When the team chose to go to war for the 2026 Opening day with a bullpen that featured
- 5 Wavier claims (Poulin, Varland, Waldichuk, Schultz, and yes Lovelady counts here)
- 1 MLFAs (Perez), and
- 2 trade acquisitions with negligible MLB service time (Beeter, Granillo)
… one could probably have been a little concerned about how they’d fare.
Well, 3 weeks in, we have our answer. They’ve already made use of every other reliever on the 40-man at some point (Rutledge, Ribalta, and Fernandez … yet another Waiver claim) plus have made use of two starters (Parker and Alvarez) to eat innings with varying success.
As Mark Zuckerman pointed out, with Fernandez’s ridiculously awful outing last night (where he gave up 2 hits, 2 walks, threw a pitch to the backstop, and bounced so many balls in the dirt that his catcher Millas seemed completely fed up when one of them caught him flush in the hand), the team has now used 21 pitchers already, including one mop-up inning from outfielder Joey Weimer.
21 pitchers. That’s hard to do when you only have 25 arms on the entire 40-man roster, and four of them are on the 60-day DL.
Already, the Nats bullpen is last in the league in fWAR, 29th in FIP, 27th in ERA, 30th in K/9.
Clearly, this isn’t sustainable. But, I’m not entirely sure where they go from here. It’s one thing when you build a bullpen as Rizzo did so frequently in the past, from a combination of holdovers, veteran FAs, and call-ups. At least there you weren’t rolling the dice with 75% of the pen. But with so many trash-heap players, who other teams didn’t even think were worthy of keeping a 40-man spot, let alone a 26-man active roster spot, this was always going to be a recipe for disaster.
There’s zero 40-man help remaining in Rochester; the only two guys they haven’t called up are starters Perales and Cornelio … who aren’t exactly locks to be able to come in and pitch effectively in relief after being on longer rest. There’s a couple more MLFAs there with MLB time who aren’t pitching half bad (Yean and Gott), but the rest of the AAA bullpen isn’t exactly inspiring confidence either.
It could be a long season.
The consequences of fielding a 40 man roster under $60m…
And to make matters worse, $10m is being paid to players who may not throw another pitch this season (Waldichuk, Gray, Williams and Henry), so the roster is essentially a $50m one at this point. Without doing the math for all other teams, I’m fairly certain this is the lowest in the majors (by a considerable margin). The Marlins are sitting at $73m, and have some dead money in a couple players that brings their real payroll to around $65m, who are the next lowest. There’s then a big jump to the next cheapest team, the Guardians and Rays in the $80m range.
So, yes, this is going to be a long season. And probably a long decade. Until the Lerners allow Toboni to spend money, this team is not going to be good for any extended period of time. And now it looks like Toboni not even having discussed an extension with Abrams or Wood over the offseason might have seen their asking prices jump quite substantially. Meanwhile, every other team in the league – even the cheapest ones – are locking down their young talent beyond their cost controlled years. It’s really a shame, because with slightly more ambitious signings, like Nick Martinez or Aaron Civale instead of Mikolas, 3+ actual big league relievers, and like Ryan O’Hearn at 1B instead of… no one, you could see how this team might not be “good”, but they’d at least be competitive if everything fell right (as things mostly have on offense). And it would’ve only cost like $15-20m more. If we opted to spend actual money, and opted for good FAs, well, then you can start to dream about this team being good. But I digress…
But back to the topic of the pitching, I’ve been pretty pleased with how Butera has been using the pitching staff, and Toboni churning through the bad players to make the best of a bad situation. Back in the Corbin days, we’d watch him just get smacked around routinely in the 2nd and 3rd times through the lineup, before Davey would pull him for the bad bullpen to make matters worse, at least now Butera is experimenting with short-starts and openers to mix things up. I appreciate that those in charge are actually TRYING something different, as opposed to the stale, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” approach of Davey and Rizzo. Alvarez getting demoted after his great long-relief start looked like a head-scratcher, but it makes sense. Alvarez threw 63 pitches in long relief, so he wouldn’t be available for another 5 days, better to make space for another arm in his stead. It’s just a shame that the alternatives to him in the meantime are generally really bad. (With that said, I don’t get why they opted for Julian Fernandez ahead of Ribalta and Schultz, who’ve been better than Fernandez in both Rochester and DC)
It also looks like the team isn’t wedded to a sunk cost. Mikolas has been diabolical, and it seems his ever-shrinking leash in the rotation was given a lifeline by a surprisingly good outing a few days ago. But I would like to see Alvarez and Mikolas switch roles sooner than later. As much as Alvarez has shown he’s, at worst, capable of eating innings, Mikolas has shown over the past 2+ seasons to be not even very capable of playing replacement-level baseball. I’d rather we invest the playing time in the future of the org. But my worry is, as I’ve stated in the past, that Toboni’s sights are set on the 2030s, so extending the service time of even bit-part players like Alvarez to 2030 is Toboni’s ultimate goal.
Will
22 Apr 26 at 4:07 am
Will … its even WORSE than that. $10M to injured arms sure … but $30-$35M of that $80M is going to Strasburg!! When you look at it that way, we’re at least $20m below even the likes of Tampa and Cleveland! It’s ridiculous what they’re putting out on the field. I long-ago gave up my Season Tickets, but if I was a STH right now i’d be *pissed* about the state of the team.
https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots/national-league/washington-nationals/
I agree, Butera’s doing god’s work right now. Using Openers, using tandem starts. It’s the kind of out of the box solutions that our prior manager never would have considered, and its evidence of what newer thinking can do. However … it’s smoke and mirrors, and it can’t last. He’s already used basically every pitcher at his disposal and we’re not even to May. Soon we’ll start to get more arm injuries, we’ll run out of 40-man arms, and we’ll start hitting the waiver wire again. That’s when this dance turns to disaster.
Fernandez right now is #1 on my “next guy to get DFAd.” I was appalled at his appearance.
Todd Boss
22 Apr 26 at 10:33 am
I just can’t let it go – this team wasn’t going to be a WS favorite, but it wouldn’t have taken much spending to be “in the mix for a wild card if we get a few breaks”. And the only reason they didn’t was that they wanted to have an extremely low payroll instead of just a below average payroll. I agree that season ticket holders should be furious. Hell, I’m furious even as I only lose joy and time and not money. (I haven’t lived in DC for 10 years and only get to one or two games a season at Nats park.)
If all we did was keep Gore and Ferrer and sign O’Hearn or Murakami, this team is at least 13-11. Just imagine if we also paid $15M for 3 average bullpen arms. (Speaking of the bullpen – the team is on pace for 56 blown saves, which would almost double the record. Wow.)
Of course, we wouldn’t and shouldn’t be expecting the offense to hold this level of production. But you don’t have to give the wins back. My whole point is that you need to put yourself in a position where you can take advantage of getting lucky. And even if we fell short, spending most of the season in contention would be really fun.
They didn’t, and the reason is that they cared less about winning games than about saving the Lerners $30M, which is less than 1% of their net worth (and the expense of which of course would have been at least partially covered by increased revenues).
All the trajekts in the world can’t cover that up.
SMS
22 Apr 26 at 11:10 am
I’ve never been a full season plan holder. But I have been going a lot of games since the Nats came to down. I’ve been a 20 game plan holder for about 15 seasons now and go to a couple of dozen games a season. The team that caused me to drop out for a while was the 2022 Nats. That team was not only REALLY bad, it was one of the older teams in MLB. That burned me out for a season.
I signed up again in 2024 and have generally been fine with it. It helps that I like baseball, and that I like going to games. It also helps that the team is now the youngest team in MLB (by batter’s age) and plays hard. It’s fun that the manager is willing to be both creative (openers/tandem starters) and aggressive (he’s PH for the catcher a number of times). The organization is finally jumping on the “use AAA as a taxi squad” way of covering innings. That’s worth a shot even though the results haven’t been good.
John C.
22 Apr 26 at 3:08 pm
I’ve run the old work season ticket group since about 2009 or 2010. Our group goes back to the early 90s when DC was up for an expansion team; we were at the Os from 1992 to 2004 and with the Nats since. Paying money to Angelos and the Lerners has been . . . an experience. We dropped our second pair after 2021, but kept one.
The Nats bullpen is a bit like Woody Allen joke with the women complaining about the food at a Catskills resort: “The food is terrible” says one, then the other adds “and such small portions.” The quality of the relief is terrible, but the virtue is its in large portions. Or, more to the point, I like that they have focused primarily on optionable guys, usually with a pitch or two that maybe can be fashioned into something that plays at MLB level. Under DeBartolo, that was Poulin, and under Tobonia, that’s Varland. The rest of the dreck could have been Varland or Poulin, but youneverknow until you trot out the Fernandezes. The Nats don’t have anyone other than Perez and Lovelady out of options. They seem to be very willing to send guys up and down when arms are abused by pitching too frequently or throwing too many pitches. This kind of contrasts to the 2025 arms like Lucas Sims and Screwthe Poche, who had to be given 13, 18 appearances before their mercy killings.
I suspect the Nats will have a lot more churn this season, but if they end up with 4 or 5 arms with team control that resemble major leaguers, it sets them up well going forward. Toboni has said he wants to see improvement over the year. Given how bad this pen is, more tryouts, cycling in and out of the active roster, and pickups may accomplish that.
JCA
22 Apr 26 at 6:13 pm
Our STH experience was not good. We were in for the 2005 season. I fronted for 8 seats personally, four I gave to a group that was affiliated with a major defense contractor, the other four I organized to split amongst a group of 9-10 people so we each got a 9-game slate. We had awesome seats in RFK; section 109 just a few rows off the field. I have no idea how we got such good tickets, but I sense it had to do with really tepid response for that many tickets at that time, and the fact that we were on the 1st base side (aka the visitor’s side). Nonetheless, going to those games was amazing.
When we got our new seats in Nats park, they have moved us 20+ rows further up the concourse and we were in basically the furthest point back for that same price point that we could be; the row right behind us was paying $20 less per ticket per night. The group that I was aligned with in RFK, that was affiliated with the Fortune 25 company? Still 3 rows off the f*cking field. So we were now paying 60/seat after having spent years with 100+ loss teams and shit facilities … my entire group cancelled in disgust. Not one of them wanted to continue after the way we were treated. Of course, the sales people called me for years, asking if I would renew. I said, “sure, put me back where I was in RFK.” and of course they couldn’t do that b/c those seats are now forever and ever owned by corporations just writing $50k checks for the seats to give out as gifts.
Todd Boss
23 Apr 26 at 3:37 pm
22nd pitcher (Cornelio) coming up! He’ll likely be tandem starter behind Mikolas, who may be struggling to keep his job if this continues too long. At $2.25M invested in just a 1 year deal, One has to think he’s on a much shorter leash than Littell ($3M this year with a $4M buyout for next).
That means that we have ONE remaining healthy 40-man arm who hasn’t already appeared in the majors: AAA starter Perales, who has 11 walks in 14IP so far for Rochester.
Todd Boss
24 Apr 26 at 9:19 am
Todd, very curious for your take on the top prospects list Fangraphs just released: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/washington-nationals-top-41-prospects/
Derek
24 Apr 26 at 10:33 am
Just new posted. Kiley’s list is … crazy.
Todd Boss
24 Apr 26 at 1:53 pm