It’s been two months since Paul Toboni was hired as the new Nationals President of Baseball Operations, it’s been 3 weeks since Blake Butera has been hired as manager and it’s been two days since the end of the Winter Meetings and we still do not have a good idea of what the Nationals’ plan for next year is.
One thing is clear by the age and roles they’ve been hiring for in the dugout and front office, there will be a much stronger emphasis on player development. Toboni said just as much when he discussed the need for individualized development goals for every player in the organization in his letter to Nats fans. However, that’s a plan aiming for 3-5 years from now, what I want to know is what they’re doing next year.
On that front we have two pieces of evidence that send a lot of mixed signals: the José A. Ferrer trade for catcher Harry Ford and the constant trade rumors surrounding MacKenzie Gore and CJ Abrams. On the Ferrer front, it seems pretty open and shut that trading one of your few good relievers is an admission that you’re tanking the season as hard as possible. However, having Ford as a return does not square with that.
If you’re tanking the season you trade your good players for 18 years olds in Single A with lots of room to develop. You do not trade for a 23 year old who has already played in the Majors and has seemingly maxed out his development. Trading Ferrer for Ford is repeating Mike Rizzo’s trade for Keibert Ruiz in 2021 hoping it works out better this time. I’ll leave it to the experts to decide whether that’s a realistic hope.
Obviously hearing trade rumors around Gore and Abrams is not a big surprise. Gore was already the focus of heavy rumors around the deadline and not much about his or the Nationals’ situation has changed much. He’s two years from free agency on a team that does not appear committed to contending before then and in a ever thinning market for starting pitching due to teams no longer developing starters, he’s valuable, even with his poor end to the season. Abrams makes some sense too, because even though he is not a leadoff hitter and he’s not a shortstop like the Nats want him to be, he’s still a good hitter with great speed who can probably fill in better defensively at other positions. The big thing here is that despite ample opportunity to tamp these rumors down at the Winter Meetings, Toboni instead embraced them.
But that brings me back to why trade for Ford? If the Nats are prepared to deal away all of their guys who have reached arbitration, what’s the point in bringing in someone whose service time clock is already started? That means, at best, you’re hoping to start contending in Gore’s free agent season with Wood, Crews, Ford, and Lile all entering their arbitration seasons. If that timeline slips by one season, you’re again looking at having to restart.
In that letter to fans the most interesting sentence was this one, “somewhere out there, the players who will comprise the next great Washington Nationals teams are taking shape, and they will largely be developed inside our walls.” It reads as if Toboni was saying this and suddenly realized what he was implying with the first part of the sentence and tried to quickly backtrack at the end of it. I’m not exactly sure why with plenty of time to edit and re-write this letter that was never changed. Similar to the transactions so far it seems to both indicate a desire to punt deep into the future while recognizing that the fans (and likely ownership) do not want to wait that long and attempting to soften the blow.
I assumed when Toboni and Butera were brought aboard that they would try to build the player development from the top down, acknowledging that the Nationals already have the second youngest roster in the Majors. I suspected the expectation was for a new group to come in and fix what’s already here and get the surprise contender season ownership was expecting last year. If the Nats deal Gore and Abrams, and if they trade one they absolutely need to trade both, that idea goes out the window.
And I get it, it’s still early. The Nats were never going to jump for someone at the top of the free agent market while the new front office tries to figure out how fixable these young guys are. I would just like something concrete that tells me how to set my expectations for the Nats. That somewhere out there, there’s a plan for how the next great Nationals team will be assembled.
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