“It just, like, feels natural, and next thing you know the ball’s way back here,” Ross said, “and you can see the ball way behind.”

It’s one of the minor bad habits Ross wants to eradicate from his mechanics. The right-hander aspires to keep things simple and not overthrow. Those are standard goals for a pitcher. But they are particularly important for Ross, a 23-year-old sinker-slider specialist who depends on generating ground balls and had shoulder inflammation spoil his 2016 season.

Ross was flashing his potential every five days before his shoulder began to hurt last June. He had a 2.37 ERA and was holding batters to a .649 OPS through 10 starts; those figures climbed to 5.45 and .795, respectively, over his next six outings before he went on the disabled list. A setback in rehabilitation pushed his return to Sept. 18, affording him three truncated starts before he started Game 4 of the National League Division Series. Coupled with Stephen Strasburg’s elbow injury, the Nationals were left without 40 percent of their Opening Day rotation for long stretches of the season, inhibiting a strength they believed they could depend on.

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“The thing that I hope for the most is that we train ’em, we have proper nutrition and we start the season off healthy,” Nationals Manager Dusty Baker said. “And that was my goal last year. How you train them, hydrate ’em, do everything, leads to Opening Day. One thing, this year, we’ve got seven weeks before Opening Day.”

That’s seven weeks for Ross to work on the other phase in his evolution: the development of his change-up, the third pitch in his arsenal. Ross threw the pitch 8.8 percent of the time last season, according to FanGraphs, but Ross said he thought it was more like three percent — four or five per start. Rarely, if ever, are starting pitchers successful with just two legitimate pitches. Developing the change-up would make getting through lineups a second and third time easier.