Nationals Designate Zack Littell For Assignment

The Nationals have designated righty Zack Littell for assignment, the team announced. His spot on the roster goes to right-hander Brad Lord, who’s returning from a stint on the 15-day injured list.

Littell, 30, has pitched 112 1/3 innings this season and narrowly kept his ERA shy of 5.00. He’s sitting on a 4.97 mark with a career-low 14.6% strikeout rate and 7.3% walk rate. That’s a quality walk rate, but it’s also substantially higher than the elite 4.2% mark he’d delivered over the three prior seasons combined. Add in the downturn in an already-low strikeout rate, and it’s easy to see why Littell hasn’t come close to matching the 3.80 ERA he logged from 2023-25.

To Littell’s credit, he’s performed much better since an awful first month of the season. Despite being tagged for eight runs in a road date with the A’s in mid-July, he still has a 3.98 ERA dating back to the beginning of May. The strikeout and walk rates aren’t materially different from his season-long marks, and he’s spent much of this improved run as a bulk arm pitching behind an opener. Littell managed to rein in some alarming home run troubles he had early in the year, though that could be partly due to not having to face the top hitters in a club’s lineup as often as he did when starting a game fresh in the first inning.

Washington signed Littell to a one-year, $7MM deal over the winter after the right-hander found a more tepid market than expecting in free agency. Littell lingered on the market into March, ultimately signing with the Nats on the 10th. He’s being paid a $3MM salary, with the other $4MM owed to him coming in the form of a buyout on a 2027 mutual option. On a straight $7MM deal, Littell would be owed about $1.93MM from now through season’s end. That might still be enough for him to slip through waivers, but it’d at least be something of a borderline call. However, he’s owed the balance of his $3MM salary (about $850K) plus that buyout. With $4.85MM still owed to him, he’ll surely clear waivers.

In addition to his $7MM base guarantee, Littell’s deal contains incentives for innings pitched. Those bonuses kicked in at 100 innings. He was set to earn an extra $100K for every tenth inning from 100 through 140, an extra $250K at 150 and 160, and an extra $500K for 170, 180 and 190. He obviously wasn’t going to reach the high end of that range, but Littell had already collected $200K via incentives and had a good chance to earn an extra $550K or so simply by finishing the season healthy.

Once he clears waivers, he’ll be released and those incentives will go out the window. A new club would only owe Littell the prorated league minimum for any time spent on the big league roster. He hasn’t been all that effective this season, but he has a track record both as a fourth/fifth starter and (earlier in his career) as a decent reliever. He should latch on with another club once he hits the market, perhaps even on a big league deal with a team seeking competent, back-of-the-rotation innings.