Washington fired general manager Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez on July 6<\/a>, said the club will see how things unfold in the next couple weeks before making any further decisions.<\/p>\n\u201cOne of the things that attracted us to Eli was how motivated he is, his work ethic, how focused he is,\u201d DeBartolo said. \u201cI love that about him. Certainly, I\u2019m not going to put any timelines on anybody. He hasn\u2019t stepped on a pro field yet, but I love that that\u2019s his outlook and we\u2019re certainly going to do everything we can to make that possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Willits recalled how he would make sure he was in the stands whenever Aaron Judge took batting practice during his father\u2019s stint with the Yankees. Another member of the New York organization at the time was Miguel Cairo, who is now the Nationals interim manager and was familiar with the new No. 1 pick almost a decade ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat made me feel really old,\u201d Cairo said.<\/p>\n
Willits joined Stephen Strasburg (2009) and Bryce Harper (2010) as the only players selected No. 1 overall by the Nationals.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m grateful for the opportunity that the Nationals gave me,\u201d Willits said. \u201cNot many people get to come up here and be the No. 1 overall pick.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP MLB: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/MLB<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Eli Willits didn\u2019t want to waste time before signing his first pro contract. The 17-year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[4260,1558,7845,7840,3506,3505,9091,4050,7949,9090,8640,8641,21086,7838,363,2008,10600,7837,99,7843,12304,5148,2331],"class_list":["post-23514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-aaron-judge","tag-baseball","tag-bryce-harper","tag-dave-martinez","tag-dc-wire","tag-district-of-columbia","tag-eli-willits","tag-high-school-sports","tag-jackson-holliday","tag-ken-griffey-jr","tag-maryland","tag-md-state-wire","tag-miguel-cairo","tag-mike-debartolo","tag-mlb","tag-mlb-baseball","tag-mlb-spring-training","tag-reggie-willits","tag-sports","tag-stephen-strasburg","tag-va-state-wire","tag-virginia","tag-washington-nationals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}