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A year ago, I wrote a piece called “Quality Should Be Job 1” but quality also comes via employees you hire. The high risk / high reward model usually fails if you do that as a standard. That is a gambler’s mentality. Risk management needs to be measured and controlled. Signing Matt Barnes, Joey Gallo, Eddie Rosario, Nick Senzel combined for about $15.5 million of wasted total payroll last year. Do you know that Gallo and Senzel actually got paid incentive bonuses on top of their salaries? While you could say the signing of Jesse Winker worked out, that isn’t a good ratio.

This year, general manager Mike Rizzo had even more money to spend — and besides the Nathaniel Lowe acquisition and re-acquiring Trevor Williams and low risk moves for Paul DeJong and Jorge Lopez, it was the same type of high risk / high reward moves for the rest of the $50 million spent. There was enough budget to go “Quality is Job 1” and not risk a lot of money on bounceback players like Michael Soroka as a starter for $9 million, Josh Bell for DH at $6 million, Lucas Sims for $3 million, and Amed Rosario for $2 million. Even the nearly $6 million for Kyle Finnegan after his late season struggles made him a bounceback candidate. That’s $26 million of high risk signings. Sure, you could throw in Shinnosuke Ogasawara and Colin Poche too for another $3.3 million combined. Will you find a Winker or two in there? Wasn’t Sims just a more expensive version of Tanner Rainey? Rosario had a great game yesterday so maybe that works. Soroka might pitch like a star. Bell might figure out how to hit like he did in his prime. Might, maybe, if.

Maybe I can close my eyes, click my heels together three times, and repeat the sentence, “There’s no place like home” to get to the magic formula of winning. Or go the quality route and just build a better roster. Shortcuts and throwing #### against the wall rarely works. Again, let’s not panic two games in. There are a lot of positives that we have seen so far.

As we enter the first weekend of the MLB baseball season, the Washington Nationals will don their new City Connect jerseys dubbed ‘The Blueprint’ for this afternoon’s game against the Phillies. This will be a warm one with temperatures getting into the low 80’s. That should add several feet to the carry of baseballs today.

As we begin the 20th season of Nationals baseball, the team will celebrate the top moments is finally here after a very long offseason and Spring Training that spanned 179 long days filled with lots of daily chatter. Now we are here. What began with the humble beginnings at RFK Stadium in 2005 to this 17th year at Nationals Park, a stadium that could have a new name mid-season, it seems like we have lived through a lot in those 20 years of history. Today is Opening Day, and with it comes the pomp and circumstance of a big day.

The final roster has basically been set. There had been plenty of leaks with surprises to the Nationals’ Opening Day roster. There was also the news we broke yesterday on DJ Herz‘s injured elbow as well as news that Jackson Rutledge was not going to make the Opening Day roster. Others broke news that told us that Brad Lord will make his first MLB roster, and we saw news that Juan Yepez was not going to make the roster. All of this was confirmed in a Press Release by the Nationals in the late afternoon with Herz going on the 60-day IL which freed up a roster spot for Lord.