Going Deep with The Nats

For 2024, the Washington Nationals focused on rebuilding with some low-risk additions, after they cleared roster spots by parting ways with a few players since last August when the purge started, and strategically improving their team by adding some power to the lineup to compete more effectively in the Major League Baseball season. The beginning of the year is crucial for setting up the team’s direction, with important decisions about adding new players, making roster changes, and getting ready for spring training.

Just prove them all wrong. The current PECOTA projections has the 2024 Washington Nationals team at 103.8 losses. Play the games — and do what you did last year, and beat all of the projections and estimates.

Much has changed this month since the news broke that the Orioles will be sold — and the Washington Nationals were taken off of the shelf as a team for sale. These two teams are still tied together through the MASN TV contract and per the Baltimore Sun — that contract might be severed to give the Nats back their RSN autonomy. For years, the Nationals have suffered in restrictive revenues — but they must take some of the blame for their own failures in not taking advantage of available revenue streams such as stadium naming rights, jersey patch sponsorships, and of course attendance that has been in a freefall.

Things look so gnarly that the Nationals declining revenues might have turned them into a position of actually benefiting from revenue sharing. Per MLB’s rules, all teams keep 52 percent of their revenue, and then pool the remaining 48 percent of their revenue to be shared and split evenly and given back to each team. That is supposed to help steer money from big-market revenue teams with those lucrative media deals, high ticket prices and attendance, to the lower revenue teams. It is very possible that in 2023 that the Nationals were a beneficiary of revenue sharing.

In 2009, the Washington Nationals were in the enviable draft position to select the most coveted starting pitcher in decades, and add an ace to their staff. The young San Diego State pitcher, Stephen Strasburg, was a game-changer for this losing franchise. Remember, Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League baseball. All Senators fans knew that — and most Nationals fans just accepted it as fact. But Strasburg changed the narrative. His 2010 MLB debut was pure electricity. Two years later, the Nats won the NL East pennant.