The Nationals

I discuss the Nationals' offseason changes and the outlook for the rest of the season. I share my hopes for the offseason. Plus, I discuss the problems MLB has.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Overreacting Since Kickoff podcast, your source for DMV sports news and opinions by someone who's been a lifelong DMV fan, who has no access to anything, just giving you his thoughts on the goings-on on DMV sports. In today's episode, I'm gonna discuss the nationals, where they are, around the All-Star Break time, how they've sort of comported themselves this season with a new manager, new GM, and what is the outlook, more sort of the outlook next year and beyond than just this year. As all of us already know, last year and the last number of years since they won the World Series have been terrible years. The ownership, it's gonna get into a little bit about that with the ownership, but let's just go what it looks like on the surface that the ownership, after Ted Lerner passed away, has decided they don't want to spend any money on any free agents, they don't want to spend money on coaching staffs, they don't want to spend money on developmental players, and we're sort of left with a really bad team. A team that doesn't have any superstars on it, a team doesn't have any good hitters or good pitchers, and the ones that they did have, like Ju Soto, they've been traded away for younger talent, and it's sort of repeating itself. You trade for somebody when they get really good, you don't sign them, you trade them for younger talent, and you're sort of in this endless cycle of never really being able to be good because by the time those players that you traded for are really good, Juan Soto, once they really established themselves, throwing trade. Well, Bryce Harper, you can put in some other players like that. But but the fact of the matter is, whatever players they had, when they got to the point where they could start helping the team by giving them an extension and then adding a few more players, it seemed like the ownership was like, nah, we're just gonna not sign you, trade them. That's sort of the narrative we got from Mike Rizzo for all these years that the Lerner group is really difficult to work with, they don't want to spend money, and so we're kind of stuck here. And I of course there was a shift between when Ted Lerner was spending money to try to win a World Series, they did. Unfortunately, they picked the wrong player to give an extension to with Strasburg, but I would say if Steven Strasberg didn't get injured the way he did, and in the signs were there that he's not gonna be durable and reliable, whatever, they gave him the contract. If he was still pitching today the same way he was pitching the World Series, he's a first ballot Hall of Famer, or at least he's in the Hall of Fame, pretty slam dunk. It didn't work out. That happens all the time in sports, but they never really adjusted, and they actually did Steven Strasberg dirty. There were some rumors that they were going to retire his number or do some retirement ceremony in which there were some give backs and contracts, and that never happened, and he's just gone. You don't hear anything about him. And in fact, I believe this is the last year of his seven-year contract, and so he's off the books. This is another thing where you can sort of attack the learners. He is like almost like 40% of their operating roster budget, and he hasn't played and will never play or pitch again. So there are the signs that Rizzo was right when he said that the learner ownership is terrible. We sort of saw this weird change last year where the team was just awful, and the manager was sitting there yelling at the players, saying that it's never the coach's fault, and then all of a sudden they all got fired. Rizzo got fired, uh, the manager got fired, David Martinez got fired, and it sort of felt like when I saw that, that probably was a good move. Because if Rizzo can't work with the ownership, it just it just seemed like it wasn't working. My assumption was that they were going to hire sort of like a retread general manager who's been there through the ringer a couple times and just whatever, we'll build a decent, decent-ish team, and that was it. And we didn't see that, actually. What we saw is they hired this young person from the Red Sox in Poltavone, and it made no sense of the hiring. Why would somebody, a young hotshot, want to come here and deal with this ownership group, unless he was given some, you know, say in how they're going to spend, some promises that they're going to spend money. And literally the first thing he did is he fires everybody. We when we're talking about a clean house, normally when they talk about a clean house, they're just talking about the major league staff. You don't really hear about everything below the major league. But he fires literally everybody from low A to the majors, all the coaches are gone, all the developmental staff is gone, all the hitting coaches are gone, everybody is gone. I think they saved like four coaches, like Matt Leecroy and Doolittle are the two names I can think of at the top of my head who they kept, but everybody else is gone. And then they hire Blake Butera, this 31-year-old, I think, who's never played above high A. He was in the Rays organization, the Rays really liked him, but you sort of had the sense of what's going on here with this. It doesn't make any sense what the learners would not want to spend money. And I know it's different when you're like Juan Soda's contract, $765 million. That's an insane amount of money. But when you are rebuilding and you fire everybody and you have to hire somebody, I don't know if you ever if you've been in the hiring process, even if you're hiring somebody for like $60,000 a year, there is more money that goes into it because the assumption is you're not just gonna hire this person for one year. There's health benefits that you have to pay for, there's retirement planning. So everybody who's even getting paid $60K,000 is probably worth about a million dollars. So there's a lot of money that the learner spent to hire all of these people. And not only did he hire all of these new coaches, all these new developmental staff, he hired all this new technology for analytics, something that Rizzo said that he asked for, and the learner said no. There's some contradictions in that. Rizzo never was an analytics guy. He was like, you know, you know, eye test. Uh, he doesn't look like a player, not this analytics stuff. So I think I don't really trust Rizzo when he was saying some of these things because again, I know signing Bryce Harper or Juan Soto or any of Aaron Judge, if you want to throw in some other part, definitely would have cost him way more money than all of the staff members that they hired combined, but that's still a big investment in infrastructure. That's a big investment in coaching staff and developmental staff that they had to shell out pretty quickly. You can't start a major league season with no managers and low A to the majors. So there is money that needed to be spent from it. And the other thing we saw is the players are better this year. There's no difference in the players from this year and last year. It's pretty much the same, but they're playing a lot better. You don't have the same stories you had last year with CJ Abrams. You don't have the stories that he's in National Harbor drinking and gambling all night and coming into the clubhouse like at eight in the morning after an all-nighter at National Harbor gambling. You don't have that. He got sent home for that. You have more of a professional organization, and the hitters are hitting. I mean, Luis Garcia, he's a retread. Everybody thought he wouldn't be able to play very well. CJ Abrams was another one who was like, is he gonna get traded? Does he need to be traded? James Wood, you don't have the same strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, and just lifeless at bats that you had towards the end of the year. What's the difference? And I think the difference is you have better coaches, better developmental staff, more reliant on our buddy analytics to actually help. And I think analytics works a lot better in baseball than it does in other sports, and you have a big difference between the two, and not much change in the players. There is one exception to this, and that is pitching. The pitching has been horrific this year. The bullpen has been terrible, and the starters are non-existent. I always tell everybody they have one and a half starters. You have you have Foster Griffin, who's been a revelation, should be an all-star this year. Nice journeyman who's somehow found it this year. He's been great. The team, you know, he pitches well. He pitches five, six, seven innings. And then you have Cade Cavale, who at times looks like he could be a dominant ace, and then other times he looks like he's a borderline number five starter. So that's why I always say they have one and a half starters, and there's whatever they have to throw in the bullpen, and it's been atrocious. And I think this is where you see the lack of spending really hurting them. Because a bullpen isn't that hard to build if you spend a little bit of money. And I know year-to-year bullpins are not consistent. You can have a great bullpen one year and the same bullpen the next year and be terrible. I mean, there's a reason for that. I mean, if you're a bullpen pitcher, it means you can't pitch three innings without getting rocked. Your shelf life isn't that long. And so that is the one area, but everything else has been great. The team's been playing good. It's been exciting to watch these games. Like they're competitive. Like when they're down, and they're not really normally down runs until they get to the end of the game, but you sort of have this feeling, yeah, they can come back. They can slug it out, and they'll they can win 12 to 6, 12 to 9. And they're above 500. And it's sort of a discussion right now. Should they actually enter the trade market? Should they start to try to do a win now and try to sneak into the playoffs? I'm on record, I'm gonna go on record here, and say I don't think they should do that. I think they should try to win, they should try to make the playoffs, but I don't think they should be trading away anything for a short-term gain to sneak into the third or maybe the second wild card. I don't think that's worth it. I think they should, and this is what I'm hoping for, this offseason take what they've built and sign a couple players, i.e., pitchers. If they could just honestly, if they just had three starters, so that would be adding one or two starters, and then one or two bullpen arms, you would see a huge difference in the win-loss total. If you just put that right there, they win at least five to ten more games, and then they're a real contender for maybe the, and at least probably not because the Braves are too good, but they're a contender for a top wildcard spot instead of hanging on towards the uh bottom wildcard spot number three. So I think this this offseason coming up is going to be a big thing with the learners. Are they actually willing to spend? Are they actually willing to build something? I just can't imagine that Paul Tabone or anybody for that matter who's young would take this job unless they got some sort of agreement from the learners that money will be spent. Now, we're not talking about signing an Aaron Judge-like contract or anything like that, but there are players that you can spend on that will greatly improve your roster. You don't need to have Aaron Judge win the World Series. You don't need that. And I don't know if they're trying to compete to win. That's the other thing with revenue sharing in the major leagues. You definitely see the stories from about the pirates owner who basically uses this as sort of a tax shelter. This is where he makes up for all of his businesses if they don't do well. So he doesn't really put a hugely competitive team out there. I mean, just competitive enough, and revenue sharing will make them profitable because they're not spending money on the field, and so the revenue sharing gets thrown into them. And then you see with Major League Baseball taking over some of the sh uh broadcasting rights for these teams, it's uh an expense that uh teams don't have to pay for. I'm definitely sure the learners jumped in on that. As soon as they got out of the massing contract, they jumped in with Major League Baseball so that they don't have to worry about broadcasting rights. That has some downsides to it. It's nearly impossible to watch uh Nationals games. I can't really do it. I obviously I pay for the uh MLB package, but if you're not willing to spend an extra 20 bucks or whatever a month or $120, you're not gonna watch it. And those are only going to be the diehard fans are gonna spend money to watch it. You're not gonna get the casual fans. Why would a casual fan spend that much money? And I know that's uh a thing with ESPN. ESPN has hoarded the broadcasting rights for hockey as well as baseball, so they have it, and then they don't have to worry about covering it or talking about it, and they really haven't, they really cut back on the uh baseball coverage. I remember the glory days when they had baseball tonight every night, and they actually had quality people talking about baseball, and now you don't have that. Now you just have bust of only or things like that, or just awful. And I think that's another problem with the Nationals is no one's watching the games, and why would they? They're bad. But the other problem is how can you watch the games? If I again, if I'm a casual fan, I'm not watching the Nationals to begin with because they're terrible, but I'm sure not paying 20 bucks or $120 to watch them on a streaming service because they've been terrible since 2019. So these are things that the learners need to address or sell the team like they were trying to do. And I know they were trying to sell the team for a terrible price. I think they were trying to do it. I the the story was they wanted $2.1 billion, not a penny less. The team is not worth $2.1 billion, especially with how garbage the roster is, how terrible they've been for the number of years. And so, in order to build value, which is kind of weird that I'm trying to tell them how to build value when they're in the real estate market, they sort of understand that. You have to have a product that somebody wants. You can't necessarily sell on potential, and maybe that's where the real estate is getting them because they can sell just farmland and sort of say, hey, look at the perceived value of the farmland. But there's no perceived value in the nationals because in order to get the nationals up to snuff, you gotta spend a lot more money. And so I just don't know what they're doing, and it's kind of disappointing, but I am hopeful. What I'm hopeful for is, as I said before, the fact that they got rid of so many coaches and they added so many coaches back, that there has to be some discussion that we need to spend some money to be better. Now, you're never going to compete with the Dodgers, and that's a failure of Major League Baseball not to implement some sort of salary cap so you can just let a few teams spend as much as they want. You can argue both ways. I know if we do the ESPN argument, they would rather have the Yankees, the Dodgers, Red Sox, Chicago, and maybe one or two other teams, and that's it. I don't care about the other teams, it can be farm teams for the big six, but we only want to have these six teams. We don't want to go to Kansas City. We don't want to go to Cincinnati. And we don't care about those teams. Those should be the farm teams. And in that situation, no salary cap really benefits because St. Louis is never going to spend that much money. But the Dodgers will. And I think the you know ESPN, Fox would rather have the Dodgers win the World Series every year for the next 10 years and maybe sprinkle in the Yankees, and that's it. They don't want the other teams in there. Whereas baseball fans should want the other side, and that would be the NFL side, in which you have insane parity, and the reason you have insane parity is because, well, two reasons, but the main one is a salary cap. The non-guaranteed contracts makes it a little bit easier for football. But if you have a salary cap, which means you're going to have a salary maximum, and then you have salary floor, and those should be within, I mean, I think in the NFL, it's probably within 10% of each other, but if they're within 20%, then these teams need to spend money in order to get up to the floor. And I know you would see always the uh analysts talking about if they put the salary cap in today, which they're not going to, so many teams are under the floor, what would be the floor that they've instituted. Of course, there's gonna be a lot of teams under because those teams that are under the floor are banking on not spending money on the field so they can have more money for revenue sharing. But if you put in the floor, then they're going to spend money. They always use that as a negative. Oh my god, look how many terrible teams are. Yes. But you put in the floor, it's gonna force them to spend more money. As they're spending more money, you can argue, and I've seen this argument before, that instead of actually trying to build a roster, they'll sign one player for whatever the gap is. If they need to get, you know, 30, 40 million, they'll sign one one guy for 50 million dollars. I'm sure there's teams that are gonna do that, but the vast majority won't do that. The vast majority will actually spend money on the roster. So you're not gonna have, you know, like an Albert Bell like the Orioles tried to do that one year. You're gonna see teams signing multiple players and become more competitive. And I think that's the big difference, and I think they need to institute a salary cap and a salary floor. I think that's just better for the sport. I don't know why the MLB Players Association are fighting against it. Because to me, by fighting against a salary cap, what essentially you're doing is you're prioritizing your Juan Sotos, your Aaron Judges, your Shohei Otanes, you're prioritizing your superstars at the detriment of everybody else, all the rank and file players. Because essentially what's happening is those superstar players are not going to get those mega contracts anymore because we got to pay our fifth starter more money to reach the salary floor. And so you're actually boosting the salary, I would say, of the rank and file over your Juan Soto's. So I don't understand why the Players Association would fight against that. You know, you're not losing your guaranteed contracts, you're keeping that. What you're doing is players are gonna get paid more money, some of your fringe players are gonna get paid more money, some of your mediocre players are gonna get paid more money. What's gonna happen is uh is the superstars aren't gonna get paid. And you're going to see a more competitive field. You're not gonna have the Chicago White Sox only winning 30 games or 40 games. You you are gonna have teams that aren't gonna be play well. You can't have every team winning 100 games, but it's not gonna be such a huge gulf between the the best team and the worst team from it. So I just I still don't understand why they won't won't go for it. I know they'll probably throw the slippery slope, oh, we change one thing, you're gonna change more, but baseball's losing out. It shouldn't. It it should not be losing out as much as it is, but it is because of decisions by ESPN. Yeah, what I mean by that is they've sort of just stopped covering it. They've dropped the broadcasting rights that they had for Sunday Night Baseball, and they've shifted that to NBC. And I think with NBC, they don't know what they're doing, but they know they need to do something to help Peacock, something to help NBC. So they sort of just randomly are bidding on things. So you saw that they try to make a splash years ago with the Premier League, which they still have, and they didn't do a good job with the Premier League. They sort of just throw it on USA, which is not a sports network, and so it's not consistent when you're going to see sports on USA, and then they're trying to help the fledgling Peacock, and it's not the easiest to find on Peacock, and what is the value of Peacock? And then NBC realizes that they needed something else, and so they bid on basketball to get it back. And I I really uh think that they didn't think they were gonna win it, the bidding rights, and they got it, and like, oh, what do we do? And they sort of just cobbled together some analysts in some studios, and I don't think their analysts are very good. I don't think their production is very good, but they have it, and so people will be watching it because we like basketball. And I think they did the same thing with baseball too, and I know they did their early morning Sunday games, and I don't think that really worked because it's 11 a.m. And keep in mind that's 11 a.m. on the East Coast, 11 a.m. on the West Coast for these games, and so you're not going to get a huge amount of viewership. And now that they've been on some of the other Sunday night games, it it could be good to have this. But at the same time, it's so fragmat fragmented to find where these games are being played nationally. So if you want to watch the nationally televised game, is it on ESPN? Is it on NBC? Is it on Peacock? And now Netflix is sitting there bidding on the Derby. They bid on some of the early games. And so it's really too fragmented for people to have a consistent basis to watch baseball. And then we run into, since we're all talking about the nationally televised games, we're running into oh great Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers. You don't get the other teams. And from a fan perspective, this is where the complaints are coming from. I don't always want to watch the Yankees. I don't always want to watch the Dodgers. I would like to watch the other teams. But from an NBC perspective, I understand the ratings are probably worse when you don't have the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox are those top teams. And so we're stuck in this problem in which, in order to grow the sport, you need to show more than just the three or four teams. But unfortunately, if you don't show those three or four teams, the viewership goes down. They don't make money off of it. So why would we do it? And that's hurting baseball. There are plenty more storylines out there than Shohei Otane. But that's all we're going to get because the masses, this is what you know, they think they want, and they don't want to see the other teams. And so Major League Baseball needs to do a better job of trying to get excitement for the other teens. And partly that's probably why you had the three wildcards. It makes a big difference that there's more teams involved in the wildcard chase than in previous years. But I just, it's really tough from a network perspective to want to show Milwaukee versus Cincinnati on Sunday Night Baseball. You would rather show a Red Sox team that's terrible versus the Yankees because you're going to get more eyes to it. And we're running into this problem. And it's sort of, I'm like circling the same thing over and over and over again about the issues. And I obviously I don't have any fixes for it. But I just am it's just frustrating if you're not a fan of one of those teams. You're gonna have to pay out the money for MLB.tv or hopeful that your local cable company that you were subscribed to has the um nationals network or whatever the other network is. I don't have that, and so I have to pay the MLB.tv to watch the games. And it says that there's no blackout restrictions, but every once in a while when I try to watch it on my my phone, no problem. Never have a blackout restriction. When I slap it on my TV, I occasionally get a blackout restriction from it, and that does make it difficult. And that's another thing. Don't get me started on blackout restrictions. That is the most ridiculous thing in the world. They need to get rid of the blackout restrictions. We're no longer worrying about whether fans are gonna go to the stadium or anything. I think it's stifling the sport, but I digress. We can sort of talk about this all day long. About that, the fact of the matter is Major League Baseball has a problem with viewership, Major League Baseball has a problem with parody. Major League Baseball has a problem with what do we do with the Superstar teams compared to the other teams. One angle you can look at it is that's fine. Let the poverty, quote unquote, poverty franchises be like the quadruple A franchises for the Dodgers, for the Yankees, for the Red Sox, and that's fine because ratings will be for baseball, they'll be good when you get into the playoffs. The other side of it is where I would like to be, would be more the NFL approach. That's to increase parity, parity through salary cap, where teams have to spend a certain amount of money. And then when you're having a locked salary cap, it really comes down to a GM picking players. Are they picking the right players or not? Because yeah, you can have a salary cap and you can have the dumbest GM, and they can sign dumb contracts, they can sign bad players, and the team could be terrible. There's nothing you can do with a bad owner hiring a bad front office, and that's true. You're never going to see the MLB get rid of an owner that's bad. You'll see MLB maybe get rid of an owner that is racist, that has sexual assault allegations, things like that, but they're never going to get rid of an owner who's not competing. Because the owners don't care. As long as the owners make money, they're happy, they don't care. As long as there's no controversy with the team, they don't care. They're only out for themselves and not out for the view. That's where we are in terms of Major League Baseball. If we cycle back to the Nats to wrap this up, I am very hopeful with the Nats. I know I sound like a learner homer. I am absolutely not a learner homer. I don't think they're very good owners. I think that they are mediocre at best owners, and it's not like we can change out ownership. I would love to buy the team. But I there's no way I could ever buy the team. So I am hopeful that the changes that they made by hiring Paul Taboni, by hiring all the young staff, all the coaches, that there is some agreement that they will spend some money. I do not expect them to sign a Ju Soto style contract, but I do expect them to spend a little bit of money on players to make the team better moving forward. I do like the analytics approach, but the analytics approach only gets you so far. You need to spend money on some players. You can do 80%, 90% analytics, 10 to 15% eyeball test. Because I think if you do analytics, Aaron Judge is a terrible analytic player. Ju is probably starting to become a terrible analytic player, but you need those players to get you over the hump. And again, you can do fine without a Juan Soto and an Aaron Judge. The point being is you need both. You need to meld the two together. You can give more of your brain power to the analytics than you can the eye test, but you still need that eye test. You still need that player to push you over the top. Uh the last bit, uh, we are in the draft. I know the Nationals drafted 11. I can't even remember the player name they took because it doesn't really matter. The point of the MLB draft is always pick the best player available. They picked an infielder, I think he's a second baseman from Maryland. He went to Texas AM. Supposedly he's a decent hitter. His fielding is subpar. Who cares about the fielding? Who cares about anything? As long as you pick the best player available. I did see some comments on social media that it was a terrible pick because he doesn't fit into the roster. That made no sense. It takes years to develop a major league baseball player. You have no idea what's going to happen. Will they or will they not develop? How long will they develop? What is the pipeline? So it is absolutely the worst thing to do to draft for fit. You draft best player available and you see where they fit in. And maybe this player just doesn't fit in and the timelines don't work. You know what you do with that player? You trade them. You trade them for a player that you need that fits your timeline better. And that's what you're supposed to do. And so right now I am going to trust Toboney. I'm gonna trust their staff that they're going to draft the best players available. If that means they don't draft pitching, whatever. I trust that they know what they're doing and always best player available. So with that being said, until the next time, take care, everybody.