In firing their president of baseball operations and their manager in a startling Sunday night massacre, Washington Nationals ownership exhibited something not readily apparent in the highest reaches of the organization.
A pulse.
This has been Dead Franchise Walking for the better part of several years, a ballclub seemingly on autopilot as longtime general manager Mike Rizzo aimed to assemble a roster and install a player development infrastructure despite a less than thorough buy-in from ownership, while manager Dave Martinez lauded the boys for battling, coached up the kids and flailed at the buttons of a bullpen where his options often boiled down to Uh Oh and Not Him.
All the while, Rizzo and Martinez operated in a realm not unlike the kids on ‘Peanuts,’ free to go about their business while unseen and rarely heard adults lurked in the background.
The biggest difference between Charlie Brown and Lucy is that Rizzo and Martinez delivered this franchise a World Series championship in 2019, the apex of an eight-year run of contention that spanned four managerial regimes and rewarded a bevy of grizzled baseball men from field to dugout to front office.
Turns out it was the beginning of the end.
The Viejos who claimed the ’19 title only got older, the club returning from the pandemic with a reigning World Series MVP, Stephen Strasburg, who’d soon turn into a $245 million sunk cost due to maddening and sad health concerns. Who’d have to wear the final five years of Patrick Corbin’s $140 million contract as Corbin’s slider flattened and fastball fizzled, the cost of doing business for one championship season.
Cue six years of nondescript misery, best evidenced by the number of days spent over .500:
2020: 0
2021: 4, the last on June 30.
2022: 0
2023: 0
2024: 2, the last on May 10.
2025: 0
Through it all, Rizzo and Martinez took on the air of permanent caretakers, that they delivered one World Series title and doggone it, they’d do it again.
‘I was the guy who signed him’
This brew of conviction and swagger reached a zenith in July 2022, when Rizzo pulled off an epic baseball trade, dealing Juan Soto two-plus years before free agency for what would turn out to be a bountiful return: All-Stars James Wood, CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore, plus two more promising youngsters in Robert Hassell III and Jarlin Susana.
It was a somber day, the beloved and just 23-year-old Soto gone in an instant, the final curtain falling on the championship club and Rizzo was asked if he could live with being known as the guy who traded Juan Soto.
“I was the guy who signed him, too,” Rizzo said, his gleaming championship ring dangling off a finger.
Touché.
Yet as the years rolled on, and Wood and Abrams and Gore bubbled up to the big leagues, that moment was less the building block of something great and more Rizzo’s last great act.
He was undercut by his inability to, in the final 10-plus years of his tenure, install a drafting and player development infrastructure to keep the talent pipeline moving. Since drafting Anthony Rendon sixth overall in 2011, the Nationals were largely a developmental black hole, save for guys who found greater success – see Lucas Giolito, Nick Pivetta, Erick Fedde – after the Nationals flipped them elsewhere.
Yet Rizzo had perhaps the most unusual gig in the industry.
The Lerner family, to put it gently, did things differently – sometimes a lot differently – than any other franchise in the game. Contracts – or deadlines to pick up options – for employees like Rizzo did not always land on the typical industry calendar but rather in the middle of the year, when baseball operations staffs are, you know, just a little bit busy. While Rizzo’s confidence never withered, there was the near-constant specter of an expiring contract at hand, creating doubt for baseball ops employees and players alike.
The franchise was mildly obsessed – and, truthfully, ahead of the curve – with deferring money in contracts. That could work out in cases like their late strike to get Max Scherzer in the fold, yet backfire in others, making their efforts to retain players like Harper seem unserious. A wave of homegrown stars, from Harper to Trea Turner to Soto to Rendon (whew!) found riches and, often, success elsewhere.
And it took years for ownership to realize running a ballclub was not like another real estate asset; a conveyor belt of veterans – both uniformed and in baseball operations – complained over the years about missing essentials in the clubhouse, to needless expense report scrutiny and postseason travel arrangements that fell well below industry standard.
Most recently, the club was well in the minority in failing to invest in the most cutting-edge training tool available to hitters, hardly dispelling the appearance the club was behind in analytics-oriented areas.
Sure, perhaps it was past time for Rizzo and Martinez to go, if only for the life cycle those jobs tend to take on. Yet Sunday is still a very dark day for Nationals fans.
It can always get worse
Why? Well, the Lerners will now be tasked with hiring a new GM/president of baseball operations, a task they’ve never really taken on in the two decades they’ve owned the ballclub.
They inherited Jim Bowden from the period in which the Expos/Nationals were wards of the state, operated by MLB, and decided, strangely, to keep him on. It wasn’t until he became embroiled in a bonus-skimming, age-falsification scandal that Bowden resigned in March 2009.
Enter Rizzo. A scout’s scout, he was the highest-ranking man standing and hit the ground running, touched by the baseball gods with Strasburg and Harper available with the top overall pick in consecutive years (a bit of fortune impossible today with the draft lottery).
Yet in Rizzo, ownership had a nice, self-contained unit: He was free to run baseball operations – quite well, for many years – so long as he accepted the Faustian bargain of mitigating ownership’s, um, idiosyncrasies. Always willing to take a bullet – he might as well have been Sonny Corleone at the toll booth – Rizzo was able to keep the franchise running at a high level even if things didn’t flow as naturally as other organizations.
So, what now? Thanks to the lottery’s bouncing balls, the Nationals will choose first in the July 15 draft, under the guidance of interim GM Mike DeBartolo. For now, baseball operations minus Rizzo remains largely intact in advance of that day.
After that, there are little guarantees, the only on-field tension seemingly whether the Nationals can avoid 100 losses for the second time in four years.
Lerner must hire a general manager and manager, and hopefully has learned from the time the family was a signature away from hiring Bud Black, only to discover managers don’t work under one-year contracts.
Meanwhile, questions about the group’s long-term commitments linger, what with a failed multi-year effort to sell the team, only for Lerner to pull the team off the market in February 2024. It was an extended period of flux, somewhat conveniently aligning with a down cycle in on-field performance yet producing anew questions of whether the club will commit to major free agents when the time comes to contend in earnest.
The team will also be TV free agents, with the long-awaited MASN settlement giving the franchise agency in its broadcast future. A TV home, a head of baseball ops, a new dugout chief?
That’s an awful lot for an ownership group to take on.
Sunday, they signaled that getting better was a bigger priority than mediocrity cloaked in stability. It was probably the right call.
Now, the hard part arrives. And while the Nationals might have been too wedded to the good old days, it’s an open question whether they have the chops to ensure it doesn’t get any worse.
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