Dreams can come true, even when things seem to be at their lowest point. It just takes time to get to a high point from the lowest point. Divers know that as their norm, and so do mountaineers. Elite athletes on teams, aren’t used to low points. Is everyone rowing in the same direction is why you need a skilled coxswain. In baseball, coaches and especially the manager assume the coxswain position in the dugout. Those coaches better have a positive impact. Don’t believe for a second “It’s never on coaching.” It’s on everyone, and that’s why the Washington Nationals had to part ways yesterday with two good men.
Davey Martinez was the only manager who could have taken the Washington Nationals team from 19-31 to the World Series win in 2019. You can say “only” because he was the only manager to pull off that feat in baseball history. He and former GM, Mike Rizzo, and ownership got the job done. But since 2019, it has been nearly six seasons of failures that the cliché messages just fell on deaf ears. The “Go 1-0 today” mantra became annoying. Martinez was no longer effective as the manager, and it showed in his demeanor. He looked like a man defeated, and you just hoped he was healthy as he moped around the dugout.
The smartest thing principal owner Mark Lerner said in a while was a truth that they believed “a fresh approach and new energy is the best course of action for our team moving forward.” Whether or not they get that in new interim manager Miguel Cairo and interim general manager Mike DeBartolo is to be seen.
Rebuilds are tough. But this year was supposed to be about improvement and a focus on winning coming off back-to-back 71-win seasons. Maybe they would be emerging from the rebuild. But lately, the team lacked fire, and normally TalkNats stays on the positive but we had to break our silence, and on May 11th we went to the dark side with what obviously pissed off Davey and others. We wrote a sub-tweet responding to a tweet and had no idea that 112,000 views later it went viral and deep.
The following game, the MASN crew lightly touched on the tweet without mentioning it directly, and they tried to show Davey in a positive light as they tracked him in the dugout. But when some outrageous calls were made by the umpire, and they panned to Davey, he was shown with no engagement. That was the typical more than one player told us in the past. Some said Davey was “checked out.” One source said he was dealing with medical issues. Who knows what to believe. Martinez had a choice to resign or take a leave of absence if the job was too much for him and his health. So much of the goodwill he built up from the 2019 World Series win was lost. He went out on a low point, and the calls were getting loud to fire him. Not from us, but throughout social media.
Things were different for Rizzo as the star executive who took the beleaguered Jim Bowden’s place as the GM after the 2008 season. Rizzo had eight years of winning on his resumé. They say to leave the place better than how you found it, and Rizzo did that, Martinez didn’t. Rizzo took over from Bowden after the dismal 2008 season with 102 losses and a terrible farm system and outlook. This 2025 team has much more of a star core than that 2009 team of Ryan Zimmerman and Jordan Zimmermann and a bunch of filler, who were playing a part to bridge the team in a rebuild to get to better times, and Rizzo got the team there.
That 2009 draft yielded Stephen Strasburg as the No. 1 pick, and the team had their future ace. Those who were there when Zimmerman greeted Strasburg on the day he signed his contract were witnessing that moment not knowing that 10-years in the future they would hoist a World Series trophy together.
Embed from Getty ImagesWhile DeBartolo was part of the 2019 celebration, you hope he is focused on what makes winning teams special — and it starts with people. Real people with different roles and backgrounds and cultures, and sizes and shapes. As Zimmerman said, “You always knew that the person behind you would get the job done.” That keeps you grounded that nobody is expected to hit a 6-run homer. Everyone just needs to row in the same direction, and you can get there if you have those types of teammates.
If you have ever played successful team sports, you know what that all means. There is a team chemistry that works. The 2019 team was not the best team as far as star quality that Rizzo ever assembled. But they sure had plenty of stars.
Yesterday, two Washington Nationals were named All-Stars. MLB requires a minimum of one player from all teams to have a representative like in 2023 when Josiah Gray was named as the lone team All-Star with his 3.41 ERA. If you just go by WAR in that 2023 season for National League pitchers, Gray ranked 49th. This is not the same situation with James Wood and MacKenzie Gore as 2025 All-Stars. They have been elite. They already have higher WAR today than Gray had for his full 2023 season. Even CJ Abrams was All-Star worthy. It’s that the field is deep, and Abrams is 4th in WAR among NL shortstops. The point is, DeBartolo takes over a team with three legit stars. But a team needs more solid players to surround those elite players.
The issue is the team only has 11-players who would rank as 1/2 win of WAR or better as we extrapolate for a full season — and only six players who would be worth +2.0 WAR or better for the full season. This is a top heavy roster.
Who Is To Blame?
A couple of weeks ago, Martinez was asked that question, and he gave the infamous quote “It’s never on coaching.” Of course the correct answer is that the blame is shared between ownership, the GM, the manager, the coaches, and the players.
Ownership didn’t provide enough money or the right guidance because the offseason of spending was a disaster as you can see by the WAR. Three of the offseason signings were gone by Game #60, and several more are in negative WAR. To quote Andrew Ross, “It was subtraction by addition.” And these weren’t your garden variety dumpster dive signings. There was $6 million to Josh Bell, and the $14 million deal to Trevor Williams over two years, and $3 million to Lucas Sims, and $9 million to Michael Soroka, a pitcher who lacks stamina to get through the opposing lineups more than twice with much success.
Bad choices on player acquisitions were worse than the total budget if you really want to hear the truth. Most of you don’t. There are those who think if Rizzo had $70 million to spend instead of $50.2 million that he would have done better. Okay, common sense seems to make that logical thinking, but if you spend the next $20 million on the same types of players, how are you going to do better? What was the plan? The offseason acquisitions were built on quantity over quality. Maybe more than Gleyber Torres said “no” to being acquired by the Nationals. That is possible. Torres was the only name leaked as far as a player who turned down the Nationals in the offseason.
At some point, you have to hope that DeBartolo goes for quality in future acquisitions. The team has many needs for the 2026 season. The team desperately needs a No. 1 catcher, a middle infield upgrade, and maybe a first baseman if Nathaniel Lowe can’t turn his season into a net positive to make him worth $13-$14 million for next year. The team will need to replace closer Kyle Finnegan who is a pending free agent after the season, and the team really needs a top of the bullpen fireman type of reliever. Yes, the team could use a top-of-the-rotation starting pitcher, but is there enough payroll to fill all of these needs? That’s the question ownership has to answer in action, and not in words. Get it done.
Let’s face it, the defense is last in the majors, the bullpen is last in the majors, and no team has made more outs running the bases. So who’s the blame for all of that? Luis Garcia Jr. has declined in defense, and Lowe hasn’t been much more than league average, and Abrams at times just misses balls he needs to glove. The Nats’ catchers have the worst combined defense in MLB. The bullpen was built by Rizzo with few proven arms. How do you sign a player like Sims who had a 5.23 FIP and was lucky on BABIP last year? He had a 5.5 BB/9 last year. Why did you sign him? It felt like self-sabotage. You would have been better off not spending that money. Same with many of the signings.
So again, there are those who think if Rizzo had more money he could have built a better team. But there were $10’s of millions of money wasted. And the addition by subtraction began in the month of May this year instead of after the season ended.
The needs last year were one starting pitcher, a closer, a set-up reliever, a first baseman, a stop-gap third baseman, and a catcher. That’s six spots, and Rizzo didn’t acquire a catcher. If you were going to fill five spots with a $50 million budget, that’s an average of $10 million a player. You should be able to get quality with that. From the offseason signings, only Finnegan has a WAR above +0.3.
Should anyone be surprised that Bell has struggled most of the season or that Sims had a 13.86 ERA or Colin Poche had an 11.42 ERA? That was over $10 million wasted on those three. Guess what, Kenley Jansen signed a one-year free agent deal for? $10 million with the Angels. Aroldis Chapman signed for one-year and $10.75 million with the Red Sox. Right there near that $10 million average. The players were there to make an impact for the Nationals. They just weren’t signed. Maybe Rizzo tried for them. Maybe he didn’t.
So let’s say Rizzo signed Finnegan $5.7 million, Jansen $10 million, Lowe $10.3 million, and Paul DeJong for $1 million. That is $27 million, and that would have left you with $23 million to spend on a top-of-the-rotation pitcher. Maybe the Nats dodged a bullet because the free agent top starting pitchers, except Max Fried, are either injured or under-performing. A tough year for acquiring teams.
That’s the problem with signing old arms and old free agents is that there is risk, and a lot of risk. A player with a great 2024 season might stink in 2025. It happens. But a general manager’s job is to find the right pieces. And it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen for the 2024 season or the 2023 season. But again, those prior years were supposed to be rebuild seasons. And 2025 was supposed to be a year of improvement. The team has a worse record than last year at this point and time.
And some have said that the real problem is that the Nationals were not drafting and developing well for the past 10+ years as Ken Rosenthal wrote in his article in the The Athletic titled, “Nationals remain among MLB’s bottom feeders despite lengthy rebuild.” While Rosenthal cherry-picked some numbers, he wasn’t wrong about the drafting and player development issues.
It’s hard to blame the draft and development issues on a lack of money. Ownership has always paid out the tops in draft signing bonuses and in international free agency. Maybe you could say that the team didn’t spend enough on scouts. But how do we give our draft picks for the past 10-years that have out-performed Rizzo’s picks? Who decided on Seth Romero, Jackson Rutledge and Elijah Green? Who decided on Seaver King and Cade Cavalli? What about Carter Kieboom and Dane Dunning? Not even looking in hindsight, we just had players we liked better that we wrote about pre-draft or “live” as the draft unfolded. Is it too early to say that Brooks Lee will outperform Green, or George Kirby over Rutledge, or Tyler Soderstrom over Cavalli? We don’t get them all correct, we had Alex Lange over Romero. We had Anthony Kay over Kieboom.
Yes, things might have been turning around in player development, and the drafts have brought in some players of promise — but the past bust factor is there, and Rosenthal’s article probably scratched Rizzo’s teflon because nobody ever wrote negatives about Rizzo in the national news until his article. The Washington Post never wrote anything negative about Rizzo until a little over a week ago. When there was clubhouse dysfunction, it was the manager’s fault or disgruntled players where Rizzo made an example of Brandon Kintzler and Shawn Kelley. If player development was a problem, Rizzo reshuffled or fired personnel. He did the same with the draft group two years ago.
But even with all of this, the blame still has to be shared. Rizzo’s final shot on the way out the door to Svrluga was, “Navigated that ownership group for almost 20 years.” Ouch.
Ownership is on the clock
When you get rid of your general manager, you better make sure the new fix is what is needed or else any failures will get pointed back at you — and in this case, that is the Lerner ownership group.
Every time Lerner would say in the past that Rizzo would have the financial resources he needed — Lerner omitted that he would have the financial resources he needed limited to the budget. The budget is the number etched in stone, and the only one to sand blast the number and start over is someone with the last name of Lerner. That’s right, so all of the empty words mean little. Actions speak louder than words. Mark’s father, Ted Lerner, blew up his own budget in January of 2015 when he signed Max Scherzer, and the following year when they signed several more upgrades. Those were the good ole days. These past few years, the budget was the budget, and fans didn’t get the big name players they hoped for.
If there is any good news, the only bad contract on the books long-term is Keibert Ruiz‘s deal.
Building the better mousetrap
Spending usually matters because good players in free agency generally cost more. But signing starting pitchers with all of the wear-and-tear of max effort pitching is making it more difficult. This is why the Nationals might seriously consider drafting a pitcher at No. 1 on Sunday. Gore is controlled through the end of the 2027 season. The health of starting pitchers just shows why you need more depth than ever.
This is why building a bullpen is so key for teams with lower payrolls, because starting pitching so very expensive. In relative dollars, bullpen money just goes further as games are 55 percent in starting pitching and 45 percent bullpen pitching. Look how many playoff contenders have shutdown bullpens and have top defenses?
We wrote during the offseason on trying to Moneyball this team with defense and bullpen and the Milwaukee Brewers are the best example of how this is working out this season. To me, this is how you get back to basics in a rebuild by building smart with good two-way position players who give you positive WAR with the right balance of offense and defense, and then get that top of the league bullpen. That in turns make your starting pitchers look better, and then you fill in with tweaks to raise the wins.
The GM
The Nats’ new interim GM, Mike DeBartolo, has his work cut out for him. Some would say the only way is up. We will see about that. With DeBartolo and his new interim manager, Miguel Cairo, they have a chance to show it in wins.
We will see if DeBartolo tweaks pitcher usage and defense with analytic overlays, and how Cairo handles the situation. This is a tryout for both of them. There are six games against good NL Central teams in St. Louis and Milwaukee to get the Nationals to the All-Star break. We look forward to getting to see what the team looks like on Tuesday evening in Busch Stadium.
