This is not my beautiful wife - How did the Nats get here

One could say being a playoff competitive baseball team for a long time is simple.You can break it down to four steps

1. Sign free agents who are good
2. Trade for players who are good
3. Draft and develop good young players 
4. Sign and develop good young international players

But simple doesn't mean easy. Doing all these things right for an extended period of time is hard and only gets harder the longer you try to keep it going. 

These things aren't easy for the usual reasons. Projection of player performance in the future is an inexact science. Everyone is going after the same pool of players. Player performance is variable by season. And of course injuries can dramatically change performance. 

There are other reasons as well. The game works against you. The salary cap puts extra penalties on teams trying to sign free agents past a certain point. Assuming you do well and win, you are assigned a worse draft position, and history shows that expected return drops remarkably fast in the first round. You also have cross-purposes that cause you to work against yourself. If you want to win it all you may trade some long-term potential for short-term gain. 

Some teams have found ways around these issues to maintain long term success. The Yankees have simply spent money* caring less about the salary cap than other teams. The Rays have dismissed the cross-purpose of trying to win it all and never trade for now hoping simply getting in will eventually lead to a title. The Dodgers have seemingly managed, at least in recent years, to do all four. But all teams are trying and few teams can make it happen. It's very hard to maintain.

Even so simply drafting lower, trading away some young players, and having less money to spend shouldn't damn a good team to become bad. Often, just as success is a mix of good decisions, good luck, and good timing, having it fall apart is the opposite. We're going to take a look at how that happened for the Nats, just like we looked out how it came together in the first place (way back pre-2015) That initial combo of good things led to an amazingly successful and YOUNG team which helped set up not only the first 2012-2015/6 window but the subsequent 2015/6-2019 one as well.  Hopefully this combo of bad things won't necessarily lead to another stretch of failure after this initial run. 

So to be good you need to sign the right FAs. The Nats managed to do that before 2019 with success.  I think I got all the 3+ year contracts here and they are a bunch of winners. (I looked at 3 year deals bc 2 years deals are an annoyance but they shouldn't really derail any plans for your team in terms of payroll. You might have to eat it for a year but that's it. Any team should be able to do that for a greater good)

Nats FA signings -

• Werth 2011 (7/126)
• Gio 2014 (3/? too lazy to tease it out extension with options  but it was at least 3 extra years)
  
• Zimmerman 2014 (6/100)
  
• Scherzer 2015 (7/210)
• Kelley 2015 (3/15)
  
• Murphy 2016 (3/37.5) 
• Strasburg 2016 (7/175)

More worked than didn't. Max is in the top FA signings of all time. Werth went back and forth but in the end amazingly was worth it. Gio and Murphy were worth more and lots more than paid. 

Even the ones that didn't work weren't too bad. Unless 2022 goes in a different way than I think Strasburg won't be worth it over the course of this deal (and would opt out setting up a new deal) but he was worth almost 2/3rd of it in the first 3 years alone. Zimmerman wouldn't be worth it because of injuries but outside of 2016 he gave the Nats something every year. Kelley was good in 2016 and usable in 2018 before the trade. There was no complete losses here.

Just as important were the contracts offered that the players didn't take. Here's where you see the luck factor in.

• Prince Fielder 2012 (6/???) - ending up signing for 9 years, one great year 2012, one full season after 2013, career ending injury
  
• Desmond 2015 (5/89.5) - would be bad the next season, played decently on a modest 1yr deal with the Rangers, got a ton of money from the Rockies and was bad.
• Zimmermann 2015 (5/105) - immediately hurt, never was good again.
  
• Zobrist 2015 (4/60) - two good years sandwiching a bad one, hurt and barely played in the 4th
  
• Ramos 2017 (3/30) - two average seasons, one good one
  

So maybe Ramos would have been worth it over the time but no one else comes close. That's four big time deals that the Nats offered, the players rejected, and the Nats were clearly better off for it.

Now let's look at the more recent deals. Again - this isn't about winning a title here. We are trying to find out why the Nats are bad now. So some of these decisions you might make knowing what you know even if they don't help in the long term

The Nats have pretty much struck out in their last 3 long term signed deals.

• Corbin 2019 (6/140)
• Harris 2020 (3/24)
• Strasburg 2020 (7/245)

Injuries have laid Strasburg and Harris low and it's difficult to imagine either of them pulling anything close to what their contracts were worth out of the hat now.  It's hard to see them giving the Nats much of anything at all in fact. After a promising start for Corbin in 2019 - he looks to have potential to disappoint over every other year of the contract. We can reserve judgment of course but his 2020 #4 and 2021 #5 isn't helping much at all. Part-time good (like Zimm) is better than full-time blah.**

And the contracts they offered but the players didn't sign?

• Bryce 2019 (10/300)
• Rendon 2020 (7/210) 
  
• Turner 2020 (6/100)

Whatever you think of Bryce he's been worth it over 3 years so far and he's barely older than Ross, Fedde and Turner. He's likely to be worth it for most of the contract. He certainly would have helped them be better the last couple of years. Rendon the jury is out but early indications are the injury bug is back for him and the Nats will have dodged a bullet. Turner of course is WAY too early to judge but him refusing the contract did put him in line to be traded, so while he was helping the Nats he was also setting up the sell as much as poor play by his teammates were.

The Nats couldn't miss with FAs until they couldn't hit. And rolling snake eyes with FAs is a good way to get bad fast. It's hard to develop players and on some level you have to see what you get from the youth and then target and fix the holes with FAs.  If you sign bad FAs not only are you not fixing the holes you set out to fix, you don't have the money to try to fix anything else.

Tomorrow we'll go through another aspect of where the Nats have put themselves in this position, this one by choice. Trades!

*A fortuitously timed missed playoff and reliever sell-off helped out as well. 

** Although full-time average is underrated.