11/6/25 was a big moving day in baseball: its 5 days after the World Series ended, and on the same day all 60-day DL guys (in the majors and minors) have to be returned to active roster status, and all free agents are declared. In the majors, that means the “exclusive” bargaining period ends (which is almost never used anymore), but more importantly to this site and this audience, it means that dozens of prospects that we’ve sometimes tracked for 6-7 years are now cut loose.
Here’s a look at the churn at both the 40-man level and in the minors. All these moves are now updated on the Big Board, as well as the Draft Tracker and the IFA tracker and my internal Nats Prospect Rankings page, which saw a slew of guys I had ranked just a few weeks ago get cut loose. I’ll talk about them below in a bit.
Major League Free Agents
- Josh Bell 1b/DH 11/2/25: FA
- Paul deJong 2b/3b 11/2/25: FA
- Derek Law rhp 11/2/25: FA
In other words, the three guys the team couldn’t even trade for a bag of balls at the trade deadline.
40-man DFA’s
- CJ Stubbs c 10/30/25: DFA’d, cleared waivers, outrighted to AAA
- Ogasawara, Shinnosuki rhp 10/30/25: DFA’d, cleared waivers, outrighted to AAA
- Mason Thompson rhp 10/30/25: DFA’d, cleared waivers, outrighted to AAA, refused assignment, FA
- Eduardo Salazar rhp 10/30/25: DFA’d, cleared waivers, outrighted to AAA, refused assignment, FA
- Jorge Alfaro c 10/31/25: DFA’d, cleared waivers, outrighted to AAA, refused assignment, FA
- Zach Brzycky rhp 11/6/25: DFA’d, claimed by Miami, gone
- Ryan Loutos rhp 11/6/25: DFA’d, claimed by Seattle, gone
- Trey Lipscomb 3b 11/6/25: DFA’d, cleared waivers, outrighted to AAA
So, that’s 11 total guys removed from the 40-man with FAs and DFAs. We added back our four 60-day DL guys (Grey, Herz, Williams, Millas), which puts us at exactly 34/40 as of this writing. That’s a ton of room for the next phase of the off-season (Rule5 and Free Agency).
Most surprising out of this list? Probably Brzycky, who was a NDFA and kind of “found gold” for the player dev staff. He didn’t get a ton of MLB time and I’m surprised they cut him and kept other relievers for the time being. It’s no surprise to me he got claimed.
There’s not a ton of “fat” left on the roster now; most of the guys I had listed early on my “next guys to cut” are now gone. I could still see the team part ways with a couple of waiver claim/MLFA relievers that made their way onto the active roster (Fernandez, Pilkington), but the next cuts after that will be deep.
MLFAs declared
Here’s the meat of this post. As of 11/6/25, all 6-year MLFAs were declared. Generally speaking, this means the following are now declared MLFAs:
- anyone drafted in 2019
- Most IFAs signed in 2018 under a certain age.
- Some older IFAs signed in 2019: if you were already 18 you’re like a draftee.
- Furthermore, anyone we’ve signed as a MLFA along the way one a one-year deal, or who hasn’t already resigned on some other deal we’re unaware of, is also newly declared.
So, from the massive list of 11/6/25 minor league transactions, here’s what that looks like. We’ll go level by level:
From AAA: no fewer than 16 guys hitting MLFA.
Some of these guys I absolutely had ranked in my end of year ranking. The highest was Schnell, who I had just outside my top 30. I had Acosta and Davila in the 50-60 range, Erick Mejia in the 70s, and then a few more in the 80-90 range. Only four of these MLFAs from AAA were home grown (Arruda, Cuevas, Adon, and Cluff). Nonetheless, 16 guys off a 31 player roster is a huge number gone.
AAA now has 15 players remaining; and basically the entire 2025 pitching staff is gone. Interestingly, there are a couple names who seem like they should have been declared MLFAs but who remain; Pena (an 17IFA, Orelvis Martinez (just signed as a 26 MLFA), and Seth Shuman (a 19Draftee who should have been declared). I don’t entirely trust these rosters or milb.com transactions, so its possible these guys were also declared MLFAs and missed the announcement, or its possible they’ve already re-signed for 2026. Especially with Shuman, I hope he’s back in the fold.
Also worth mentioning here, a shoutout to Darren Baker, who was released a bit earlier in the off-season to pursue other opportunities.
From AA: 8 guys
| SP | Atencio, Jose |
| CF | Williams, Donta’ * |
| CL | Santos, Junior |
| CF | DeShields, Delino |
| MID | Vasquez, Samuel |
| LR | Knowles, Lucas* |
| 1B | Naranjo, Joe |
| LR | Choi, Hyun-Il |
Just two of these 8 were home grown (Knowles and Atencio). I had Atencio ranked relatively high on my end of season ranks (#47) and I had high hopes that the team might retain his services. I had a couple of these guys in the 100+ range (Vasquez, Knowles, Naranjo). Lastly I thought the team could hold onto Choi a bit longer, but perhaps not.
I don’t see any players remaining on the AA roster who seem like they should have been declared. The oldest draftee/signee is Kevin Made, a 19IFA who was young and retains one more year of control.
From High-A: Six guys.
| SU | Otanez, Johan |
| CA | Colmenares, Jose |
| LR | Caceres, Bryan |
| LR | Arias, Wander |
| SU | Montero, Euri |
| DH/CF | De La Rosa, Jeremy* |
I think it goes without saying that, if you’re not out of A-ball by the time you’ve had 6 seasons in the minors, you’re not really a prospect. And, true to form, the only one of these six guys who I even mentioned in my rankings was De la Rosa, and that’s only because at one point a couple years ago he was in the top 30 range.
Wilmington still has a couple of rostered guys who seem like they should have been declared MLFAs: setup man Yeuris Jimenez and maybe Adam Bloebaum, who was signed as a “MLFA” in 2025 but may really be an “NDFA” for eligibility purposes. Pablo Aldonis (currently in the AFL) was a 19IFA but was young and gets one more year.
Low-A: just 3 guys
Rivero was home grown, the other two were 2025MLFAs. Rivero, coincidentally, was the last remaining 2018IFA player we had, closing the books on what turned out to be a really awful IFA class. The most accomplished player out of the 2018 IFA class was either Rodney Theophile (MLFA last year after getting to AA) or oft-injured Jose Atencio, who made it to AA but missed all of 2025.
Nobody was cut loose from the FCL team, and just one name from DSL who, frankly, I didn’t even realize was rostered. Sometimes the team sneaks these signings without much in the way of announcement.
All in all, 34 MLFAs declared on 11/6/25. With all the outrights and MLFAs, the domestic system is now down to 139 players.
Of the 125 players that I ranked at year’s end, 16 of them are now MLFAs.
I think the biggest “shock” to the system is just how much of this year’s AAA squad is now gone. There’s not nearly enough players set to rise up from AA, and there’s not enough guys who would be dropping down from MLB right now (34 on the 40-man, meaning just 8 would move down not including known DL guys). This spells a ton of new MLFAs set to come into the fold this coming spring.
one point on what to do with Schnell, Butero managed him for two seasons in Low A ball. I’m pretty sure they know what he brings to the table.
I would not be surprised to see a significant number of these guys re-signed. nothing short of renegotiating a new deal in advance of the deadline would have changed anything.
FredMD
10 Nov 25 at 11:33 am
Maybe they offer Schnell a major league/40-man deal to entice him to stay. I mean, the team needs a 1B/DH.
Todd Boss
10 Nov 25 at 1:30 pm
I actually don’t think many of these guys will be re-signed. It’s a convenient way for the new regime to turn the page. One should put a star by the names of the guys they do retain because they must see some glimmer of promise or fixability.
I’m glad that Lipscomb cleared waivers. Even if he never becomes more than AAAA, he’s a flexible piece, a hard worker, and a known leader/mentor. He may become coach material if he doesn’t make it much farther as a player. (I also wonder about Jackson Cluff as a potential coach.)
I shared the thought that Brzykcy might be fixable by a new staff, but it also was absolutely a good time to try to get him through a DFA. (Most other teams aren’t adding guys to their 40-man rosters right now as they also clear for Rule 5 and free agency.) Zach’s MLB ERA is 10.05 (albeit not helped by getting hung out to get pounded a few times), and his AAA career ERA is 6.89. We didn’t just lose Mariano Rivera.
Schnell’s 23 homers and 21 doubles across 129 AA/AAA games last season make him a good possibility to re-sign. His 31% K rate and .321 OBP are reasons that they didn’t add him to the 40-man. They’ve already got five OFs on the 40-man and a decent possibility that they’ll add Christian Franklin ahead of Rule 5. Franklin has less power but strikes out a lot less (20%) and gets on base a lot more (.390 OBP).
Beyond those guys, I don’t see a lot to discuss. Adon and JDLR are two names that have been on our radar a long time, and two guys who were bad decisions on 40-man additions before Rule 5 several years ago. JDLR seems like he’s been around forever but is actually half a year younger than Hassell, just a month older than Crews.
KW
10 Nov 25 at 1:52 pm
On Schnell, the numbers definitely pop: 23 HR and 18 SB screams toolsy. But he also had a 31.1 K% on the season, which climbed to 33.8% in AAA. He had a swinging strike rate of 20.9% in Rochester, which was the 2nd worst rate of 232 players by a considerable margin by any batter with a minimum of 200 PA (2nd only to Jorge Alfaro, who ended the season as our catcher, largely because of that awful swinging strike rate). Alfaro had a 36 K% in the majors this season. Another player in AAA who had a high swinging strike rate was uber-prospect Carson Williams, whose 17.2% swinging strike rate was considerably better than Schnell’s, resulted in a 41.5 K% in the majors. Gage Workman had a 16.7% swinging strike rate and struck out 41% of the time in a small sample in the majors. Reece Hinds, a similar story. A 17.5% swinging strike rate led to a 47.7 (!!) K%. Schnell was even worse than all these guys at making contact.
All that to say, Schnell is no different. MLB pitching will feast on him. So, while perhaps with some better coaching, there is a potential diamond in the rough there, with our current OF depth charts, where Schnell would be something like 9th to 11th (Wood, Crews, Lile, Young, Hassell, Franklin, Pinckney, Glasser, and soon supplanted by Petersen and Petry) I won’t lose any sleep over his loss.
Brzkycy is the one I’m most disappointed to lose. He had a dreadful 2025, but up until this season, he was excellent. It feels like an org with good pitching development can help him realize his potential. The Marlins aren’t the worst destination, but I’d be much happier if I was Loutos going to Seattle.
Will
10 Nov 25 at 1:56 pm
Re Lipscomb, on the MLB Network draft coverage last year, when Christian Moore was drafted, Tony Vitello mentioned Lipscomb by name as the guy at Tennessee who took Moore under his wing and raised his game. Lipscomb also has been James Wood’s offseason workout partner (former youth league teammates).
KW
10 Nov 25 at 1:59 pm
Will, it looks like we were thinking along some similar lines while posting at the same time.
I keep forgetting their curious insistence on making Glasser and Petry outfielders even though they’ve already got a truckload of ’em.
The flip side of that, of course, is that Lile shouldn’t be an OF (very bad defensive stats), but he’s really short to play at 1B.
KW
10 Nov 25 at 2:02 pm
I do see why Schnell and a couple of the others have found some boosters among us, but I think the correct interpretation is that the team doesn’t think these guys have any prospect value whatsoever.
It’s guys like Schnell, and Matt Cronin from last year, who really drive home the fact that organizations round their evaluations to almost all minor leaguers down to zero. We can, and should, marvel at these guys who almost make it – who become the 1500th best baseball player in the world – but they aren’t prospects and don’t really belong on our ranked lists.
(This is different from an argument that a specific player being mis-valued, which will definitely happen sometimes. It’s perfectly reasonable for any independent evaluator to believe in Schnell’s ability to develop better bat control, or whatever. By all means, rank him 35th if you think he belongs there. But once we get down to the part of the list where our evaluations would still leave players unprotected to be lost for nothing, I think the rankings cease to make sense.)
SMS
10 Nov 25 at 3:50 pm
Several of us have expressed great hope that Toboni will bring in a developmental staff that will teach/emphasize contact. I looked to see whether his Red Sox were any better at it than the Nats. Sadly, they weren’t, at least at the MLB level. In fact, the Nats at 22.6% were slightly better than the Bosox 22.9%. Butera’s Rays were even worse at 23.1%. So neither Toboni nor Butera is coming from an organization that is elite with contact.
The question then becomes whether a franchise can do noticeably better. The answer is an emphatic “yes,” led by a team that was a hair from winning the World Series. The Blue Jays as a team struck out only 17.8% of the time. It didn’t do the Royals nearly as much good to K only 18.2%, followed by that Padres at 19.1%.
At the other end of the spectrum were the Angels (27.1%), the Rockies (25.9%), and the Orioles (24.2%), all of whom sucked.
Boston did take more walks than the Nats, 8.3% to 7.4%. The DC number ranked 28th in the majors. The Yankees led with a 10.2% rate, followed by the Dodgers at 9.4%. The woeful Rockies were the worst at 6.7%.
KW
12 Nov 25 at 9:24 am
KW, my issues with contact rates is exclusively on the minor league player dev side. Darnell Coles was the king of “contact above all else”, in perhaps the exact opposite way the MILB teams seem to coach players (particularly those most in need of coaching), and why I’d bet the Nats (at the major league level) were one of the most likely to swing at the first pitch. It’s why guys like Keibert Ruiz and Luis Garcia have found a lot more playing time and patience than they might have in a different org. The obvious drawback is the walk rate, that you pointed out (3rd worst in the MLB while the 22.2 K% was almost exactly league average).
I can’t be bothered to re-do the research, but at some point over the summer I looked at how Nats affiliates’ K rates compared with league averages (and which specific players bucked the trend), and I seem to recall every team except Rochester was worse than league average (with Wilmington and Fredericksburg being significantly worse than average). This is not a coincidence, because nearly every single HS bat we’ve drafted over the past decade or so (with the exception of Lile- though I’m likely missing a couple others) has been unable to develop a good plate approach. Even Brady House, despite rapidly rising up the ladder, has some scary K:BB numbers. It certainly doesn’t APPEAR that the Nats’ minor league batting philosophy was in line with Coles’ “contact is all that matters” approach, which must have been all the more jarring for young batters upon reaching the majors.
Regarding Toboni, what I think would be interesting is to look a bit closer at the profiles of the players they’ve drafted in recent seasons. The story about Kristian Campbell is really interesting, but are there other players who’ve also seen big improvements with tweaks around launch angles? Did they have a draft “type”, like Danny Haas did? In Campbell’s case, he specifically talked about how he sacrificed frequency of contact for BETTER contact. For example, at GTech, he had an insane 7.8 K%, but since the Sox tweaked his plate approach, his K% has hovered between 15-26% (a rather big jump). However, he also went from 4 HR at GT to 20 HR in his first MILB season. I hesitate to extrapolate the single best possible player development case across the entirety of Toboni’s body of work. But it’s something I’d like to look into more.
Will
12 Nov 25 at 11:03 am
I don’t know that there was ever much coordination through the system on hitting approach, particularly with the MLB and MiLB levels. I doubt that Coles had much influence on what was taught in the minors. Same with Hickey among the pitchers. Perhaps they briefly had it when Menhart became the MLB pitching coach, but they soon kicked him to the curb in favor of Davey’s buddy Hickey.
I’m not sold out on contact-over-everything hitters either. Luis Arraez is the perfect example of an empty-calorie hitter, and Garcia and Ruiz are right there with him. In his evaluation of Arraez as a free agent, Keith Law wrote, “One of the most overrated players of the century, Arraez led the National League in batting average for three straight years, but it’s an empty sort of batting average as he doesn’t walk or produce many extra bases.”
As for Bosox drafting, they did take high K/high BB Braden Montgomery in the 2024 draft, then traded him to the Chisox in the Crochet deal. The next hitter they took in the 2024 draft was Zach Ehrhard, a high BB/low K guy, who they flipped to the Dodgers at the 2025 trade deadline.
Hm, Toboni comes from an organization that had no issue with trading guys they’d recently drafted. Also, in the last two drafts, the Red Sox have gone completely away from drafting high schoolers in the upper rounds, despite 2025 supposedly being a very HS-heavy draft class.
KW
12 Nov 25 at 12:47 pm
IIRC Toboni talked more about bat speed than contact, but I could be wrong.
I appreciate the services that Menhart provided when he was the Nats’ pitching coach. But I’ll never understand why he’s been anointed as “the one that got away.” If he was all that great a coach, why hasn’t he gotten another MLB gig? Last I heard he was a roving minor league pitching guy for the Royals after going to Taiwan for nine months and being in indy ball for about ten months.
John C.
12 Nov 25 at 6:22 pm
John, agreed about Menhart.
He was also the pitching coordinator of the farm system from 2015-2019, which was arguably the nadir of our pitcher development, and it’s those barren years that turned us into the 2nd worst team in baseball from 2020 to present. His promotion felt like yet another easy internal promotion. Yes, he stabilized a very messy 2019 pitching staff, but in his other year of experience was presiding of the disastrous 2020 season (despite being anchored by an excellent Scherzer and not-yet-awful Corbin).
Long is the only Nats coach that I still long for. Maybe Mike Maddux too.
Toboni’s hires are certainly interesting, and something of an extension of his own profile! And I’m glad they brought in some experience via the bench coach, Johns, because Butera and Mathews are absurdly young. It’ll be good to have a guy around who can provide a different, more traditional perspective to the young, motivated coaches, without it becoming too much of a stuffy old boys club.
Will
13 Nov 25 at 8:01 am
Kevin Long is one of the few coaches who is demonstrably better than the rest. He was a runner-up candidate for a number of managerial searches a few years ago, but I haven’t heard his name mentioned recently.
Menhart certainly seemed to stabilize the Nats pitching staff in 2019, and particularly the bullpen situation. But I agree that how far he fell after leaving the Nats was really curious, almost like he got blackballed or something. So many mediocre coaches continue to ride the ol’ boy network to job after job (as Nat fans can attest, and as Will just mentioned), but Menhart got banished to the West Virginia Power.
Mike Maddux was part of Dusty’s entire coaching staff that did not get renewed at the end of the 2017 season, although for some reason they then brought back Bob Sendley. I thought Lilliquist was going to be a good hire, coming from years of success with the Cardinals’ staff, but he never clicked with the Nats. Like Menhart, he’s never coached in the majors since the Nats fired him.
KW
13 Nov 25 at 1:09 pm