Nationals disaster: Soto and Harper are long gone
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
By Ken Rosenthal / The Athletic
If you are identifying baseball’s perennial bottom feeders, the Colorado Rockies come immediately to mind, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Chicago White Sox and the Miami Marlins also in the conversation.
The Washington Nationals belong, too.
Since winning the 2019 World Series, the Nationals ranked third in the majors in losses through Monday, behind the top-ranked (or bottom-ranked) Rockies and the Pirates. They have recorded four consecutive 90-loss campaigns and could easily collect a fifth this season.
A lack of investment is partly to blame. The Nationals opened with a top-10 payroll seven out of eight seasons from 2014 to 2021 but in the past three years have averaged in the bottom 10.
A perhaps even bigger problem is the team’s failures in player development, as well as amateur and international scouting, going back more than a decade — failures that the spectacular return for Juan Soto at the 2022 trade deadline can mask only so much.
Good teams both spend and develop. The Nationals do neither. So while the Nats hold the No. 1 pick in this year’s draft, selecting in the same spot where they landed Stephen Strasburg in 2009 and Bryce Harper in 2010, the end of their rebuild is not necessarily in sight.
Even if the Nationals raise hope of a turnaround by avoiding their seventh straight losing season, their timing might be off. For pitcher MacKenzie Gore and shortstop CJ Abrams, two of the key players acquired from the San Diego Padres by Mike Rizzo, the president of baseball operations, for Soto and first baseman Josh Bell, free agency is an object closer than it might appear.
Gore, the major league leader in strikeouts, is at the same level of service Soto was when the Nationals traded him — two-plus years away from hitting the open market. Abrams, tied for fifth among shortstops in Baseball Reference’s wins above replacement, is three-plus years away.
Extensions? Not likely for Gore and two other potential building blocks — outfielder James Wood, the most promising player acquired for Soto, and outfielder Dylan Crews, the second overall pick in 2023. All are represented by agent Scott Boras, who generally prefers his clients to establish their values on the open market.
Abrams, represented by Roc Nation, “held substantive discussions” with the Nationals regarding an extension in the spring of 2024, according to The Washington Post. But the Nats’ interest in keeping Abrams long term is unclear after they demoted him for the final nine days of the 2024 regular season over what the team described as an internal matter.
Even if the Nationals want to retain Abrams, their track record of extending core players is not good. Strasburg twice was an exception, signing an extension, then re-signing as a free agent. Harper and third baseman Anthony Rendon left as free agents (in Rendon’s case, it proved to be a blessing for the team). Soto and shortstop Trea Turner were traded — Soto after the Nationals offered him a 15-year, $440 million deal that fell short of his price in free agency by $325 million.
Among current Nationals, the only player signed beyond next season is catcher Keibert Ruiz, whom Rizzo acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers at the 2021 deadline as part of the return for Turner and pitcher Max Scherzer. That deal, along with the trade of Kyle Schwarber and others, marked the start of the Nationals’ rebuild.
Ruiz, in the third year of an eight-year, $50 million deal, was one of the worst catchers in the game in 2023 and 2024. He opened the current season on an offensive tear but has since regressed. According to Statcast, he continues to rate poorly as a blocker and a framer, and is only average as a thrower.
The potential exits of Gore, Abrams and others would be of less concern if the Nationals’ farm system regularly spit out potential replacements. But since 2013, the Nationals have drafted and developed only three players with career WAR above 5.0. Those three — Nick Pivetta, Erick Fedde, Jesús Luzardo — made their marks with other teams.
The Nationals recently promoted a fourth player from the Soto-Bell trade, outfielder Robert Hassell III. A fifth, hard-throwing right-hander Jarlin Susana, is on the injured list at Double-A with a mild sprain of his ulnar collateral ligament.
Among the other team’s other prospects, third baseman Brady House, the 11th pick in 2021, is performing well at Triple-A, while right-hander Travis Sykora, the 71st pick in 2023, is dominating High-A.
Yet even if the Nationals hit on all of those players, Wood is perhaps their only young hitter capable of reaching Harper/Soto/Turner-type stardom. And it’s not as if the ownership group headed by Mark Lerner were showing any inclination to spend the way it did for much of the 2010s.
That raises the question of how the Nationals will handle the No. 1 pick. Will they go for the highest upside and draft a high school shortstop like Jackson Holliday’s younger brother, Ethan? Or will they go for a college pitcher who might not be worthy of the first overall selection but could get to the majors quicker?
Rizzo, who signed a contract extension of unspecified length in September 2023, does not appear to be under pressure. The Lerner group took control of the team in May 2006. Rizzo has run baseball operations since March 2009. Davey Martinez became the manager in October 2017. If the Nationals give off an insular vibe, it might be because the ownership knows only Rizzo’s way.
In July 2022, Rizzo told “The Sports Junkies” on WFJK 106.7: “This is a reboot year. We don’t call it a rebuild because a rebuild is a five- or six-year process. I think this is a shorter reboot. We’ve shown in the past we know how to do these things.”
Alas, the promise of a shorter reboot is gone. And time no longer is on the Nationals’ side.