There are literally thousands of free agent combinations, and you could plug-and-play dozens of names into a spreadsheet based on a budget. The Washington Nationals are rumored to be spending this offseason. The team has been tied to several of the big names from Juan Soto to Alex Bregman to Christian Walker to Anthony Santander to Pete Alonso. It has been a few years since the Nationals have had their name associated with the top of the free agent stack.
We were asked to put together a chart based on spending $35 million, $50 million, and $65 million. Of course you won’t get Soto with a $35 million budget, and a $50 million budget will not fill the other voids.
What are the main needs? General manager Mike Rizzo made it clear that he wants middle of the order bats (plural) and pitching. With that in mind, that is how we approached putting together scenarios.
“We’re always looking for starting pitching and pitching in general.”
— general manager Mike Rizzo said to the media at the GM Meetings last 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.”
“We would like to attack our offense in the offseason. 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.”
Some think the Nats need to spend $85 million this offseason. Sure, that would be fun in an alternate reality; however, we know that Rizzo likes to add over many years as he tweaks his roster. Now the Nats have not been linked to Max Scherzer, but fans would like to see how he fits. The issue is that Scherzer has been stricken with multiple injuries the past few years and was limited to just 43 innings in 2024 and a 4.18 FIP. He put up a bWAR of just 0.4. Can you count on a 41-year-old to give you 28 good starts and spend $15 million on that gamble?
For these purposes we hope that the total spend is well above $35 million for new acquisitions and we capped it at $65 million to give the one scenario to meet all of the goals and get Soto. We used MLBTR as a guide for salary projections for these free agents.
Here is what we came up with:
We did not put Santander or Alonso in here, but you certainly could using the MLBTR numbers of $20 million for Santander and $25 million for Alonso. You can put other names in here too.
Let us know your scenarios, and we will see who got it right at the end of the offseason.
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