Povich had some command issues in this one. He allowed home runs to Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt on pitches that were literally right down the middle and was around the heart of the plate far too often. Otherwise, he was missing badly with his secondary pitches, especially his changeup and curveball. Povich needs some semblance of consistency from those pitches to get right-handed batters out, but they combined to force just one swing-and-miss and zero swings outside the strike zone. Alas, he’s lined up for a two-start week coming up against the Twins and Angels.

Povich struck out five batters on the night while issuing only one base on balls. After getting obliterated by the Reds in his last outing, Povich showed once again why he’s such a highly regarded prospect in this one, baffling the Nationals’ hitters for most of the evening and generating plenty of weak contact. The lone tally against him came on an RBI single by Josh Bell in the second inning. Povich got eight whiffs on 87 pitches on the night, posting a CSW of 34 percent. Assuming that he doesn’t get replaced in the rotation by Kyle Gibson, he’ll look to further improve upon his 5.04 ERA and 1.72 WHIP when he takes on the Yankees at home on Tuesday.

Elly De La Cruz, Jeimer Candelario and Matt McLain all homered off him. Povich, now 0-2 with a 6.38 ERA, has a little more time to turn things around with Kyle Gibson still tuning up in the minors, but he’s not long for the majors at this rate. He’s completed five innings in only one of his four starts.

It was not an efficient outing from Povich, who didn’t allow much hard contact but also couldn’t generate many whiffs at all with just a 13 percent whiff rate and 26 percent CSW. His new changeup continues to struggle to find the zone, and it’s hard to be overly excited about the left-hander even though he has a 3.60 ERA on the season. He could be a decent deep-league streamer against the Reds next week, but the strikeouts just haven’t been there.