Hello my fellow Nats fans. Happy New Year from all of us (i.e. “me”) at Nationals Arm Race. I posted this on 1/1/26, then the site immediately took a dump, but seems to be back now, so lets try this again.
Thanks for continuing to read what I have to write, to have awesome conversations in the comments, and to be fans of the sport and the team.
I wondered what would be a useful post for 1/1/26. I think i’ll ask some open ended questions and ask for predictions in the comments.
Topic 1: Will the Nats Executive Youth Movement work?
I have yet to write at all about the youth movement in the Nats front office because, well, It’s certainly worked in the past for other/better franchises than ours (Theo Epstein was 28 when he took over Boston in 2002, Jon Daniels the same age when he took over Texas in 2005, and both had great success), so I don’t really have anything to say there from a criticism or support perspective.
Now, perhaps the combination of all three of these key figures being so young is concerning.
- Paul Toboni, 35, as President of Baseball Operations
- Anirudh Kilambi, 31, as General Manager
- Blake Butera, 33, as Manager (youngest in 50 years)
Toboni came from Boston, Kilambi came from Philly, and Butera came from Tampa. All three of those franchises are in far better places than we are, and each brings much needed experience to this team.
- Toboni’s role in Boston? Amateur Scouting and Player Development
- Kilambi’s role in Philadelphia? R&D, Data, Analytics, and Player analysis
- Butera’s role in Tampa? Senior Director of Player Development and head of their Farm system
See a trend here? I do. So the question is this: What do you see this brain trust doing with the team going forward? And, do you think it will move the team in a positive direction?
Here’s my 2 cents: The Rizzo regime blew nearly a decade of drafts and left this team with the gaping hole of player development that it’s just starting to get out of. Unfortunately, he had to trade practically every major star we had in 2021 and 2022 to cover for these player development failures … and now those players are starting to push into Arbitration. Now we have a new approach heavy on data (the Nats were not exactly considered at the forefront of data usage in the league), heavy on development (where we’ve failed badly for a while), and heavy on amateur scouting (which Rizzo, despite his pedigree coming up as a scout in Arizona, grew out of in his later years).
I sense this group is going to start over, probably has pitched the ownership group a 5-year plan starting with this year’s IFA crop to be announced in a couple weeks, and then moving onto the 2026 draft, and in the meantime will trade most anything not nailed down for more prospects to help build from the bottom up. This also signals to me that the MLB product will get worse before it gets better. And it leads to my second topic:
Topic 2: Will Gore and Abrams be on the roster on Opening Day 2026?
Clearly the industry expects Gore to be moved this off-season, with his name atop most trade candidate analysis pieces. But … he didn’t move at the Winter Meetings when the buzz was hottest. The best time to get the most value out of a player is either:
- At the Trade Deadline, when contending teams make irrational decisions in pursuit of playoffs
- At the Winter Meetings, when everyone’s in the same building and you can play teams off each other.
Since he didn’t move at the Winter Meetings, I’m now thinking Gore sticks with us until next trade deadline and we roll the dice he stays healthy and improves the first half of next season.
Now, as for Abrams? He’s one of the worst fielding SS in the league but produces at a solid 106-107 wRC+ level the last two seasons. The SS free agent crop this off-season is pretty weak … but its not like the league can’t look up Fangraphs fielding stats themselves and see what the rest of us see. Nonetheless, His trade value is as a SS, and he needs to stick there until some rival executive swallows his analysis and says to himself, “ok we’ll deal with the defense to get the offense.” I’ve seen other blogs make the argument that Nasim Nunez should start at SS for us in 2026 and we should move Abrams to 2nd … The dumbest thing you could possibly do with a tradeable asset is to make him LESS valuable in trade by moving him to a less desirable position.
So, all that said, I’m guessing Abrams also sticks with us, plays out the first half, and we look to move him to a team that could use him at either SS or 2B and let THEM make the argument to him that its time to move off SS. I mean, if you’re Abrams and you’re looking at a 100-loss team that’s going to be this way for another couple years, and you get an offer to join a contender but you have to move to 2B … you’d have to be a fool not to jump.
Topic #3: Are we going to see more Starter Acquisitions for the 2026 Rotation?
At the end of the 2025 season in my 2026 rotation wrap-up/prediction post, I thought the 2026 rotation would look like this:
- Gore, Grey, Cavalli, a Free Agent, and one from Alvarez/Irvin/Parker/Williams for the 5th.
Since then, we’ve made some moves. We signed a FA (Foster Griffen), we picked a Rule-5 Starter (Griff McGarry), and we’ve acquired a hard-throwing starter in trade with MLB experience (Luis Perales), all three of whom change this equation. I think if you laid out the Nats 40-man starter depth chart right now it’d look something like this:
- Gore, Grey, Cavalli
- Griffin locked in as the #4
- Williams (as much as I hate to admit it) the early favorite for #5, if only to see if he gets some trade value in his walk year.
- McGarry as Rule-5 is making the team, but seems likely to be in a SS/LR role. Maybe he beats out Williams for the 5th starter.
- Alvarez proved he can pitch in the Majors and as a lefty gives the rotation/bullpen flexibility. Or, maybe he wins the 5th starter role and puts both Williams and McGarry in the pen.
- Irvin, Parker, Lord: all seem better suited for the bullpen. All have options but it’d seem foolish to put any of them back in AAA.
- Herz to the DL
- Perales, Cornelio, Eder as the 1-2-3 in AAA. We just lost Lao to Japan apparently, though I’ve only seen that on social media posts and not officially in the transaction pages.
So, the salient question for the front office is this: Are you happy with this configuration, or are you making more moves? If they move Gore pre-season, that almost guarantees a Rule-5 pick and/or Alvarez is in the rotation to start the year, unless we want to roll the dice with more 5.75 ERA production from one of Irvin/Parker/Lord.
I sense this front office isn’t done making trades or signings yet.
Anyway, Happy New Year and hope to get your thoughts on these three topics to kick off January.
… test …
John C.
7 Jan 26 at 11:47 am
It works!
Todd Boss
7 Jan 26 at 1:30 pm
Another root cause: i’ve been periodically getting what looks like Denial of Service attacks against the blog… In Nov/Dec we ended up blocking an entire Texas-based ISP that was just letting some troll/spammer setup a bot that would flood the site with connections, which prevented others from legitimately connecting. Today I found something similar from an ISP in like the Netherlands (not a lot of Nats fans there), so I’ve blocked them as well. Hopefully this keeps things going.
Todd Boss
7 Jan 26 at 1:31 pm
Happy to see the comments are back!
NYE, here’s to hoping that 2026 can’t possibly be worse than 2025.
On 1: I also share a slight concern about the consistent youth-focus of essentially every single new recruitment in the org. Not just Toboni, Butera, and Kilambi. Every single appointment to Butera’s coaching staff besides the old-head bench coach. The the hitting coach, the assistant hitting coach, the other assistant hitting coach, the pitching coach, the assistant pitching coach, the first base coach, and the third base coach. They’re all under 40! The consistency suggests it’s one of the key factors in hiring people, and while youth is great for baseball players, experience isn’t a bad thing for front office and management jobs. On the other hand, the young guy getting hired seem to have good reputations, so I hope that youthfulness will lead to a highly motivated team, willing to experiment with different ideas and ways of thinking that might give them a much needed edge to catching up with other bigger, better resourced orgs with significantly more institutional memory.
I also agree that these hirings (and subsequent deals) suggest the team is not positioning itself to be competitive before 2028, but probably later, which leads to 2.
2. If the team isn’t going to compete before 2028, then Gore and Abrams have to go. I would argue that the best time to trade a player is today, the next best time is tomorrow. Value depreciates with time, so I don’t understand why we’d let Gore, for example, use of 25% of his controllable time waiting until the arbitrary trade deadline in July. Perhaps the counterargument to this is teams may be hesitant to pay top dollar for 2nd half Gore. But that too is an argument for trading him sooner than later, because if Gore comes out of the gates with the near 7 ERA he posted in the 2nd half, his trade value will basically disappear. Trade him ASAP.
On Abrams, I don’t understand how moving him off SS makes him less valuable. Any sane team wouldn’t be acquiring him to be a SS. So why not try and showcase to other teams that he’s a good defensive 2B? And give him some reps in CF to give him more positional versatility? I’d expect that would RAISE his value, not lower it.
3. If the goal is to be competitive in 2+ years, the best we can hope for is another Griffen (or Soroka) reclamation project. Am I happy about that? Of course not. But I wasn’t happy with settling on Soroka last season, or Williams before that. But with them just giving their last 40 man roster spot to Joey Wiemer, I’m at a bit of a loss about their free agency plans… it would seem to me to a flippable SP would’ve been way higher on the priority list than the 9th OF, but maybe I’m the dumb one.
I still struggle to see how the org can develop their way out of this hole. So many other teams are also really good at this, and a bunch more have the payroll to paper over developmental deficiencies. With the anti-tanking rules and comparative punishment for being a large-market team (no competitive balance picks or IFA bonuses), we are at a structural disadvantage in building from the ground up. I think the only way out of this is through spending in free agency, but that looks like a long way off at this point.
Will
7 Jan 26 at 4:54 pm
@Will – on the Wiemer acquisition, he’s not preventing the Nationals from signing anyone. He’s just not. He’s the next best thing to a minor league signing (which for some reason a lot of folks love to wring their hands over … but I digress). I suspect that this was just a chance to pick up a player on a flyer. If they need the roster slot for pretty much any reason, Wiemer is off to DFA land. If he clears, great! The Nats can outright him to AAA. If he doesn’t, no big deal.
FWIW I’m pretty sure that this is what the Giants were doing. They picked him up on 11/21, and tried to clear him through waivers a month later.
John C.
7 Jan 26 at 10:32 pm
John, the problem with Wiemer is that it’s very strange that they opted to allocate their last free roster spot to an OF, who’s at best 7th on their OF depth chart. Meanwhile, dozens of other potential reclamation projects at positions of actual need have been passed over. For example, Marco Luciano, former top 100 SS/2B prospect, just got waived by the Pirates (and claimed by the Orioles, who are behind us in waiver priority). I see a much clearer and logical path for someone like Luciano to contribute to the Nats, playing two positions where we have almost no depth, as opposed to OF. There’s another dozen relief pitchers, who are also probably better than Pilkington, that have hit waivers without a claim by the Nats.
And if the point is to sneak him through waivers, it will block the playing time of Christian Franklin and/or Robert Hassell, who are our CFs in Rochester.
Weird one.
Will
8 Jan 26 at 4:43 am
I think Toboni is rightly asking the moon for Gore and having not secured Eldridge, Mayo or Casas at this point may have pivoted to turning him into a better version of himself thereby strengthening his hand at the deadline. the first two teams have obtained other starters, albeit not in Gore’s class. The Cubbies just got Cabrera, the dominoes might start falling
FredMD
8 Jan 26 at 9:17 am
I’m not too terribly worried about the Wiemer acquisition, because there’s still half a dozen guys on the 40-man who probably could go.
Lets be honest: any one of the following names could be replaced tomorrow with a MLFA: Fernandez, Ribalta, Adams (zero options), Tena (zero options), Pilkington, Chaparro, Lara, and now Wiemer. None of these are “prospects” and nearly all of them who have MLB time have been awful.
Also, i’m not entirely sure whether Lao is or isn’t still on the team: i’ve got a twitter message that says he’s signed in japan, but he’s also still on the Nats 40-man roster at mlb.com. So… who knows. Maybe we still have an open spot.
Todd Boss
8 Jan 26 at 9:48 am
FYI, as Luke posted on NationalsProspects, the BA top 30 just hit, and there’s a ton of stuff to talk about there. I’ll let this post sit for another day and post about htat tmrw.
Todd Boss
8 Jan 26 at 9:49 am
I try to limit my comments to the post’s subjects, but since Todd brought him up I’ll weigh on on Wiemer.
it was stated that he hasn’t tapped into his projected power yet he did hit 13 dingers in a limited role in 2023. there has been some web content suggesting a swing change followed, maybe the Nats’ new brain trust can get him back on track.
that can’t be ignored when comparing him to Young. power is lacking on the roster.
FredMD
8 Jan 26 at 1:19 pm
Maybe Mike Rizzo’s retirement hobby is launching DDOS attacks at blogs that criticized his draft and player development record?
NG
8 Jan 26 at 1:23 pm
@NG: somehow I don’t think “Information Technology” is in Rizzo’s wheel-house, having just run one of the least-regarded analytics front offices in the sport. 🙂
Todd Boss
8 Jan 26 at 3:22 pm