Going Deep with The Nats

The Washington Nationals selected four Rule-5 eligible pitchers for the Nats 40-man roster with DJ Herz being an obvious move along with Mitchell Parker who emerged this week as a near-lock. General Manager Mike Rizzo also added RH reliever Zach Brzykcy who is rehabbing from a UCL surgery as well as RHP Cole Henry who is working his way back from thoracic outlet syndrome surgery.

While all four names were debated over the past few weeks, the biggest surprise per a source is that the Nats could not come to terms with Dominic Smith, and he was DFA’d much like Luke Voit was a year ago. Smith was arbitration-eligible and might have earned about $4.3 million if he took this to an arbitration hearing. Much like Voit last year, Rizzo was not going to chance it and per a source tried to negotiate a deal under $3 million, which obviously did not happen. Also, RHP Cory Abbott was DFA’d, and Andres Machado requested Unconditional Release Waivers to pursue an opportunity in Japan.

Shortly afterward all of the aforementioned roster moves, the Nats also announced that arb-eligible outfielder Victor Robles and reliever Tanner Rainey both came to terms on one-year deals. That gives the team cost certainty with both. It doesn’t guarantee that Robles isn’t traded, but this probably also means he won’t be a DFA. We are waiting on dollar figures for both. Sources told us that if Robles did not come to a contract resolution, he would have met the same fate as Smith.

The GM meetings started on Tuesday and were supposed to have concluded today in Scottsdale, Arizona, until a bad case of stomach flu hit dozens of attendees. At first they thought it might have been food poisoning — but once it was determined to be a virus, MLB shut it down on Wednesday. Today’s schedule is really for the benefit of registered MLBPA agents, and their meetings will be conducted on ZOOM calls.

Yesterday, in the early afternoon in Scottsdale, Nats’ GM Mike Rizzo spoke in MLB Network and then to the assembled media in two separate sessions. There was really nothing new from Rizzo, rather he just reiterated what he has been saying since the end of the season that he will be working on acquiring starting pitching, bullpen help, and a middle of the order power bat.

There are only 30 GM jobs in MLB, and it makes it one of the most coveted jobs in the world. In the new-age era of moneyball-to-analytics, the GM’s job spills over on many teams to almost make some of the managers into puppets — with the GMs pulling the strings. There are GMs that have overrides on lineup configurations and when to pull a starting pitcher. Mister Geppetto just has to be smart enough to know which strings to pull. Modern day managers don’t even realize how much their jobs have changed since the days when a manager like Davey Johnson was doing his own rudimentary form of analytics in the dugout — a first for a manager.