by Andrew Lang
by Andrew Lang
The Washington Nationals officially named Michael Johns as the team’s bench coach. This was announced by manager Blake Butera this afternoon. With this hire, Johns, 50, becomes the first coach officially added to Butera’s staff. The pair has known each other from working together in the Tampa Bay Rays’ organization.
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Introducing a new feature that Ghost/Steve came up with. Similar to our Point-CounterPoints, but different in that we don’t respond to each other. Instead we change our plan based on what others have said or some have gone and stuck with their original plans.
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Whether you use statistics or visual observation, the Washington Nationals bullpen in the 2025 season stunk. They were putrid, rotten, and embarrassing at times. It was the worst in Nationals’ history — and that’s saying a lot given some horrific seasons in Nats’ history. The prior administration just struggled to build good bullpens — even in the 2019 World Series season. Sorry for giving you those flashbacks to Mr. Infinity aka Trevor Rosenthal, Kyle Barraclough, and others.
Even if you believe the best laid plans can go awry, the 2025 bullpen was never planned well. It was an after-thought on a collision course with disaster in the offseason. Anyone with baseball sense knew that when the plan was to rely on Lucas Sims (13.86 ERA), Colin Poche (11.42 ERA), and Jorge Lopez (6.57 ERA) that the plan was destined to fail. They were three of the four offseason free agents signed with only Kyle Finnegan (4.38 ERA) working out. By the way, Finnegan went to the Tigers in a trade and pitched in 16-games and improved to a 1.50 ERA. That itself was an indictment on how bad things were in Washington. So part of it was the player himself, part was the bad defense, and much of it was the coaching and bad decisions.
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Today was a big roster purge day for the Washington Nationals as they pared their strategic 40-man roster this afternoon to 34-players. They actually DFA’d three players and added back four injured players per the rules for those on the 60-day IL.
In fact, two of the DFA’d players, pitchers Zach Brzykcy and Ryan Loutos, were claimed by other teams. And the third DFA’d player, infielder Trey Lipscomb, was outrighted to Triple-A. For now, Josiah Gray, DJ Herz, Drew Millas and Trevor Williams are all back on the roster — but expect Herz and Williams could go back on the 60-day IL before the start of Opening Day on March 26, 2026.
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The vast majority of the Washington Nationals players are 28-and-under making them part of Gen Z. New manager, Blake Butera, was near the end of the millennial era. The outgoing upper management group was made up of mostly “baby boomers” with a few Gen X people. Some of these players have grandparents who were born in the baby boom era. Times have changed. Get with the program they say — and don’t throw shade.
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The Arizona Fall League (AFL) went through an early schedule of postponements as monsoon storms brought golf-ball-sized hail and heavy rain through the desert. The official Phoenix rain gauge at Sky Harbor Airport recorded 1.64″ of rain that disrupted the first week of AFL baseball. That was the most rain in a single day in Phoenix since 2018.
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Time to discuss who we would like to see newly minted manager, Blake Butera, hire, or at least consider, for each coaching staff position.
Steve, Andrew and I will each weigh in with some thoughts.
Then it will be your turn to discuss in the comments.
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The Washington Nationals rebuild suffered cracks in its foundation. Can a patch-job fix it, or is this a partial teardown to rebuild again? PoBO Paul Toboni spoke about building a strong foundation. What Toboni wants to build on starts with the team drafting and developing top prospects for the long-term to where this is a farm system you can count on. And Toboni talked about building a scouting and development monster and turning out great prospects “year-over-year-after-year where you have all of this young talent non-stop coming up to the big leagues,” as Toboni said in an interview.
Part of the issue now is a top heavy farm system that isn’t deep, and some of the top prospects have not been productive at the MLB level. Some players who have been productive have not been consistent. But a systemic issue in the farm system is the same ongoing issues caused by drafting to flawed archetypes of the past. It all started there. Baseball has proven time and again that it is very difficult to fix major flaws on players.
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"Opening Day should be a National holiday"
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