David Peterson labors through 4 innings against Nationals in spring start

David Peterson went 4 innings against the Nationals on Sunday, allowing 4 earned runs on 5 hits, 2 walks, and 2 strikeouts. Not a disaster on paper. Not a clean outing either.

The trouble started immediately. James Wood led off with a single on a sharp line drive to center. Peterson walked the next 2 batters, loading the bases without recording an out. He got a groundout from Dylan Crews that moved the runners up, then escaped on a groundout from CJ Abrams. But Daylen Lile made him pay — a ground ball double to right scored both Wood and Jacob Young and pushed the New York Mets into a 2-0 hole before the first out was recorded. Peterson stranded Andrés Chaparro at third to keep it there. It could have been worse. It was still a messy 27-pitch first.

David Peterson Settles, Then Unravels Again

The middle innings looked like a reset. Peterson retired all 3 Nationals in the second — including a strikeout of Riley Adams on a swinging slider — and rolled through the third on 3 groundouts. The command that abandoned him in the first was back. The pitch mix was working.

The fourth ended it. Peterson got a groundout from Lile, then gave up back-to-back singles to CJ Abrams and Luis García Jr. Riley Adams followed with a 7-pitch single that scored both runners and tied the game at 4. The sequence on Adams was telling — Peterson went to his four-seam fastball 3 times in the at-bat, got fouled off twice, and couldn’t put him away until Adams hit a grounder the other way.

The number that captures the outing: 64 percent strikes. Peterson’s pitch-to-strike rate sat well below the league average threshold that typically separates passable starts from grind-it-out ones. Both multi-run innings were ignited by walks, and the fastball command that made him an All-Star in the first half of 2025 was inconsistent from pitch to pitch.

Peterson enters 2026 as a locked rotation piece — there is no real competition for his spot. But last season ended with a 12.54 ERA over his final 5 starts, and this outing carried some of the same fingerprints: walks early, fastball command wavering under pressure, and a short leash on the pitch count. Spring is for working through it. The rotation has the depth to give him time. What he needs to show is that the second half of 2025 was the outlier, not the first.