He's done really well since he's been with us. But I want to get everybody involved. So we got some great options as far as if they make a switch and bring a righty in. We got some lefties on the bench. But I like the way we match up against this lefty today.”

CINCINNATI – Despite their limited action in free agency over the winter, the Nationals’ payroll has gone up a bit this year, a product almost entirely of returning players whose salaries increased via arbitration.

The Nats’ Opening Day payroll (counting 26 active players, plus five more who began the season on the injured list) is $107,566,629, according to Spotrac, which ranks 21st among all major league clubs. One year ago, that figure was about $94.5 million, which ranked 22nd.

Those totals count all money owed to players during the upcoming year, not any money that will be paid at a later date via deferrals.

The Nationals did very little in free agency during the offseason, signing only three players to major league contracts: Joey Gallo ($5 million guaranteed), Dylan Floro ($2.25 million) and Nick Senzel ($2 million). They did sign four more veteran free agents to minor league deals during spring training who wound up making the roster: Eddie Rosario ($2 million guaranteed), Jesse Winker ($1.5 million), Matt Barnes ($1.5 million) and Derek Law ($1.5 million).

All told, the Nats spent only $15.75 million on free agents, down from $18.25 million the previous offseason.

Five Orioles made their first Opening Day roster Thursday. Four of them were easy calls, anticipated over the winter or definitely late in camp.

Grayson Rodriguez was in the rotation after last spring’s surprise demotion, with the only question whether he’d be the No. 2 or 3 starter. He gets the ball this afternoon.

Yennier Cano made his 2023 debut on April 14 in Chicago, with the Orioles desperate for bullpen help, and became an All-Star setup man and backup closer. He was a lock this spring to repeat those responsibilities after the Craig Kimbrel signing.

Infielder Jordan Westburg made his major league debut on June 26 and was set for 2024, with most of his work done at second and third base but also with a chance to play a little shortstop. Outfielder Colton Cowser really had to win a job after reaching the majors on July 5 at Yankee Stadium and going 7-for-61, and he responded by batting .304 with six home runs and a 1.135 OPS in 18 exhibition games.

Cowser broke the news to the beat crew on the final day that he made the club.

Former O’s manager Buck Showalter used to say, “That’s what they look like” when describing a young player or prospect who looked like a future star.

The same phrase might have applied to ace pitchers and yesterday’s outing by the Orioles' Corbin Burnes.

“That’s what they look like.”

That’s what can happen when you get a smart pitcher with a great plan, who knows how to put away hitters, has all his pitches working and executes well. Great plan, great stuff, great outing.

For the Orioles, this Burnes addition should be, well, great.

The Orioles are 1-0, the record that really matters.

Only 161 more to go, and then more. It’s almost inconceivable that this team isn’t playing deeper into October than 2023 at the least.

I’m not using yesterday’s Opening Day trouncing of the Angels as my sole reason. They don’t appear to be very good - on paper for sure and on the field in their first regular season game. What are the odds of that happening without Shohei Ohtani?

There was a lot to unwrap from a day that began with Nick Vespi’s unexpected inclusion on the roster. I heard earlier in the day that he was summoned to Baltimore but didn’t know why until the Orioles announced that Jacob Webb went on the paternity list. So, Vespi makes his first Opening Day roster and Webb is denied his first.

Gotta admit that a baby is one heck of a consolation prize.

CINCINNATI – A season of renewed optimism ran headfirst into a brick wall this afternoon. Opening Day saw Josiah Gray get lit up by a 33-year-old journeyman, the Nationals lineup get shut down by a 31-year-old making his first start in two seasons and their starting third baseman get taken out by a pregame ground ball.

An 8-2 loss to the Reds – a game that essentially was over after three innings – was demoralizing enough. The injury to Nick Senzel might as well have been a kick to the groin, one that came 90 minutes before the season’s first pitch was even thrown.

Senzel, the former Cincinnati first-round pick who signed for a modest $2 million over the winter in hopes of resurrecting his career, was fielding grounders during batting practice when a ball struck him on the thumb. Instead of trotting out of the dugout with his new teammates in his old ballpark for player introductions, he was getting an X-ray, which revealed a broken right thumb, according to manager Davey Martinez.

"It's awful," Martinez said. "He was in a good spot, and we were in a good spot with him. He was excited for today. And then just a freak accident."

"I was warming up in the training room, and I see him roll in," Gray said. "I'm not really paying attention, but I hear him saying something happened. I feel terrible for him, because obviously the significance of coming back here - he had a long career here - and for it to happen in pregame as well, that's a tough blow for him. I feel for him."

The last game played at Camden Yards pushed the Orioles to the brink of playoff elimination. Today really was the next chapter.

Opening Day healed the wounds. Corbin Burnes was a starter who tried to provide closure.

The ballpark was packed and a chant of “Let’s Go O’s” began immediately after the anthem. Fans already erupted during player introductions, with Burnes maybe edging out Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman and Félix Bautista. The silence during the pregame “in memoriam” was broken by the image of Brooks Robinson on the video board.

This place couldn’t stay quiet for long.

Burnes’ first pitch was a 95 mph cutter for a strike to Anthony Rendon. The sixth, with the count full, struck him out.

CINCINNATI – Victor Robles is on the Nationals’ Opening Day roster for the sixth straight year. He is not, however, in the starting lineup for the first time.

Opting for what he hopes will be a better offensive matchup, manager Davey Martinez decided to start veteran Eddie Rosario in center field, with Jesse Winker in left field, for today’s season opener against the Reds.

“They’re both really good against right-handed pitching,” said Martinez, whose team is facing Cincinnati righty Frankie Montas. “I looked at the matchups, and I like the matchups. … This is the matchup I wanted to go with today.”

It’s an alignment the Nationals tinkered with during spring training, after Rosario signed a minor league deal in early March. The 32-year-old has played almost exclusively in left field throughout his long career with the Twins, Guardians and Braves, but he does have 58 games of big league experience in center field (albeit none since 2019).

Martinez, though, didn’t want to sit Winker, another mid-spring acquisition who struggled last season in Milwaukee but produced a .942 OPS in Florida over the last month to earn a spot on the team. And with Joey Gallo (a two-time Gold Glove Award outfielder) starting at first base, Joey Meneses is forced to be the designated hitter.

The Orioles' 2024 season, their 71^st season in Baltimore, begins this afternoon at Oriole Park. They start a three-game series hosting the Los Angeles Angels.

The Orioles, who are 45-25 all-time in season-opening games, have won 10 of their last 13. They won at Boston on Opening Day last year. The O's are 46-24 in home openers. 

The Orioles open a season at home for the first time since March 29, 2018 versus Minnesota (2,191 days). The O's won that game, 3-2, on an 11th-inning walk-off home run by Adam Jones. The Orioles were originally scheduled to open the 2020 and 2022 seasons at home.

The Orioles are 2-3 in the last five Opening Day games. They won eight in a row from 2011-2018.

The Orioles went 101-61 last season to win the American League East for the first time since 2014 and advance to the playoffs for the first time since 2016. The Angels went 73-89 each of the last two years. They finished fourth in the AL West in 2023 and have had eight straight losing seasons since winning 85 games in 2015.

CINCINNATI – And away we go!

Forget about anything that happened last season. Forget about anything that happened over the winter. Forget about anything that happened during spring training. It all made for great conversation and debate, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Starting today, we have actual baseball to watch and evaluate.

The 20th season of Washington Nationals baseball begins on the road. It’s actually the first time the Nats have opened on the road since 2018, when rookie manager Davey Martinez debuted with a win in … Cincinnati! This is the eighth road opener in club history, and it’s strange to think the only repeat towns during that time are New York and Cincinnati of all places.

This is also only the fourth Opening Day against someone from outside the National League East. The others: at the Cubs in 2012, home against the Yankees in the bizarre 2020 season. Among division foes, the Nationals have faced the Mets and Braves five times apiece, the Marlins four times and the Phillies twice.

The last 12 season openers have seen only three starting pitchers take the mound: Max Scherzer (six times), Stephen Strasburg (four) and Patrick Corbin (two). But today, the Nats pass the ceremonial baton to someone new: Josiah Gray, who makes his first career Opening Day start, against the franchise that drafted him in 2018 (and then traded him to the Dodgers six months later).

With all due respect to recent O’s Opening Day starting pitchers like Andrew Cashner and Tommy Milone and even Kyle Gibson from last year, this year’s starter has a resume that most O’s starters in recent years can’t touch.

Right-hander Corbin Burnes was 10-8 with a 3.39 ERA last season for Milwaukee. He won the 2021 National League Cy Young Award. Today he becomes the first previous Cy Young winner to start an opener for the Orioles since Pat Hentgen in 2001. He was AL Cy Young winner with Toronto in 1996.

Burnes said this week, which is probably pretty obvious – a regular season start is very different from one in March.

“How I prepare for a big league start, has already started, been going for a couple of days now,” he said Tuesday in the Baltimore clubhouse. “A spring training start, you kind of see the lineup about an hour before the game and you just go out and pitch it. So, now that we know who we are going to see, we can game plan a little bit. The focus isn’t on anything about how you are doing mechanically or how the ball feels, it’s going out and getting as many outs as you can that day. The mentality is definitely different.”

Burnes is pleased with a spring training that he felt checked all the boxes – from getting his various pitches ready, to building up his pitch count, to getting to know his new teammates.

CINCINNATI – The day has come. The 2024 baseball season begins later today, here in Cincinnati where the Nationals face the Reds in the opener of a three-game series. And for the first time in a while, there’s some genuine optimism surrounding the team.

Not enough optimism for anyone to predict this season will extend into October, mind you. But consider this: A year ago, four of us predicted the Nats would lose at least 100 games. This year, nobody is that pessimistic about their chances. Progress!

This is, hard to believe, the 20th season of Nationals baseball. And it’s the 15th season of Opening Day predictions by the beat crew. Most of the names have changed. Some left for a few years and then returned. All are convinced they’re smarter than anyone else in the group. Time will tell.

As always, I’m grateful to every one of them for participating in this exercise. And as always, we’ll revisit every one of these predictions at season’s end and cringe at how little we actually knew …

WHICH NATIONALS WILL BE SELECTED FOR THE ALL-STAR GAME?
Bobby Blanco (MASNsports.com) – CJ Abrams
Jessica Camerato (MLB.com) – CJ Abrams
Craig Heist (106.7 The Fan) – Josiah Gray, Keibert Ruiz
Chelsea Janes (Washington Post) – CJ Abrams
Andrew Golden (Washington Post) – MacKenzie Gore
Bill Ladson (MLB.com honorary) – Josiah Gray, Jake Irvin
Spencer Nusbaum (Washington Post) – MacKenzie Gore
Mark Zuckerman (MASNsports.com) – Kyle Finnegan

In the history of memorable Opening Days for the Orioles, having new ownership introduced is bound to surpass the snow storm of 2003.

The Angels are playing the Orioles, but also second-fiddle to the excitement generated by David Rubenstein’s purchase of the team and assuming the role of control person.

Cal Ripken Jr. will catch the ceremonial first pitch from Aubree Singletary, a fourth-grade student at Harlem Park Elementary/Middle School and the child of a Baltimore City postal worker. This is an ode to Rubenstein, who’s father held the same job.

Representatives of the new ownership group, including Rubenstein, Michael Arougheti, Mitchell Goldstein and Michael Smith, will yell “play ball” to start the game.

The baseball torch will be passed and the ballpark is gonna be lit. No amount of rain can douse it.

If there is one player on the current O’s roster that can tell the young group of talented players that will begin this new season at Triple-A instead of in the majors, how tough that can be, it is infielder Jordan Westburg.

Westburg, over the 2022 and 2023 seasons, had 714 plate appearances at Triple-A Norfolk and hit .283/.366/.533/.899.

After batting .274/.361/.508/.869 in 91 games during the 2022 season at Triple-A, he was a top 100 prospect heading into last season. Yet he didn’t begin the year in Baltimore. And he didn’t go back to Norfolk for just for a few games or a homestand or two. He didn’t debut with the Orioles until last June 26.

It was a long wait for him, but worth it to finally get to the majors and he was on the O’s playoff roster last October, playing all three games versus Texas.

But he indeed had a lengthy wait. He said in the Baltimore clubhouse yesterday that he hopes the group that was sent to the minors recently – to include Jackson Holliday, Coby Mayo, Heston Kjerstad, Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers - can look at him as someone who had a long wait to get there. But then ran with his chance when it finally came.

The Orioles won 23 exhibition games, the most in club history. Their .793 winning percentage also ranked first. And it meant roughly the same as crap.

The real stuff begins Thursday or Friday, depending on the weather.

Winning is always better than losing unless your goal is to tank. However, spring training games don’t feature the best players for nine innings. Bullpen moves aren’t usually strategic except to provide innings and work. And the results include split-squads with some of the opponents in Sarasota bringing unrecognizable names on the travel roster.

At least the Orioles’ minor leaguers were high quality. Some of the road lineups were as good or better than the home version.

Daniel Johnson and “Everyday” Errol Robinson were camp superstars because of their clutch hitting after the seventh inning. They aren’t coming off the bench on Opening Day. They aren’t jogging down that orange carpet.

From the moment they traded Max Scherzer, Trea Turner and six others in July 2021, the Nationals stopped paying attention to their won-loss record.

Managers, general managers and players can say all they want about competing every single day and believing they’re going to win far more than they lose, but deep down everyone associated with the Nats knew at that moment the organizational priority no longer involved winning percentage at the major league level.

That continued through the 2022 season, which also saw the club deal Juan Soto in the biggest trade of them all, and then through the 2023 season, even though the Nationals’ win total ultimately did improve by a healthy amount from 55 to 71.

Now, as the rebuild enters its third full season, with several core players already on the roster and several more coming soon, it’s fair to ask for the first time in a long time: Should the Nats be judged primarily by their record?

“I think we’re at a point right now where it’s wins and losses,” right-hander Josiah Gray said. “We want to improve on last year.”

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Josiah Gray first pitched in a big league camp in the spring of 2020, a 22-year-old prospect with the Dodgers who made it through only three appearances before he was sent down to the minors.

Gray was thinking about that the other day when Davey Martinez called him into his office and informed the now-26-year-old he will be starting Opening Day for the Nationals next week.

“Progress is probably the first word that comes to mind, because of how I’ve progressed through the league in the short amount of time I’ve been a major leaguer,” Gray said. “I just remember my first big league camp being with the Dodgers and getting cut, and thinking how that feeling was. And to say you’re going to be our first arm out of spring training going into the season is really cool and really surreal.”

Martinez had been leaning in this direction all winter, but the manager decided to wait to see how Gray fared this spring before making the official announcement today. In the end, the progress Gray displayed last season while earning his first All-Star selection and his continued development this spring was compelling.

“He’s matured so much since the first day I saw him,” Martinez said. “Even through the struggles of last year, he’s a lot different. Coming into camp, he’s been so much different as far as growth-wise. Understanding who he is, working on things he needs to work on, not trying to reinvent the wheel. He knows he needs to go out there and attack and throw strikes.

On Dec. 4, Jackson Holliday, the No. 1 prospect in baseball, turned 20. He was a teenager no more. The next day at the Winter Meetings in Nashville, O’s executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias let the world know the kid had a good chance to make the O's 2024 Opening Day roster.

"It's definitely a very strong possibility,” Elias said that day, getting reporters attention in stating it so strongly.

Fast forward to this spring camp and the kid that is 20 is starting to really swing it well in spring games. After getting two hits versus the Yankees in Tampa Monday afternoon, he is 10-for-31, batting .323/.344/.613/.957 with two doubles, two triples and a homer. He is 6-for-14 his last four games.

Manager Brandon Hyde said the stat sheet will be just a small part of the evaluation of Holliday. But the kid is handling everything well thus far, from opponent pitchers like the Phillies Zack Wheeler and Toronto’s Yusei Kikuchi, to every national reporter that wants his time to the fans that clamor for autograph.

He fits in well in a clubhouse where he is the young guy and the rookie and to me, he is looking like someone with a great chance to break north for the opener. Just like Elias said in December.

SARASOTA, Fla. – Announcing that Corbin Burnes is the Opening Day starter is like confirming salt content in the ocean or the negative effects of snorting pollen.

Burnes wasn’t acquired from the Brewers to work in a supporting role. The Orioles are holding an ace. He goes on top of the deck.

An elbow injury removed Kyle Bradish from any consideration. John Means might not be ready to pitch in a major league game until late April or early May, since he won’t get any Grapefruit League innings.

Manager Brandon Hyde began Sunday’s media scrum with the Burnes news, which fell considerably short of breaking status. Everyone knew it was coming, like a holiday marked on your calendar. But it still had to be shared.

Burnes was such an obvious choice that the media didn’t bug Hyde incessantly about it. His decision to make it official at that moment froze many of us like a two-strike, 12-to-six curveball.

SARASOTA, Fla. – The assumption became official this morning.

Orioles manager Brandon Hyde announced that Corbin Burnes will start Opening Day against the Angels at Camden Yards.

Who else could have received the honor?

Burnes stood on the mound for the last two openers with the Brewers, and he was the obvious choice again after the Orioles acquired him on Feb. 1 for pitcher DL Hall, shortstop Joey Ortiz and the 34^th overall pick in the upcoming draft.

“Take all the guesswork out of that,” Hyde said, smiling.