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
30 comments:
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.
It'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?
I’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.
Yeah, 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).
But 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!")
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.
FWIW, 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.
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.)
The 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.
I'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.
What 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.
Losing 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.
On 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
It'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.
The 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 100% agree that no one saw it coming. I didn't see it coming. Even retrospect, I don't think we should have seen it coming. This is a 90th percentile outcome. Stipulated.
But an inside straight isn't runner runner quads. I wouldn't bet the house holding a gutshot draw, I'm aware that I have nonzero equity and I'm thinking about the implied odds and semibluff opportunities. I'm not unthinkingly mucking my hand.
That's my point. I'm not saying they should have gutted the farm system to trade for another team's Gore. And I'm even OK with them trading Gore and Ferrer for prospects (for Gore - I just think the deal wasn't good enough, not that he should have been untouchable). And I'm not saying they should be running a $190M payroll this season.
But spending $40M to get them up to "below average" would have given them optionality to take advantage of a 90th percentile outcome this season without sacrificing one iota of long term system building. In fact, having better trade chips to sell would have helped restock the farm in the majority of cases where we are clear sellers at the deadline.
It would only have cost money, and not that much of it, given the context. I do not understand why any fans care if the Lerners have $3.52B instead of $3.5B at the end of the season (blindly guessing those numbers and assuming increased revenues cover half the outlay). Why is that more important to you than a 10% chance to make the playoffs?
@CP---you are, of course, welcome to your opinion. I agree that the starting public positions (all we have now) are much further apart than 2022 and that the state of the game (early pandemic + lack of younger fans) was less settled. There is a perception that the players gave too much away in 2022 and will be much tougher this time. Also, this will be a more public negotiation, making it harder to reach compromises.
HOWEVER, the game is in a much different place. Salaries are up; team values are up, fans are back in the stadiums. There is a significant resurgence in the game and its economic prospects. The owners are looking at gargantuan (all-profits!) payments for two new franchises and the union is looking at more jobs and more money for younger players. Among those closest to the parties, there is a strong believe that no games will be lost..
. In the end (February/March 2027), there is just too much money to share to risk killing the game's momentum. I don't know exactly how this will resolve---aggressive players vs. greedy owners in a public test of wills is not ideal--but it will settle before anyone actually loses any money. That means before games are lost.
I do hope you're right, but people make self-destructive decisions all the time. And "there's too much money at stake" isn't always determinative.
I'm pretty certain that the players are willing to lose a season before they cave on a cap. They've seen this push coming for years and they're ready for it. Maybe they'd eventually cave, and maybe not, but it will take a lost season an a minimum.
The only question in my mind is whether the owners are bluffing. Maybe, and hopefully, they are. But they will never have a more anti-labor NLRB, so if they're thinking they'd need to have this battle at some point, it's possible they choose to have it now.
The next real-ish datapoint will be whether 2027 control appears to be discounted around the trade deadline. I had a theory that was the explanation for the light return on Gore, but I didn't see any reporting or analysis pick that up, so the simpler story is more likely - Toboni was a bit higher than consensus on Fien et al.
@SMS. Those are all reasonable thoughts. IMO most of the owners (certainly not all) are smart enough to know a cap is unwinnable. However, saying it is their highest (only) priority is a good negotiating posture.
Re: Gore. Consider: Toboni saw Gore as good but not special. In that case, Fien and three decent prospects was a good return. We always say teams should sell high, but they rarely do. The Gore trade may prove to an example.
Yeah I don't see the Gore trade as harshly as many. Fien and DFG both look to have high floors, and Rosario has real star potential depending on how he comes back from TJ. Whereas Gore has all of 0.3 WAR on the season, hardly the top of rotation arm he was always billed to be
I'm seeing Gore with 2.1 fWAR and Zips projects him to finish with 3.5, which would beat his preseason Zips (3.0), though not by a statistically meaningful amount. He looks like he's still the pitcher he was for us: an SP3 with stuff that could support better if he ever puts it all together, but without any specific indication that he's about to do so.
But, sure, if you think he's a less valuable pitcher than, say, Brad Lord, of course you love the trade.
I've never been a fan of how FG rates pitchers; their reliance on FIP over results may be better for projections, but it's not good for rating what's actually happen. I'll note that even on FG if you toggle to RA/9 WAR Gore drops to 1.1. For years the FG reliance on FIP consistently overvalued Patrick Corbin when he was easily one of the worst starters in MLB (in 2024 they had him at +1.9 fWAR; B-R had him at -0.8 bWAR). FWIW my brother scrolled past the SB Nation Rangers (Lone Star Ball) site the other day and most of the fans posting there HATE the trade. One of their writers recently nicknamed him Mackenzie "For Five Prospects" Gore. From the posters, it seemed like if the Nats offered the prospects back 95% of the Rangers fans would say "yes, please."
SMS--interesting that you are expressing annoyance at the Nationals for the return they received in the Gore trade. I suppose you disagree with them, but suffice it to say the vast majority of Rangers fans would absolutely reverse that trade and hand Gore back for those prospects now.
A timely article on SBNation's "Lone Star Ball" (Texas Rangers site) and its comment stream underlines the point. Yesterday's article on Lone Star Ball by site lead writer Christopher Fittz has the cheerful title "46-46: Gore disemboweled as Rangers lose 13-1 to the Angels". In the game article, Christopher hangs this sardonic moniker on the former Nationals hurler:
"Meanwhile, MacKenzie “For Five Prospects” Gore allowed seven runs in five innings as Chris Young’s [Rangers GM] great hope has become the league’s worst starter among arms who have tossed at least 100 innings this season."
I hadn't realized "For Five Prospects" was now a Ranger fan call sign for Gore. Reading the comments under the article verify that yes, Rangers fans think their GM overpaid for a disappointment.
I wish Gore well, but I'm a lot happier on this side of that particular Toboni trade. YMMV
I've heard that "what actually happened" line a few times and It never really made sense to me. Why care about ERA when what "really happened" was a team win or a team loss? Are strikeouts and walks not things that "really happened"? Everything downstream of "winning the World Series" is a process stat, and everything upstream of spin rate and the like are also things that really happened
Look, I get the objection to using FIP. Obviously pitchers have some control over balls in play and they should rightfully absorb some nonzero amount of the credit and blame for them. But "0% credit/blame of BIP to the pitcher" is just demonstrably a better approximation of the pitcher's contribution than the "100% credit/blame of BIP to the pitcher" methodology that BR uses.
But, fine, let's use the 50/50 split that puts him at 1.6 WAR. That pulls him under his preseason projection, but just barely. To my eye, he's the same pitcher for Texas that he was for us, and the same one all parties expected on the day of the trade. YMMV. (And I believe you that the majority of Rangers fans are upset. I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that that datapoint doesn't affect my evaluation at all.)
I was a bit overbroad in my analysis of FIP. It's essentially what they use instead of ERA on their base WAR for pitchers. All the other stuff still counts.
If you're worried about "team win" or "team loss" results, I will note that the Rangers' record in games Gore starts (8-11) is worse than their record when he doesn't (39-35). This was also true of the Nats last season. They were 10-20 (.333) in Gore starts, and 56-76 (.424) in games that he did not. If you're concerned about about BIP results, I will note that the Rangers generally have a better defense (#11 by defensive efficiency) than the Nats have (#26), and much better than the Nats' defense last season (#29, only saved from DFL by the Rockies, who play in Coors Field).
Your Brad Lord comment makes no sense. From my perspective, I was a bit surprised that the Nats received the return they got for Gore at the time. The risk of the trade was that Gore unlocks his TOR potential before he hits free agency. From my perspective a risk worth taking (and looking better with each month that passes). YMMV, and that's OK.
I was looking at bWAR, i'm actually astonished that fWAR and bWAR are so far apart on him https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/g/gorema01.shtml
BR has Lord (0.8) with more WAR than Gore (0.3). If that's the evaluation you believe, then of course the trade looks great.
And I certainly wasn't arguing in favor of using team record - I don't even want to use ERA as a primary indicator of a pitcher's value. I was just highlighting the absurdity of constructing a binary between "stats that measure process" and "stats that measure results", which is what I think people mean when they say that BR's WAR rates "what's actually happened" and FG's rates "what should have happened."
Anyone else tired of this dumpster diving for relief pitchers? What kind of “relief” is Matt Krook providing any team he plays for? I get that matchups cloud a managers vision on who he picks from the bullpen. But when you have a lead in the 9th, why does someone turn to Matt Krook to hold it down? Because he’s LH? Poulin (LH) should have been available and hasn’t pitched since 7/5. Where was Ribalta?
Just go sign some D-III kid and put him in the 9th. He would probably fail spectacularly, but it would be a great story and he’d probably do it for a dollar. Plus he has one thing on Krook: he has never failed before at the MLB level. What are we doing here?
I have had the misfortune to be watching the Nats during the last several meltdowns. As I think Butera admitted after this last loss--rigid adherence to L/R match-ups is a bad approach. I would add, especially when your pitchers are a mix of inexperienced and inept cast-offs and not a mix of good, better, and best. Beeter looked good in the eighth and was more likely to succeed in the ninth than bringing in a lefty with no history of success. This is not hindsight--the second they said Beeter was done for the night, I foresaw disaster. Can we write this off as a rookie mistake by a first year big league manager?
I watched the collapse again tonight. Maybe Beeter couldn't have saved Friday night, but he was at least warmed up and threw 7 good pitches. He was still the better choice Friday night. They brought him in cold tonight and it was a disaster. Good relievers are supposed to come in with just a few bullpen throws and get outs---so not making excuses for tonight's sorry result.
Another bullpen meltdown last night. The MLB record for blown saves in a season is 34, held by the 2004 Rockies, the 2021 Phillies, and the 2021 Nats. This Nats bullpen has blown 27 saves so far and we’re halfway through the season. Next highest is 17 (As, CWS, DET).
League average across the other 29 teams is 12.1 blown saves. How much has this hurt the Nats? Of the 27 blown saves this year, the Nats have gone on to lose 19 of those games, managing to claw their way back to win the other 8.
So, what would an average bullpen actually do for their record? If you regress their bullpen performance to the league average, you would expect them to hand away about 8-10 fewer games than they actually did.
Adding 9 wins to their current 48-47 record would put them right around 57-38. Instead of fighting for a wild card spot, an average bullpen would have them virtually neck-and-neck with the Dodgers for the best record in the NL.
To me, the .500 record screams "sell". We aren't going to the WS with our current pitching staff. Meanwhile, the playoff hopes of the Guardians and Rays would benefit greatly from a Griffin/Garcia package. Both have the farm systems to pull it off.
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