Most analytical observers of the Washington Nationals had their doubts about Kyle Finnegan as the team’s closer. But few expected him to be gone at the non-tender deadline. Obviously the motivation went back to his Dollar/WAR. MLB Trade Rumors thought Finnegan would get $8.6 million at an arbitration hearing, and the Nats, per TalkNats sources, said that the team would not tender him a contract without an agreed upon contract in place. That did not happen and Finnegan became a free agent on Friday night.
FanGraphs, today, has Finnegan at a modest 0.3 WAR, and Tanner Rainey, who was also non-tendered, is at a -0.3 WAR. With both gone, the Nats win projection from FanGraphs is still at 75 wins (a .461 win mark). Of note, there are 29 free agent relievers projected at a 0.3 WAR, and 21 at 0.4 or above. Most of those relievers have closing experience. By default on the Nationals’ roster, Jose A. Ferrer would be the current player as the placeholder as the closer.
The process of trying to assess values of players into the future is far from an exact science. Some do not like the WAR formula; however, it appears to be the best comparative indicator we have for values. You could certainly agree, or disagree, with certain players projections in their modeling.
“We’re always looking for starting pitching and pitching in general.”
— 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 [want to] get a little more impactful kind of bats to go to place around our good, young core of position players.”
What we want to do today is re-look at the budget projections with nearly $10 million of additional cash freed up, and add a closer as a priority. Of course we are playing armchair GM and making many assumptions using FanGraphs WAR projections for free agents and MLB Trade Rumors projected AAV salaries.
We also added many names to the list as suggested by commentors on the free agent article from last week. Our current CBT payroll projection has the Nats at $ 96,358,692 to be exact with Stephen Strasburg‘s salary, the six tendered arbitration eligible players, 40-man benefits, player benefits, and the pre-arb bonus contribution. Keep in mind, the Nationals had an Opening Day payroll of $127 million this year. The Nats are currently $31 million below that number. How much, and who the Nationals acquire, are the questions going forward.
The top player to add for dollar/WAR was Alex Bregman. He would also add his Gold Glove for added defense which is really the problem with the pitcher’s WAR in FanGraphs that has distorted ERAs. They are not giving WAR values at or above the levels that Nats pitchers achieved last year. For instance, for MacKenzie Gore they are giving a 2.7 WAR value for 2025, versus his actual 3.2 for the 2024 season. Gore’s numbers were the most extreme for the pitchers, and they did similar to Jacob Young who made his value on defense, baserunning, and scoring runs. You would think Young would progress with his hitting and come in similar for defense and baserunning to make him more valuable in 2025 — but FanGraphs took him from 2.6 this year to 1.6 next year with more plate appearances for 2025! This is why we play the games and believe that both Gore and Young will far exceed these projections.
Looking around at other teams, FanGraphs took Michael Harris II and made him one of the most valuable players in baseball. Last year in 110 games, Harris put up a 2.0 WAR. Next year they are projecting a 5.2 in 154 games. While you would expect a healthy Harris to put up better cumulative numbers, they are projecting him for the best hitting slash of his career and that becomes the justification for their numbers. Maybe they will be right, maybe not.
The Nationals won 71-games last year with a flawed roster. They achieved addition by subtraction by bringing up their young top prospects like James Wood and Dylan Crews, and the Nats pitching was much better than expected — even though the defense was bottom-5 in baseball.
With FanGraphs at 75-wins for the Nats, we showed several models for adding WAR, and there was a $65 million model to add 8.8 WAR. You might subtract 1.8 WAR in cumulative from players you eliminate and get to +7.0 to the 75-win total which gets the team to an 82-80 winning record. And that is where you hope that better defense will raise this starting rotation far beyond the projected WAR. With literally thousands of combinations of how you could spend money to get to your goal, the reality is when players say “yes” to a contract, and you play the games.
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