If there are any certainties in the Washington Nationals’ clubhouse — if there are any certainties in the wide world at all — one is Lane Thomas spending more time in the batting cage than not, hitting and hitting and hitting. Dave Martinez, Thomas’s manager since August 2021, has often wished Thomas would take more breaks. Teammates have wondered how the outfielder’s arms haven’t fallen off. But Thomas’s logic follows a pretty simple pattern.
Struggling? Swing your way back into a rhythm.
Thriving? Keep swinging so the rhythm doesn’t stop.
“I love having a bat in my hand,” Thomas said toward the end of last season. “That’s really all there is to it.”
So there he was Saturday afternoon, hacking against a pitching machine in Nationals Park. And a few hours later, he was at the center of a 5-2 win over the Detroit Tigers, slapping the go-ahead hit with a two-run single in the fifth inning. He finished 3 for 4 in the leadoff spot, hitting a double in the eighth before he scored on Jeimer Candelario’s double down the left field line.
To snap a four-game skid, Candelario kick-started the offense for the Nationals (19-27) with a solo homer in the fourth; Patrick Corbin held the Tigers (20-23) to two runs in six innings while logging his 1,500th strikeout; and relievers Carl Edwards Jr., Hunter Harvey and Kyle Finnegan protected a lead that grew on RBI hits by Keibert Ruiz and Candelario.
A lot of players chipped in. But Thomas, 27, stood out because of the month he’s putting together. After ending April with four doubles, no triples, no homers and 25 total hits in 107 plate appearances, Thomas already has three doubles, a triple, six homers and 25 hits through 80 in May. With those numbers, he has added more than 150 points to his OPS.
The underlying metrics, mostly hard-hit and barrel rates, don’t suggest the offensive outburst will continue. But he’s limiting his chases and whiffs, giving himself a shot to do damage. Lately, it has shown.
“When he gets ready to hit the fastball, he’s really good,” Martinez said of Thomas, who punched his hits on two four-seam fastballs and a slider Saturday. “He’ll stay consistent, but he’s got to get ready to hit the fastball.”
“Just being consistent with an approach,” Thomas said of what’s causing his success. “Just taking good swings in good counts. I think that’s the big thing: being confident and taking your ‘A swing’ in that count instead of being a little in between on pitches.”
Unlike many of the Nationals — looking at you, Ruiz and CJ Abrams — Thomas is fairly passive in the batter’s box. Entering Saturday’s game, he had swung at 58.6 percent of the pitches he had seen in the strike zone. That ranked as the 10th-lowest rate in MLB. The major league average is 69.1 percent. And because he is not always aggressive early in counts, pitchers have a tendency to get ahead with fastballs in the zone.
Thomas has explained his thought process, recognizing it might be flawed: He is comfortable with two strikes — or at least as comfortable as he can be in counts that are statistically terrible for him. In turn, he doesn’t often feel rushed to swing, preferring to see a pitch or two to mitigate the risk of swinging at the wrong one. That can be a tough strategy, banking on a second or third solid pitch to hit. Ahead of Saturday’s game, Martinez raised an eyebrow when Thomas’s thoughts were loosely relayed to him.
“He told you that?” Martinez said, laughing, at Thomas trusting himself in two-strike counts. Thomas’s numbers deflate with two strikes in the way most hitters’ numbers deflate with two strikes. In 2022, though, he did smack nine of his 17 homers with two strikes, showing he can get his “A swing” off when the odds are stacked against him.
Against Tigers starter Alex Faedo on Saturday, Thomas fell into a 1-2 count in the first and still lined a high fastball for a single. And in the fifth, after Faedo struck him out looking in their previous matchup, Thomas dug in with a chance to tilt the score.
“The at-bat before, he punched me out on a fastball. I think I was just sitting slider early in that count,” Thomas said. “And then I kind of check-swung, and I thought I went on that [first-pitch slider called a ball]. So I figured they would repeat that pitch [in the 1-0 count]. I was just trying to get it a little up in the zone and put a good swing on it.”
Faedo did try the slider again, jamming Thomas a bit. But he was able to muscle a single through the middle that brought Ildemaro Vargas and Abrams around to score. The Nationals didn’t look back.
Despite his speed and arm strength, advanced metrics consider Thomas a well-below-average right fielder, partly because he struggles going back to the wall. To stick around, then, perhaps as a fourth outfielder if the Nationals turn the corner in the coming years, he will have to maintain steady offensive production (and ideally improve on defense, too).
Thomas has two more years of arbitration eligibility. Behind him, Washington is developing a small stable of outfielders, including top prospects James Wood (20 years old), Robert Hassell III (21) and Elijah Green (19). Since the Nationals acquired him from St. Louis for Jon Lester at the 2021 trade deadline, Thomas has been a regular on rebuilding clubs that have finished in last place. To his credit, his adjusted OPS was three points above average last season. He’s solid, if nothing much more, and is hoping to iron out the long slumps that have dotted his five-year career.
Building on this stretch is his latest chance.