Teams rebuild all the time. If you aren't blessed with an owner willing to spend your team cycles through times when they spend more and times when they spend less based on the talent they have. What you don't do is rebuild from a rebuild. This is what the Nats are doing and it means one simple thing :
The Nats screwed up.
So the question is where and when and like many things that are wrong it's not just one moment, but a series of bad decisions and bad luck that lead them to this point.
1) The Nats had a stretch of very bad drafts.
The Nats were never really known as a strong development team and their drafts were first pumped by the can't misses of Strasburg and Bryce, then by Rizzo's "all or nothing" strategy paying off with guys like Rendon and Giolito. But the strategy of all or nothing in a place like the draft usually gives you nothing and the Nats had very thin drafts and in the quest for a title that thin layer of talent from 2013-2016, Nick Pivetta, Dane Dunning, Jesus Luzardo, was the needed trade fodder.
Still one decent player a year can hold a org up. But the 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019 drafts were all terrible ones for the Nats. The 2018 one especially stands out with their first 3 picks and 6 of their first 7 never reaching the majors. Leaving the Nats with the emptiest of coffers when time came to rebuild
2) The Nats bet on the wrong horses / don't develop well.
You don't trade ALL your best talent and the Nats did keep guys around they liked. They ended up holding on to Austin Voth, Erick Fedde, Carter Kieboom, Seth Romero - guys that amounted to very little -while dealing guys that did something. How much of that is talent and how much development? Who was asked for and who did the Nats say were off-limits? We'll never know but they basically rolled snake eyes on the high draft picks kept around.
3) The Nats got "unlucky" with the Strasburg signing
In hindsight the way to go was to let both the oft-injured Strasburg and Rendon go and bet on keeping Trea and Max. That's hindsight. In the moment the Nats felt (and the fans wanted) them to keep one or both of these champions. The Nats bet on Strasburg and lost. Of course if they bet on Rendon they would have likely lost too. Not much they could have done here but once you sign him he's one of your tent poles for the next half-decade.
4) The Nats misread the COVID season.
A team not committed to just spending should always be prepared to rebuild as sports are fickle beasts and guys that hit .300 today might hit 250 tomorrow. The Nats though got caught flat-footed. Post Championship the Nats were looking to compete still. They had just signed Corbin and backed it up with a signing of Strasburg long term. You could see the wheels turning on how the next team would shape up. Would it involve Max and Trea? Soto? Where would guys like Kieboom, Robles, Voth, and Luis Garcia fit in?
Then 2020 happened and Stras barely pitched and Corbin was bad and Fedde wasn't progressing and Voth seemed outmatched and Robles regressed and Kieboom looked like he was dropped on a baseball field from an alien planet. Without Rendon the line-up wasn't good enough to carry the team. Surely this was just the weirdness of the COVID season. So the Nats didn't see a pitching staff that simply didn't exist anymore and didn't rebuild right then and there. Instead waiting a year and seeing what 2021 would bring
5) The Nats blew the Max/Trea trade along with several others in 2021
Halfway through 2021 and obviously not a real contender anymore because the staff was basically just Max, the Nats decide to pull the trigger on the Max/Trea trade. They sent them off to the Dodgers to get the core of the next great Nats team, potentially built around Juan Soto (but likely not). In came a ton of minor leaguers headlined by two of the Dodgers top prospects in Keibert Ruiz and Josiah Gray.
They were legit prospects but two mid Top 100, older for prospects, guys who were more likely to be contributors than stars. Still we don't know what the Nats were offered and you take the best you can. Perhaps this was it. But the best thing they got overall was Lane Thomas* and that's not the rebuilding core you expect to have after trading away what might be two HoFers (one in his prime with time left on the contract) and a bunch of useful pieces. Just whiff after whiff here
At this point, even though they would objectively nail the Soto trade, the Nats were done. That trade became all the Nats had to rebuild with. The 2020 draft and beyond weren't barren but they didn't produce the immediate talent you'd hope for heading into what they knew at the time would potentially be a rebuild. Even the incredibly deep 2023 draft had the Nats with the #2 pick grabbing Crews who has developed perfectly well but also has not been impactful as six of the 12 players drafted immediately after him**.
There was not a bunch of guys creating stars and filling in gaps. There was one - Brad Lord. Maybe 2 if you count "defensive OF" which Jacob Young was. There maybe more coming but the timing for the rebuild when you give up in 2022 is to see a path forward in 2025, which they did. And see it start to come together in 2026, which it did not.
The Nats didn't see the issues of 2020 were real and long lasting and waited a half-season too long to begin the rebuild. Thanks to a traditionally weak drafting ability they didn't have the organizational depth to support the rebuild, creating very little talent while keeping the wrong guys. When tasked to begin the rebuild whiffed on a number of trades giving the Nats half the base they might expect and they couldn't find immediate impact guys in the draft or through international signings.
Rizzo blew it. As a bad drafter who relied on big bets paying off but a decent trader, he needed to nail all the trades to set this up or get lucky again in the draft. He didn't get lucky and he got the trades wrong at the worst time.
*Drew Millas was part of this group so I guess we can say the jury is still out. I guess.
**and four of those were HS guys
