Are The Nats Supposed to Be Good?

I know the easy thing to do is say no and click away, but I implore you not to, because I am not asking the question from the perspective of cold hard facts. If you look at the top-level data the answer is pretty obvious. By FanGraphs’ Depth Charts projections, the Nats are 26^th in MLB with a projected WAR of 29.3, by plain ol’ wins and losses that’s 73-89 and a 3 percent chance to make the playoffs. If you would like a second opinion, Dr. Baseball Prospectus says 68-94 and a 0.7 percent chance of making the playoffs. Yes, sometimes the second opinion can be even worse than the first.

But that’s not the perspective I’m interested in, what I want to know is do the Nats, especially the ownership, think they are supposed to be good? Has Mark Lerner really put the idea of getting to take his real estate clients out to his shiny owner’s box to watch a winning team away for good? Or, has he simply bought into the idea that he can have his cake and eat it too? In other words, have a team to be proud of but not spend the money he had to in the 2010s? Because when you really dig into it, I think the answer might be the latter.

To start, the overall numbers above hide that the team is actually better than it was the last two years. Here are their projected FanGraphs WARs, records and playoff odds.

Compared to last year that’s a nine-win improvement by WAR and an eight-win improvement by record. You may also recall that the 2023 and 2024 teams managed to beat their projected records with identical 71-91 records. A similar improvement over projection would put the Nats right around .500. While that still isn’t a playoff team, it’s a team that could have some hope beyond the first pitch of the season.

The reason it might not be as noticeable is because the improvement has not come by way of a flashy star, but instead by filling the team with actual major leaguers. In 2023 the Nats had six positions (including DH) projected below two wins above replacement. In 2024 it was an astounding eight, with five of those below even one win. In 2025 that’s turned around to just four, with one of those being Dylan Crews at 1.9. At this point, third base is the only position that is a complete black hole of sadness.

Such a drastic year-to-year improvement has to mean something. As you can see below they have the seventh largest improvement in projected fWAR compared to the previous two seasons, hanging out with a lot of teams with playoff aspirations this year and the [Location Unavailable] Athletics.

If the Nats really didn’t care about this season they could have been perfectly content to run back the 2024 plan of acquiring nothing but replacement players to stick around their handful of young guys and let fans hang onto the small hope they represent.

Lerner recently gave an interview with the Washington Post where the social media money quote was this:

“When Mike calls me in and says, ‘We really need to think about it,’ for next winter, we’ll talk about it,” Lerner said. “Right now, he doesn’t think — and I agree with him: There’s no point in getting a superstar and paying him hundreds of millions of dollars to win two or three more games. You’ve got to wait until — like Jayson. Jayson was right on the cusp of [the team] being really good, and it took us to the next level. That’s the ideal situation. It’s always on our mind.”

When you see all the young talent the Nats acquired when they traded Trea Turner and Juan Soto and tanked for high draft picks (Abrams, Wood, Crews, Gore, Ruiz, Hasell, Susana, etc.) all on the Major League roster or knocking on the door it’s easy to wonder how that time isn’t already upon us. And many, myself included, followed that to the conclusion that Lerner is throwing Rizzo under the bus here as a trumped-up excuse to not spend on the team.

The other way to read it, which I think is worth exploring, is that there wasn’t a free agent worth signing to a large contract that wasn’t tied to the qualifying offer. And the way that the new draft lottery works, it was really not worth it to sign a player who received a qualifying offer. As a reminder, if the Nats had signed one QO guy they would have forfeited their second highest draft pick and $500K in international money. Yes, they would have kept the No. 1 overall pick, but they would have lost a key benefit of being No. 1 overall, having a large signing bonus pool to spread around to sneak an extra prospect or two in the middle rounds. Plus, the QO penalty would not negate the draft lottery penalty of being ineligible to pick higher than 10^th next year. By signing someone tied to the qualifying offer the Nats would have been significantly ruining the impact of what is hopefully their last high draft pick for a while.

The best free agents by projected fWAR that did not receive a qualifying offer were Blake Snell, Gleyber Torres, and Yusei Kikuchi. If you include players who did well last year but aren’t projected to follow that up you can add Jurickson Profar, Michael Wacha and Jack Flaherty. When the Nats signed Werth he was coming off of three years of 5.1, 4.7 and 5.1 wins above replacement. The six 2025 guys have combined for zero five-win seasons, with Jack Flaherty getting the closest at 4.7 fWAR in 2019. It’s not exactly a fair comparison.

Overall, I think it could still be argued that there was a path for the Nats to spend into contention, but that wasn’t what Lerner said. He specifically brought up the case of bringing in a single Jayson Werth-type and based on their situation he’s right that they really couldn’t have done that this offseason.

So, if we don’t read that quote as Lerner saying “I don’t care if the team is good, I just want money,” we need to return to the data and the data shows a concerted effort to make a better team. “Good” might be a stretch, but I think you can say that for the first time in four years there are expectations. And with expectations comes a lot more pressure on people who have been cruising along the last couple years without it, mainly manager Davey Martinez and his hand-picked coaching staff. If the 2025 Nats pull another 71-91 finish, with an intentionally improved roster, I think the manager’s seat could be heating up again.