Important Baseball Thoughts, Journal No. 19

In which the Washington Nationals blow it all up again, and don't have a lot of better options

1.

Let’s start with a few premises.

1a. New ownership wants “its guys” running things. Almost always true.

1b. New ownership is not necessarily better. Often true.

1c. Change for its own sake is not smart. often true.

Now:

Change for the sake of change, when a half-decade of bad decisions x bad decisions = a league-bottom roster year after year? Bro, there is nowhere to go but up.

In the case of the Nationals, I think it’s neat that new Baseball Ops Demigod Paul Toboni has an MBA. I also am gunning for my own MBA. In this case, I care less about the MBA than about the fact he has hi-level experience running one of the most consistently excellent baseball teams in the world (@ Boston Red Sox.) Great on-field product. Elite farm system. Basically, every year.

We can sit here and argue about what constitutes a great season. Is it a great year if you win 100 games and fail to win a World Series? Yes, imho. Winning 100 games is incredibly hard to do — ever — and winning a WS requires a crazy amount of luck as well as, obviously, skill. But the difference in skill between a 94 and 103 win team is microscopic. I have argued in the past that the most impressive thing is actually to win 100 games multiple years in a row; World Series are crazy volatile.

2.

Toboni inherits the third worst team in the National League (hi Rockies, hi Pirates. Sorry we’re all stuck here.) Everything about 2022-2025 sucked. We traded Juan fuckin Soto. We traded everyone. We developed nobody. We drafted like idiots, in general. Awful. Let’s not discuss this further.

3.

Skipping to the present. We have a kinda-sorta core group of players. Mackenzie Gore and CJ Abrams are on this funny edge-of-the-envelope where they are not superstars, but they’re clearly in possession of elite talents. Gore was a Cy Young-worthy pitcher for half of last year; CJ runs hot and cold. They’re 26 and 24 respectively. Teams pay ransoms for this kind of talent.

The Nationals are in a tragic nexus that’s funny in a “theater of the absurd,” or “everyone dies in the end,“ way:

-CJ and Gore have a *lot* of untapped potential,

-But their very team-friendly rookie contracts run out in two years,

-The odds of “extending” those contracts, I would argue, are miniscule in CJ’s case, and nonexistent in Gore’s case because of his agent, Scott Boras, who loves being the center of a free agency circus regardless of whether it’s good for the client or not.

-The rest of the team either can’t hit, can’t defend, or can’t pitch,

-Therefore,

-As constructed, the Nationals will not be competing for a playoff spot in 2026 or 2027 at a minimum,

-Which covers the last two years of both existing deals of the two star players,

-Which raises a simple question: what do you do with huge-upside players on nearly expiring contracts when the rest of the team is still so thin/not good enough?

Well, folks:

You trade them.

Sport in 2025 is really just a game of asset flipping. Maybe it’s always been that way.

4.

My guess? Gore and CJ are dealt.

-Gore for three players, two near-MLB ready pitchers and a younger high-upside position player.

-CJ probably gets something similar. He’s more complicated because he is a league-worst defensive shortstop, so a position change is coming for him, which affects his valuation — but 24-year-olds who can hit 20 homers and steal 40 bases don’t grow on trees. Someone will pay.

As for the Nationals? The irony is that the single fastest way to get to a point where we could use players like Gore and CJ, is by trading them for quantity and quality.

My Nats have needs at virtually every position except OF (Daylen Lile is excellent, James Wood looks like a future MVP candidate, Dylan Crews had shitty surface numbers but if you look “under the hood” he had a really tantalizing season and is, at least, a really good defensive OF.)

Deal Gore. Deal CJ. Very sad to see them go, but happy bc it will signal the new guys aren’t delusional; they know the old guys left the cupboard bare and have to reset.

Toboni talks about good decisions compounding other good decisions.

Just the other day, we traded a great reliver (Jose Ferrer) for a top-notch prospect catcher (Harry Ford.)

So let’s keep the good decisions rolling and make some moves.

-A