ST. LOUIS -- If Friday felt any different to Cade Cavalli, he wasn’t showing it.
Hours after the Nationals announced a four-year contract extension that will keep the right-hander in Washington through at least 2030, Cavalli sat at his locker inside the visiting clubhouse at Busch Stadium dressed like he always does on start days.
A bright red Nationals beanie covered his head. A dark hoodie and gray sweatpants made it look as though he were preparing for a chilly October afternoon rather than a sweltering day in St. Louis. Black earbuds were in. His glove was in his lap.
Cavalli tossed a baseball into the air and caught it. Again. And again. He stopped occasionally to pound his fist into the pocket of his glove, then set it aside and flipped through the thick binder marked with his No. 24. At another point, Cavalli draped a white Gatorade towel over his head and sat motionless at his locker.
The routine was so sacred that manager Blake Butera didn’t dare interrupt it. Even on the day the Nationals made their biggest commitment to a pitcher in years, Butera limited his interaction with Cavalli to a congratulatory fist bump.
“I usually don’t talk to him when he pitches,” Butera said. “The last thing I want to do is change anything to his routine that he’s had so much success with.”
A few hours later, Cavalli showed why.
The 28-year-old tossed five scoreless innings in the Nationals’ series opening 9-1 win against the Cardinals, scattering four hits without issuing a walk and striking out six. With Washington’s offense staking him to a 9-0 lead, Cavalli’s night ended after only 73 pitches.
His final pitch provided a fitting punctuation mark. Cavalli struck out JJ Wetherholt to end the fifth, recording his 200th strikeout of the season before walking off the mound.
Cavalli knew before taking the mound that he needed six strikeouts to reach 200. By the time he got to 199, Butera could sense that Cavalli knew exactly where he stood. So could everyone in Washington’s dugout.
“You could tell,” Butera said. “There’s a little bit different demeanor out there, especially when we got the two strikes on some guys when he was at 199. … I think we wanted it in the dugout more than he wanted it out there.”
It made Cavalli the first Nationals pitcher to reach 200 strikeouts in a season since Stephen Strasburg, Patrick Corbin and Max Scherzer all did it in 2019. Friday also marked his 13th victory, the most by a Washington pitcher since 2019, and his fourth scoreless outing in his past seven starts.
The milestone arrived on the same day Washington officially made Cavalli a centerpiece of its future. His extension begins in 2027 and runs through 2030 with a club option for 2031, rewarding a pitcher who left the bump Friday with a 3.02 ERA over 32 starts in his first full Major League season.
It was a lot for one day. Butera joked that if anybody felt different because of everything surrounding Cavalli, it might have been the manager himself as he watched from the dugout, hoping Cavalli could get to 200 and then get through the night with a manageable pitch count.
Cavalli, meanwhile, kept doing what his routine has trained him to do: narrow his focus.
Butera compared Cavalli’s approach on start days to “a boxer getting ready for a big fight,” conserving his energy and becoming hyper-focused on the hitters he is about to face. That focus didn’t disappear because a contract had been signed hours earlier.
“Nothing’s gonna change,” Cavalli said. “My contract changed, but nothing’s gonna change. You know, still make the next best choice, whatever that is, and keep being a great friend and great teammate to all these guys, and just keep working hard.”
That philosophy carries more weight considering what preceded this season. Cavalli went nearly three years between Major League appearances while recovering from Tommy John surgery and navigating setbacks along the way. On Friday, he talked about how those years reinforced his belief in stacking one good decision upon another and trusting where they might eventually lead.
“It’s not a bad thing to go dream and have high expectations of yourself and hold yourself to a high standard every day,” Cavalli said. “When you stack a good day on top of a good day for a long time, some good things can happen.”
Enough of those days eventually brought Cavalli to a conversation with his wife, Maddie, his family and his agent about whether Washington was where he wanted to commit the next several years of his career. For Cavalli, that part apparently wasn’t very complicated.
He pointed to conversations with Ryan Zimmerman and what it meant for Zimmerman to stay with one organization through difficult seasons before ultimately becoming a World Series champion. Cavalli wants an opportunity to experience something similar.
“It was more like, ‘Hey, let’s do the longest deal possible because I want to be here truly forever,’” Cavalli said. “I really love this organization.”
But before the money, the milestone and five more zeros, Cavalli’s Friday began the same way so many of his starts have this season: beanie on, earbuds in, binder open and baseball in hand. Business as usual on a day where business ruled supreme.