With all of the talk about the Washington Nationals potential 2025 lineup, there could be additions of a new rotation arm and bullpen arms for the 2025 season. While it is possible that the Nats could fill those spots from within the organization, the team still could use a true No. 1 starter to seed in front of MacKenzie Gore, Jake Irvin, and DJ Herz. That would allow Cade Cavalli and Mitchell Parker to compete for the No. 5 spot in the rotation. On top of that, the team could always use another upgrade in the bullpen.
With Patrick Corbin, Trevor Williams, and Jacob Barnes off the roster due to free agency, the team has a chance to better last year’s pitching staff that took major strides year-over-year from 2023 to the 2024 season.
The Nats pitching staff also had the second highest fWAR in all of MLB which shows that pitching was a strength — but there is a warning sign there because FanGraphs calculates pitcher’s WAR off of FIP which is fielding independent pitching. The Nats had the 9th best FIP in baseball at 3.94 while turning in an horrific season as a defensive team that must be fixed. That was a contributing cause to why the Nats’ staff ERA of 4.30 was ranked 23rd in baseball.
While the Nats’ ERA was trending in the right direction, keep in mind, that baseball as a whole, had an ERA that trended lower improving from 4.33 to 4.07 respectively from 2023 to 2024. Now let’s look at the Nats’ ERA of 5.02 in 2023 with their 5.15 FIP. The staff ERA pitched better than their FIP in 2023.
Clearly, the Nats front office has a lot to analyze and see where their money will be best spent this offseason.
“We’re always looking for starting pitching and pitching in general.”
— general manager Mike Rizzo said to the media at the GM Meetings this week
“We’re fairly happy with our starting pitching depth. Our pitching people have done a great job developing these guys, caring for them and bringing them up to the big leagues to perform at the big league level.”
For additional depth going forward, MLB Pipeline projects Top-30 pitching prospects Tyler Stuart (No. 19) and Brad Lord (No. 30) to make their MLB debuts next year. While Rizzo personally named Jake Bennett (No. 18) as a pitcher who could make his MLB debut in 2025, he is coming off of UCL elbow surgery and last pitched in High-A in 2023 prior to his injury. Then there is also the unranked Andrew Alvarez who could be added to the 40-man roster as a Rule-5 player.
There are so many pitchers via free agency or trades to look at as viable acquisitions. Many pitchers could help the Nationals — but there is a trap of signing the wrong pitcher like the Diamondbacks did last year with Jordan Montgomery. Budgetary constraints will be a factor, of course, in a holistic view because the team’s priority might be looking at adding a team leader on offense.
When Rizzo and the Lerner ownership group built the 2011-to-2019 Nats rosters, there was a distinct need for a leader in the clubhouse. The team signed Jayson Werth to the largest contract in franchise history at the time. The team had an ace in Stephen Strasburg who debuted in 2010. They did not add Max Scherzer until 2015.
Every aspect of the team does not have to be added right now. You use the continual improvement method where you make tweaks, additions, and subtractions every season to improve year over year as you emerge from a rebuild. There is a cyclicality to the sport as players age (for better or for worse), players get injured, and players move on in free agency. But you must take advantage as your window opens up — and that is the stage we believe the Nats are at right now.
The Nationals are establishing a young core. The next step is a risky process as you try to find those pieces that fit together like a puzzle where you are not forcing a square peg in a round hole like many teams try to do and then fail. Chemistry is a key, and was so evident in the Nationals’ 2019 World Series season that most agree was not the team’s best roster on paper like they had in the 2015-2018 years that could be described as the “Where’s my ring?” seasons.
Like Werth, who won a World Series ring before coming to the Nationals, that would make sense to find a team leader who has raised the World Series trophy before. You want winners on the team. You want that in a leader. That is why Alex Bregman‘s name has been rumored to the Nats. He was 23 years old in 2017 when the Astros won that tainted first World Series, and 28 when they won their second one. He grew into the leader of the team in 2022. There is added value there plus his relationships with current Nats’ players.
The Nationals had negative WAR at both third base and first base during the 2024 season. There could be more value in upgrading both spots which Rizzo might be able to do. He said that ownership realizes where the team is at in the process. Rizzo continued. “I think that if there’s a free-agent signing that makes sense for us, I think that we’ll be allowed to do that. That’s ultimately a discussion that we have when we meet with ownership where we have a blueprint in place. These [GM] Meetings kind of guide me into that discussion with ownership.”
While the budget is so important, finding the right players are more important. The Royals made the playoffs in 2024 by finding the right players, not spending the most money. There is no guarantee that adding just Juan Soto would transform the Nats instantly into a playoff team like Scott Boras once promised with another of his free agents when he referred to Eric Hosmer as, “Federal Express Playoffville”, meaning that he would deliver the team he signed with to the playoffs. In Hosmer’s five years with the Padres, he was on one playoff team and that was in the COVID-shortened 2020 season.
This is a team game. One player can be the superstar, and as Mike Trout has shown, it takes more than one star to make the playoffs. Sometimes it takes more than three or four superstars on one team if you look at the Angels of the years Shohei Ohtani was with Trout. Remind us again of how many times that Angels team went to the playoffs with Trout, Ohtani, and Anthony Rendon? The answer is zero.
Rizzo used the plural when talking about “impactful kind of bats.” That might indicate that he understands that it will take more than just one player.
“We would like to attack our offense in the offseason,” said Rizzo. “We’d like to get more offensive efficiency — we get a little more impactful kind of bats to go to place around our good, young core position players.”
The players who the Nats have been rumored to be talking with are: Bregman (Kiley McDaniel/ESPN), Christian Walker (Bob Nightengale/USA Today), Soto (Jesse Rogers/ESPN), and Anthony Santander (Jon Morosi/MLB.com) are probably the four most impactful bats in free agency. Oddly, the Nats have not been linked to any pitcher this offseason.
This could be a great offseason for the Washington Nationals.
