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The Nats head of player development is on the broadcast tonight. Says Susana had an mri earlier and they are just waiting on results.
Had surgery on his lat
Ugh. I just don’t trust the Nats not to screw everything up.
This is the Rizzo legacy of drafting (or trading) based on appearance, not baseball skill, and without the coaching to develop arms properly. At least Susana's one of the last his man crushes working his injured arm through the system.
Jarlin Susana had season ending lat surgery in September. He should be back at some point in early 2026.Those are the 2 and 3 prospects in the system. There were some interesting notes about Susana though. One is that he is now listed at a massive 6’7 283 pounds on the Nats media guide. The others have to do with his pitch mix. Apparently, he has two distinct power breaking balls now, a slider around 91 MPH and a curveball in the mid-80’s. Both are plus pitches. He has also developed a power changeup that sits at a crazy 94 MPH. It has the potential to be a plus pitch too. Susana just has crazy upside if he stays healthy and throws strikes. Before he got hurt, that command was getting to a decent place.
Apparently hes not expected to be ready to pitch until June?
https://www.thenatsreport.com/live-washington-nationals-game-updates/washington-nationals-2026-spring-training-live-updatesNot pitching until Summer
Who? That link didn't take me to any particular article.
Jarlin SusanaJarlin Susana who is recovering from receiving surgery last summer for a torn lat muscle, made 15 throws from 60 feet also on Thursday. The time table for his return that club officials are aiming for: sometime this summer
While he was still an amateur, Susana had a very, very late velocity spike and progressed from throwing in the mid-80s to the mid-90s in a short period of time. Because he popped up late relative to his peers, most of the pool money when he was first eligible to sign had already been committed, and he opted to wait a year so that more teams could pursue him with a meaningful bonus. The Padres signed him for $1.7 million and pushed him to camp in Arizona during 2022 minor league spring training. Susana had only pitched in eight official games on the complex before San Diego traded him to Washington as part of the Juan Soto deal.After a walk-prone 2023 and a rough first half of 2024, Susana turned a corner that June and dominated for the rest of the season. He ended up working 103.2 innings (40 more than the prior season), struck out 35.4% of his opponents, and generated groundballs at a whopping 59.9% clip. Just when Susana had nearly demonstrated the stamina and durability of a big league starter, his 2025 was defined by injury and a change to his delivery. He suffered a Grade 1 UCL sprain in early May and was shelved for two months. He came back in July and looked awesome for another month, including two dominant starts in one week against a prospect-laden Erie club (10 innings, 23 strikeouts), before Susana tore his right lat and needed surgery. At of the start of the 2026 season, his timeline for return is sometime in the middle of the summer.Healthy Susana has extraplanetary stuff. It’s easy to point to his velocity as an impact attribute — he touched 103 mph several times in 2025, and he’s always had elite velo when healthy — but it’s his slider that’s easily his best pitch. There are times when it has cutter-y movement, but it has eye-crossing downward bend at its best, in the Brad Lidge slider mold, except it’s as hard as 92 mph. It’s a slam dunk 80-grade weapon that generated misses at an incredible 58% clip in 2025. Susana’s arm slot came down throughout 2024, which changed the approach angle of his fastball compared to his time in San Diego, but his lower body is still quite upright throughout his delivery, which has kept his release height a shade above the big league average. Its possible his fastball’s bat-missing performance might keel off a bit as he faces upper-level hitters, but for now, it’s missing bats at a nearly plus-plus clip thanks to its overwhelming velocity.Susana barely used his changeup the last two seasons. It’s currently a glorified two-seamer in the 92-94 mph range. One out of every 10 or so is good, but he often casts it and it sails on him; the ones that flash have enough tailing action to miss bats. His slider has enough utility as a strike-stealer and finisher against lefties that he might not ever need a changeup, but some kind of splinker/splitter thing might emerge down the line, as tends to be the case for a lot of the pitchers today who have lower arm slots like Susana.The lack of a consistent third pitch, and Susana’s recent injury history, certainly color his forecast with relief risk. But his size, the lefty-dousing utility of his two elite pitches, and the possibility that his arm speed might eventually yield a good changeup gives him top-of-the-rotation ceiling, which is a designation we reserve for precious few prospects here at FanGraphs. Even if Susana ends up in the bullpen, we’re probably talking about one of the best couple of relievers in all of baseball
