WASHINGTON — It was impossible to miss the symbolism at Nationals Park on Monday.
First, consider that this stadium, 16 years into its use as Washington’s major-league home, is still called “Nationals Park,” having never been subject to a naming rights deal that would have, conservatively, brought a few hundred million in additional revenues by now to the Lerner Family. To be fair, by way of comparison, the team Washington faced Monday hasn’t gone the naming rights route, either; it still plays in what is still called Yankee Stadium, not Amazon Presents Exxon Mobile Field at Yankee Stadium, Brought to You by Our Presenting Sponsor, Walmart.
It is also true that the Yankees, in business since 1903, are at 27 World Series championships and counting and are worth $7.1 billion, according to Forbes, ranking them second in the world among all sports teams just behind the Dallas Cowboys ($9 billion) and just ahead of the Golden State Warriors ($7 billion). In their case, the iconography of the team name on the stadium is probably worth more than anything they’d get on the free market.
The Nationals, est. 2005, have one title. It was a great and memorable championship. It was also five years ago. And it feels even longer than that to many, including several thousand paying customers who have continued to come out while Washington embarked on a retooling rebuilding complete roster teardown and foundered at the bottom of the NL East.
Second, consider that Juan Soto, who was supposed to be the Nationals’ Luke Skywalker, is playing instead for the First Galactic Empire, hitting in front of Aaron Judge. For 2024, anyway.
Juan Soto gets a warm ovation from the crowd in D.C. 🫡 pic.twitter.com/feFW9UOFHX
— MLB (@MLB) August 26, 2024
Monday, though, was an inflection point for the Nats, a significant moment when the work of Mike Rizzo and his overhauled staff over the last half-decade started to stitch together, like when your grandmother finally finished a big panel of that afghan she’s been working on since you were 8.
Manager Dave Martinez filled out the top of his lineup card thusly:
5 C.J. Abrams (L) SS
3 Dylan Crews (R) RF
29 James Wood (L) LF
You could do worse than that for the next half-decade or so.
Martinez wrote his lineup Monday against the New York Yankees on a paper plate that he planned to give to Crews, the Nationals’ No. 1 pick in 2023, who was called up from Rochester over the weekend after he’d started to wear out Triple-A pitching. He had to go from Lehigh Valley, where the Red Wings were playing, up to Rochester, N.Y., to pack, then drive six hours down to D.C. He had just enough time to call his mom.
“She was over in Winn Dixie when I called her,” Crews recalled Monday afternoon. “People were looking at her all crazy.”
dylan surprised MOMMA CREWS with the mlb debut news!!!
❤️🥹 @__dc4__ 🥹❤️ pic.twitter.com/CfwkX2SZcZ
— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) August 26, 2024
The Nationals’ expectation is that Crews will generate similar looks of disbelief from their fans for years to come.
“He is what I would call the best recovery hitter that I’ve ever seen, where it looks like maybe he’s going to get beat on a pitch, and then make a decision late. And then, next thing you know, it’s a home run to right center,” Crews’ college coach, LSU’s Jay Johnson, said last year, after the Nationals drafted Crews second, just behind his LSU teammate Paul Skenes, taken first by the Pittsburgh Pirates.
“Back in the day, Mike Piazza had an ability to do that,” Johnson said. “Edgar Martinez had an ability to do that. You don’t see that at the college level all that often. I just think it’s his combination of great vision and incredible bat speed. He can make late decisions, which allows him to control the zone well, and then get to that power. He hits with power, with the ball deeper, better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
With Crews’ MLB arrival, seven weeks after Wood’s, the Nationals hope their next great team has started to fill in, for real, on South Capitol Street — two years after the Nats folded their cards and sent Soto to the San Diego Padres for a monster haul, including Wood and Abrams and MacKenzie Gore. With Abrams, Crews, Wood, Jacob Young flashing Gold Glove-caliber leather in center and Luis Garcia Jr. having a breakthrough year at second, positions are getting locked down.
But it is not complete. It is far from complete. And it is up to the Lerners to plot the franchise’s next steps back, by green-lighting a real foray into free agency this winter. They’ve spent before, when they had a core group of young talent. Time to start spending again.
It doesn’t mean they have to OK $500 million or more to bring Soto back. The combined free-agent deals Washington made for Jayson Werth in 2011 and Max Scherzer in 2015 totaled just $336 million. But there’s a lot of space — among, say, MLB’s other top 20 to 30 free agents — for a middle ground from which this franchise can navigate. You don’t want to reset MLB’s market with a Brink’s-like deal for Soto? Fine. But that means doing way more than serving up the nothing burgers that Washington’s done the past two winters.
Yes, resolving the MASN deal has been interminable, never finalizing how and when the Nationals will get their share of revenues from the Baltimore Orioles. Yes, the Nats got screwed by COVID-19 in 2020 and never got to take their financial victory lap the year after winning it all. Those were two legit body blows. But it’s time to get out of this limbo the team’s been in. If the franchise is indeed off the market, then, with Patrick Corbin’s six-year, $140 million contract finally coming off the team’s books after this season, it’s time to add some gray stubble to the clubhouse.
Martinez has had to be the face of this … whatever they’re calling it. He’s had to wear all those losses, all the growing pains, all the rentals. He loves the game, the building, the occasional tough love necessary to get, say, someone like Garcia to reach his potential. But there’s only so much cajoling he can do.
“I can tell you now, that (if) opportunities arose to do something else, I want to be here,” Martinez said Monday. “I want to finish this through. This is special to me, to be with these kids, and try to finish this off, and try to get to contend again. It’s going to happen. I really believe that. With this core group, it’s going to happen. We’re heading in the right direction. I’ve said that before. Dylan’s just another kid who’s going to help us win games in the future. I’m excited about it. Today, I woke up, and I had a different kind of feel about today, about what’s going to happen.”
The 2024 pitching development of Jake Irvin, and D.J. Herz, and Mitchell Parker, along with Gore, has accelerated the timeline. Josiah Gray had hit a rough patch before undergoing Tommy John surgery last month, and he’ll likely miss all of 2025. But he was a 2023 MLB All-Star. There’s legit stuff in his now surgically repaired arm. Cade Cavalli, 18 months removed from his own Tommy John surgery, was throwing up to 125 feet over the weekend as he nears a return.
Martinez was looking at cutups Monday morning of 6-6, 20-year-old right-hander Travis Sykora, Washington’s third-round pick in 2023, who’s coming on, uh, quickly. Jarlin Susana, also 6-6, also 20, who also arrived in D.C. via the Soto trade, is still throwing an easy 97-99 mph as he continues developing secondary pitches, now at High-A Wilmington.
Have A Day, Susana!
Jarlin Susana struck out seven in 5.0 innings of one-run ball for @WilmBlueRocks on Sunday.
Susana is up to 137 Ks in 93.2 IP this season. He ranks 6th in all of @MiLB with 13.16 Ks per 9.0 innings (min. 15 starts). pic.twitter.com/x9DocXwaWB
— Nationals Player Development (@Nats_PlayerDev) August 26, 2024
But all of them, from Crews, Abrams and Wood, to all of the promising pitching prospects, need some air cover — veterans who can help them reach the next level, not more we-hope-we-can-flip-these-guys-at-the-deadline bargain basement shopping. Max Fried would be awesome, but Less Than Max would work, too.
Arizona’s Christian Walker, who might still be hitting bombs out of Dodger Stadium, would be a legit upgrade target at first (.254/.338/.476; 11 outs above average, per Baseball Savant), but he’ll be 34 on Opening Day next year. The Pirates’ Rowdy Tellez, 29, is third in all of baseball in FanGraphs’ Ultimate Zone Rating at first base, at 2.3. But maybe Tellez doesn’t hit enough for your liking (.693 OPS entering play Monday).
Oh, hey, looky here — our old friend Rhys Hoskins has an opt-out in his three-year deal with the Milwaukee after this season, at $4 million. He was doing his usual thing at the plate entering play Monday for the Brewers — 21 homers, 65 RBIs, .728 OPS, after tearing his ACL at the end of spring training in 2023 — playing around two-thirds of his games at first, the other third DH-ing.
Good offensive stats, not great. Certainly un-Sotoish.
But, here’s what the Nats’ top four first basemen this season — Joey Meneses, Joey Gallo, Juan Yepez and Andres Chaparro — had done offensively combined entering Monday: 12 homers, 77 RBIs. And none of them had been a key part of winning teams in Philly, as Hoskins was before missing all of last season.
It would not cost $500 million to bring in someone like Hoskins for a couple of years, and especially if you believe, as the Nats do, that their 2023 second-round pick, Yohandy Morales, could be their long-term solution at first.
Only Soto can determine how playing in D.C. compares with playing in New York, the biggest city and media market in the country. He won it all here. He’s trying to do that with Aaron Judge there. But he loved it here.
“I would say that, nothing is going to be like what we (had) in the Nationals in 2019,” Soto said Monday. “But, definitely, this is really close to what we had back then. We all are getting along together, pretty well. We’re playing hard. We’re coming in here, everybody wants to win at the end of the day. That’s what matters. It doesn’t matter, anything else. It’s not about the money or anything. We’re coming in here to play baseball and to win games.”
Look, I would love a Soto Reunion Tour. I have said and written that Soto’s was the one loss — after that of Bryce Harper, and Scherzer, and Trea Turner, and Anthony Rendon — that was the cruelest for most Nats fans. Because Soto was not only a generational talent, and was still just 23 when the Nats sent him to San Diego. But because he was, more or less, homegrown, a 2015 international free-agent signing who blew through the minors before coming up for good in 2018. Because he did things in the 2019 postseason that 20-year-olds aren’t supposed to do. And he’s just entering his prime years. I get it.
But I also take people at their word. Or, as it’s been around here since December 2018 — when Corbin turned down the Yankees to sign with Washington, and helped the Nationals get their hardware the following October — their silence.
(Photo: Rafael Suanes / USA Today)
