The Nats are where they have been now for a while which is fun and good because where they are is "about .500 and in the playoff discussion".
About a month ago we talked about the playoffs and while we'll go over that deeper in a week during the ASB I want to look at my assumptions about the other teams to see how they held up. If so, it's likely worth checking them out again the same way at that time.
Gap would grow between the Nats and Braves/Dodgers/Brewers
Was 11.5 behind ATL, 8.5 behind MIL, 8.5 behind LAD
Now 7.5 behind ATL, 10.5 behind MIL, 13 behind LAD
Well the one that matters I was wrong. Basically the rest of June was a horror show for the Braves going 4-13 to end the month. They've picked it back up recently and I still think I'm basically right in my call here that these are just better teams.
Cardinals and Phillies are likely no worse than Nats, catchable but likely to hold lead
Was 3 behind STL, 2.5 behind PHI
Now 3 behind STL, 4.5 behind PHI
PHI has shown that the horrible start was just that and they are a perfectly decent team. That plus the general advantages should keep them ahead of the Nats depending on trade deadline machinations, injuries, and general luck
Arizona and San Diego are worse than Nats and definitely catchable
Was 1 game behind ARI, 1 game behind SDP
Now 1 game ahead of ARI, 1 game ahead of SDP
Yep, these guys aren't as good.
Cubs and the Pirates are better than the Nats and might widen tiny gap
Was 0.5 games behind PIT, 0.5 games behind CHC
Now tied with PIT, 4.5 games behind CHC.
One team proved me right with the Cubs big push in June ending the month 14-4. The Pirates seemed more on par with the Nats when they faced.
Cincy is a mirage, but maybe the Marlins are real?
Was 2 games ahead of CIN, 2.5 games ahead of the Marlins
Now 4 games ahead of CIN, 3 games BEHIND the Marlins
Well look at that. Marlins are on a 23-8 run currently while whatever luck Cincy had has petered out.
The short of it - yeah those assumptions mostly held up. Really only one team surprised from what I was thinking and that was the Braves. Most did exactly what the numbers said they would and the others didn't stray that far. So yeah worth while to look again, see what has changed and where the Nats fit. But that's for a couple weeks.
The Nats have a good run into and out of the ASB. Into it's the middling Astros, the Yankees who can't hit without Judge and he isn't expected back before the ASG, and the bad A's. Out of it it's the bad Rockies and the middling Dbacks and Blue Jays. If they really are contenders for a playoff spot they'll take these 18 games and go like 11-7, 12-6. Tread water and trades of good players and a crash out to end 2026 seems more likely
Just being in the conversation is such a welcome change. I really wish Toboni had known that the hitting would improve so much and the pitching wouldn't -- just hanging on to 2 more pitchers (Bennett and Ferrer) would have made a dramatic difference in the team's record.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame but I can't blame him. What happens in the next 30 days is going to be pretty big. I assume Toboni has a plan that he is going to stick to unless the Nats do something silly like go 15-3 in the games I talked about. Question is how much is that going to hurt? If the Nats hold their ground go 10-8 and are 56-53 and 2 games out of the WC and they trade CJ? or Garcia?
ReplyDeleteI’m just an anonymous commenter, but from my vantage point trading CJ would be a bad idea. Obviously he’s a good hitter and he’s pretty young. He’s fun to watch, seems to have a lot of personality (in a good way), and the young fans I know as a father of a big baseball fan just love CJ. I think trading him away loses more than just his baseball skills. I know baseball is a hard numbers game and that at the end of the day money talks, but more than a few fans would be very sad to see him go.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree with both Kevin and Harper here. A lousy team doesn't need good relief pitchers, even ones with four years of control, so why not trade him to shore up a position of desperate need with a high-end prospect? An MLB-ready prospect who projects as a #4-5 at best is well worth taking a plunge on a guy who is a little farther away and needs more work but has the stuff to be a high-end performer if the breaks go right. Those trades made perfect sense on the information the team had (and, for that matter, there's no reason Ford and Perales might be exactly what we hoped we'd get out of them, a year or two down the line).
ReplyDeleteBut while Wood and Abrams's bounce-backs were perhaps predictable, nobody could have expected Keibert Ruiz to somehow become a really good catcher both offensively and defensively. Or that Garcia would start tearing the cover off the ball. Or that Toboni would pick Curtis Mead off the scrap heap and he'd be good again. Or that the rest of the lineup would hit *enough* (and with timely luck) to be worthwhile players. *Nobody* had "the literal best offense in baseball" (scoring-wise, but also first in baserunning, fourth in wRC+, second in HR and ISO...) on the bingo card for "where are the Nats now?"
The pitching staff was constructed to get through the season and maybe generate a guy or two out of the Griffin-Mikolas-Littell trio who could be traded and maybe generate another Lane Thomas, with a bullpen who wouldn't have to worry about protecting leads because the offense wouldn't give us any. Instead, we find ourself in a situation where if the Nats can keep the opponent under five runs they'd win three out of four games.
And...I don't know what happens if they keep it up. I'm sure the plan going into the season was to trade Garcia, Griffin, Mikolas, Littell, and anyone in the bullpen if they were able to get any value for them, plus Abrams if someone came along and blew Toboni away with an offer, Young, anyone else like that. Now, there's fan excitement, the team is actually competing, and there's the question of whether it's worth *buying.*
(Ironically, Jose Ferrer is exactly the kind of player the team should consider buying: quality players with several years of control. Trading prospects for rentals should be an absolute "NO!")
It's not so much that I blame them for trading Gore, Ferrer and Bennett (Well, I did and do think the return for Gore was light, so I guess I do blame them a little for pulling the trigger on that one. But the other two seemed fair to me and made strategic sense, even if I slightly preferred Bennett.)
DeleteThe mistake that I blame them for was insisting on having the lowest paid active roster in the sport, by some distance. They thought that it wouldn't matter because we'd be terrible - and we all thought it probably wouldn't matter because we'd be terrible - but sometimes unlikely things happen. And the fact that this team would probably be in the driver's seat for a playoff run if they'd spent $40M on free agents - an amount which still would have left them with a below average payroll - should be keeping Toboni up at night. That was a huge mistake and we can only hope that he's learned from it. (I should say that it's also possible that the Lerners insisted, in which case they are cheap dirtbag owners and they get the blame instead of Toboni. But one or the other or both fucked up.)
I'll never understand how the "wow, the new regime has this team overperforming!" circle can sustain the "boy, they fucked up" square. I think that there's a reasonable chance that $40M on free agents would make this a better team. IF the right players were interested in coming to a team expected to lose 95+ games and IF those players stayed both healthy and good going forward. There's also a reasonable chance that spending money would NOT have produced a better team. In which case we'd be bitching about how they "might as well have set money on fire." On the bright side, we get to be angry either way.
DeleteI'd say it's very simple. Tactical successes don't excuse strategic failures. The organization intentionally underfunded the MLB product on the logic that success was impossible so why waste money to hurt their draft position. The fact that success wasn't actually impossible blows it all up.
DeleteWhat I'll never understand how you conflate "some FAs get hurt or play badly" with "signing free agents is a wash in aggregate, so fans should never complain about ownership".
Finally, I obviously can't speak for any other fans, but I will never be upset with a team for setting money on fire unless they're up around the luxury tax or something where there might be actual budget constraints. Efficiency matters at that point, but it should not matter to a team like the Nats. Even if you fail, trying to win is way way better than not trying to win, and it should be the bare minimum that we demand from the team.
Discontinuity is always going to be the risk when you change horses in mid-stream. Toboni wasn't hired buy into Rizzo's vision. A lot of his early action suggested a second rebuild. Injuries to key pitching prospects in an already thin farm system may have underscored to ownership the importance of system depth at the expense of near term competitiveness. One can only speculate whether Rizzo might have anticipated this year's improvement at the plate, and signed pitchers accordingly.
DeleteIt's also important to consider that NO ONE saw any of this success coming. Not the organization, not the public, not the baseball press. The Nationals sit here in July with a winning record and Fangraphs assigns them a 6% chance of making the playoffs and their models predict them to play .448 ball for the rest of the season, a percentage better than the records of only the Royals, Angels, Mets, Giants, and Rockies. The Nationals' success thus far is basically a 90th percentile outcome, the equivalent to drawing to an inside straight at poker. Which, it's certainly nice if it happens, but you don't bet the house on it.
DeleteThe only players on the team that anyone had any expectation *might* be good were Wood, Abrams, Lile, Gore, Ferrer, and possibly Cavalli, and of those only Lile ended 2025 actually in a good place--Wood, Abrams, and Gore had massive second-half crashes, Ferrer underperformed his peripherals all year (partly thanks to lousy Nats defense), and Cavalli was a prospect about to start his first full season.
We castigate owners like Dick Montfort and Arte Moreno for their bitter refusal to admit that their teams are lousy and that they should sell assets and rebuild their farm systems, rather than clutching to their few good players, throwing good money after bad, and wasting whole seasons. The Angels are running a payroll of $175M per Sportrac!
The organization can only act upon the information that it has, and every bit of information that was actually available suggested strongly that throwing $40M at the Nationals' roster would, maybe, turn a 60-win team into a 65-win team. If they were lucky and got good results. Instead, the front office elected to tear down and rebuild the minor league coaching and player development pipeline basically from the ground up, sold off expiring assets in exchange for restocking the farm system with players that have, to this point, performed well (as have many of the returning players, such as Eli Willits and Seaver King).
Now, it's important to keep in mind this defense only works when the team is awful. If the team keeps up its performance through the end of the year (not necessarily by W-L, but I mean that players like Wood, Abrams, Mead, Ruiz, Cavalli, and Beeter don't fall off down the stretch, and that others like Ortiz and Perales who may get a shot in the majors perform respectably), then the perspective changes. (This of course assumes that we actually have an offseason...or a season...at all; the lockout and CBA fight that are sure to occur interferes with reasonable analysis.) At that point, ownership needs to open its wallets, whether it's to try to extend young talent like Wood or Abrams if possible, or to bring in free agents (especially on the pitching side, where merely adding arms of moderate quality to replace the Loveladies and Parkers and Perezes and so on would be the easiest way to improve the team in a cost-effective way). If they stand pat and do nothing if the Nats finish around .500 in the way they did after 2024, then any and all criticism of ownership as being cheap would be justified.
I still think Toboni has a pretty strong prior in favor of selling at least the rentals but I agree with Harper that he'll wait until the last minute to do anything committal. And the biggest thing - other than the team continuing to win enough games - is that the wild card standings keep opening up and adding clarity. It's much better to be one of 5 or 6 teams fighting for for 3 spots than to be one of 8.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I would sell high, and dangle Griffin and Garcia at deadline. CJ is the face of the franchise, so use the (potentially very long) off season to extend him. The 2027 labor impasse clouds everything. It should be our break out year. But the idea of splashing big on aging stars when they might not play in their highest value year isn't attractive.
ReplyDeleteLosing games next year because of labor problems is exceedingly unlikely. There is just too much money on the table for either side to let that happen. Right now, fans are overreacting to the initial posturing phase, where the two sides are usually far apart, as indeed, the owners and MLBPA are right now.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, a lock-out is almost certain. My assumption is that the lockout will divide the baseball world between "the haves" who can afford to make mistakes before December 1 and the "have nots" who are likely to wait and see the new rules when an agreement is signed in February/March 2027.
Given the abysmally low state of the Nats payroll, the size of the DC market, and the increased fan support for a team with stars and a future....the Nats have the ability to play before and after the lock-out. I believe the new management team has the capability to win both the before and after phases. The question is whether ownership understands this is the time to start spending serious money.
I heartily disagree about losing games next year being "exceedingly unlikely". The two parties are much, much further apart than they were for the previous lockout in 2022. The fact of the matter is that a salary cap/floor is inevitable and is a dramatic change to how the league currently operates. I just don't see a world where the lockout doesn't cost the league some games, considering that the last time a salary cap was proposed resulted in a World Series cancellation and, coincidentally, preventing the Nats predecessors a chance at a ring
ReplyDelete