The Nats signed Jorge Lopez over the weekend to a 3 million dollar deal. It's fine. Simillar to deals in the past for the likes of Dylan Floro the Nats are picking up someone in his early 30s who had some success in the past hoping that they can recapture that.
The gamble on Lopez is a little bit different than on Floro. Floro had an off year before signing with the Nats but had been good pretty much every year before that, and had good fancy stats in 2023. You were making the solid bet that the fancy stats and history were right not the one year aberration in ERA. Lopez, pitched pretty good last year, but has a limited history as a reliever that is a bit spotty with some bad fancy stats at times. You are making the slightly less solid bet that 2023 was the aberration and 2022 and 2024 were real. As I say - still solid as Lopez is a couple years younger and just had a pretty good year.
Basically Jorge Lopez was Kyle Finnegan last year so this represents a lateral move there with significant cost savings. Good for Rizzo.
But of course we've said Kyle Finnegan isn't really all that good. Very consistently better than average but that's about it. So replacing him with him isn't making the pen that much better, it's just inching it back to where it was last year which was meh.
It's a good move. It makes the Nats better than they were the day before. However unlike a move like Lowe, it's not making the Nats better than they were in October. We've said they are probably down to RP moves. They should be making the pen significantly better than last year. Something that can be done fairly cheaply with a bunch of pretty good but not great arms taking up every spot. If everything else is over in FA, let's do that at least.
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I mean...I feel like Lopez has the potential to be meaningfully better than Finnegan, who's spent his entire career being slightly better than he "ought" to be, but with the risk of the one poor year (2023) dangling there saying, "what if this happens again?" But it's still a relief pitcher on a one-year deal; it's not like when Rizzo traded for Kintzler, Madsen, and Doolittle with the anticipation of having good bullpen pitchers not just for this year but in the future. And maybe one year is all that a guy like Lopez should be getting.
But ultimately, the issue is that the Nats look like they're rolling the dice on Wood, Crews, Abrams, Garcia, Ruiz, Gore, Herz, Parker, Gray, Cavalli, House, maybe some others becoming good-to-great players, and if they're not, there's no plan B. Lowe is the only player added to the team this offseason who's more than a gap-plugger, and even he's only here for two years. The problem is that Rizzo isn't building a team where some of the young talent needs to develop, he's built a team where ALL of the young talent needs to hit the upside or we're looking at 75-ish wins again. Yes, we're not looking at Jesse Winker, Eddie Rosario, Nick Senzel, Joey Menenses and Joey Gallo all starting at the same time, and that definitely feels like year-over-year progress. They've been replaced with Wood, Crews, Tena, Bell, and Lowe, and nobody could argue that that's not an improved lineup over 2024. But...it just doesn't feel like the Nats are trying to pursue success. There aren't any veteran players here who are here to be part of the long term, and that doesn't feel good. I can't speak for anyone else, but I felt like that now that the kids were here: Wood, Young, Crews, Abrams, Garcia, Ruiz in the lineup; Gore, Herz, Parker in the rotation, it felt like 2011, time to make a move that said "we're contending now" and instead we got more shuffling around the edges and some penny-pinching. (I mean...yes, Kyle Finnegan wasn't going to be worth the estimated $8M he'd get in arbitration, but the Nationals haven't spent anything like enough where *not* spending $8M on him--for one year, mind--made any sense. That's the move you make if you're scraping the luxury tax line. There was plenty of budget to keep Finnegan AND sign Lopez to replace Garcia.)
For this year this definitely looks like the plan. The question would be - Is management simply a year behind where we think they should be? If they are that means instead of last year, this is the "young player evaluation year" which would (could?) be followed by a burst of FA spending / trades to make the team a viable contender NEXT offseason. A bit disappointing to go through another year of not really trying but in the end the Nats will be where fans want them to be. If they aren't though, then they are just keeping costs down hoping that nearly all goes as well as possible and if not, may not have a plan to make the team a contender this go around.
Even though I would have made a Werth like signing before LAST season, I think it's still reasonable to ask this question. After next off-season I won't.
As I’ve said before I think the team is further away than Harper thinks, especially given the strength of the NL east (3 easily top 10 teams in MLB, and close to top 5). So even if we do hit on a lot of the young guys (which I am iffy on betting on especially given the recent history of the organization in development) there’s still quite a jump needed to also overcome the strength of schedule difficulty from within the division.
The Lopez move is more of what we've seen all offseason. In isolation, all these signings are fine and some are maybe even good. They all seem like efficient ways to improve the team. But that doesn't explain why the team cares so much about efficiency with $120M payroll.
It is possible that for each individual top-30 FA there's a reason on their side or the team's why a deal doesn't make sense. It's also possible that Rizzo swings a big singing or a trade and the team looks meaningfully different come April. But the simplest explanation is that this version of the Nationals is trying to keep spending as low as possible.
If 3 or 4 of the young good players become great players, it might be enough. But the right way for the team to handle this offseason was to buy a couple of great players and only need to develop 1 or 2, so I'm pretty disappointed at this point.
@Sheriff -- The problem with that rationale is twofold. One is that it leads nowhere - I think you'll grow old and die waiting for Cohen get bored with his new toy or for Atlanta's board to decide they'd make more profits rent-seeking from the bottom of the division . Maybe the Phillies age out of contention and have to suffer a 3-5 year rebuild like we've been going through, but they won't go quietly, and as we ourselves saw back in 2015/6, it's not impossible to retool an aging contender and skip the rebuild.
My second problem is that it seems to buy into a binary version of success that doesn't at all line up with my fan experience. I would enjoy the year a lot better if we were an 84 win team that's eliminated from the WC in late September, than if we're a 74-win team that's showing incremental improvement but still fundamentally non-competitive. I want to make the playoffs, and I want to win another world series, but I don't understand the championship-or-bust perspective. Next season, I'm going to spend probably hundreds of hours watching this team play, thinking about them and discussing them. The better the team is, the more enjoyable that is. And that doesn't only kick in when you make the playoffs.
@SMS Absolutely. Obviously, a championship is the goal, but ultimately, these rebuilds aren't enjoyable as a fan. I'm tired of August running around and the only thing I care about being if Players X and Y are doing well. And the fundamental issue is that I don't feel like Nats management is actually *trying* to field a competitive team in 2025, and they're also not trying to lay the groundwork for fielding one in 2026 apart from "hope all the kids play well." In 2022, that made sense. Now, not so much!
I mean...contrast the Rays. They play in a viciously difficult division with perennially high spenders and massive financial limitations, and yet they do their damnedest to field a competitive baseball team every year. They don't always succeed (like this past year, where injuries when through their starting pitching like a scythe through wheat stalks), but their goal is always to play winning baseball even while they confront their budget problems.
Totally agree, this is about financial control and continuing to assess the kids. Disappointing, as I think we were all wishing for more of a 2011 - 2012 feel to the start of this season.
The difference this year compared to 2011 is that the Nationals don't have an owner who worked at Griffith Stadium as a kid, and who really really wants to see them win. I suspect that while Ted Lerner was willing to spend (somewhat) to see glory, his kids are less invested in that. Especially as they already got to be part of that.
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