In addition to being deeply bad, the Washington Nationals are also profoundly unserious. These traits tend to go together, but sometimes do not. A rebuilding team can be a serious one, so long as its actions follow a path of logic, and so long as that logic is bound to the general priority of becoming better, and so long as the path is reasonably direct. Sunday the Nationals gave a start to Shinnosuke Ogasawara, a 27-year-old rookie pitcher who’d thrown just nine total innings, all in the minors, since April 13. Ogasawara was needed because Trevor Williams, owner of a 6.21 earned run average and arguably the worst starting pitcher in all of baseball, has a kerploded elbow, and is on the injured list. Ogasawara got lit up by the Boston Red Sox—seven hits, four runs, and 55 pitches in exchange for eight measly outs—leaving manager Dave Martinez to run out six relievers, one of whom was making his season debut after recovering from a second career Tommy John surgery, another of whom was Andrew Chafin. Of course the Nationals lost.
Good and serious is easy to spot. The Los Angeles Dodgers are good and serious; the Philadelphia Phillies are good and serious; probably there are good and serious teams in the American League. Bad but serious is having good players who are torn up and full of holes, and having some exciting young players to shuffle around into the openings. The Atlanta Braves can be said to be bad but serious. Good but unserious is having Barry Bonds at the heart of your lineup while also giving 600 plate appearances to the corpse of Marquis Grissom. Bad and unserious is Being The Colorado Rockies, but it is also running Trevor Williams out there every fifth game, and when his ligaments fail having no one better to claim his spot in the rotation than some soft-tossing mid-career bozo who pitched to an ERA of 11.25 in the damned Grapefruit League. Bad and unserious is having baseball’s worst bullpen and not just one but both of the two worst catchers in the sport, while also having the worst overall team defense, while also grading out as one of the two or three worst baserunning teams in the league, in the fifth year of what was once described with a straight face as a “shorter reboot” project.
The Nationals fired Martinez on Sunday, and also his boss, Mike Rizzo, of “shorter reboot” infamy. Sports fans find themselves in the position, too often, of feeling relieved that someone has been fired—or traded or waived or shipped to the minors—while grappling with the somewhat more complicated formulas of determining whether the action was deserved, or allowing oneself to feel good about a person losing their job. I, a disgusting self-loathing Nationals fan, am sincerely not glad today that Martinez and Rizzo were canned. Martinez is someone that I have enjoyed as a quirky Nationals character, and to the extent that the nice things that players and reporters say about his treatment of others are not horseshit, I have felt good about rooting for someone who has a reputation for being good to people. And as a Haver of Guys, emotionally I will always consider a Guy in hand to be worth two guys in the bush: In the same way that I would rather see Dylan Crews become a productive hitter than for the Nationals to trade Crews for a bonafide stud, I would rather Martinez uhh remember how to motivate his players to wear their baseball gloves on their non-throwing hands than for the Nationals to hire a different manager who comes by this behavior more naturally. Martinez has been my guy; thus I am bummed to see him go.
Rizzo, too, although his case is somewhat less complicated. Here is an astounding fact, pulled together by Davy Andrews at FanGraphs: Since their second selection of the 2011 amateur draft, 14 players drafted by the Nationals in the first round have combined—combined—to produce minus-0.4 fWAR. No Nationals first-round pick since Anthony Rendon has produced better than a win and a half for the team, by this metric. The most productive hitter selected in the first round by the Nationals over that span has been Brian Goodwin, who played 96 total games for Washington and has been out of the majors since 2021. Over the winter Rizzo fortified a 71-win team by trading away one of his bullpen’s few authentically good pitchers for first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, and then spent $7.5 million on three veteran relievers, while waiting out a humiliatingly soft open market for long-time closer Kyle Finnegan. Lowe has hit .235 with an exactly average OPS+, and the three veteran relievers pitched to a combined 9.46 earned run average and were all gone from the roster by the end of May. Rizzo’s other key winter addition, beyond the heartbreakingly oomphless Ogasawara, was veteran designated hitter Josh Bell, who currently has a .298 on-base percentage and who Statcast grades in the league’s 18th percentile by batting value.
When your job is to construct a competitive baseball team, that’s how you lose your job. Still, it’s hard to work out what should be done with the knowledge that Martinez and Rizzo have proven themselves capable of winning an entire-ass World Series. I imagine this confusion goes some way toward explaining why it is that Mark Lerner, owner of the Nationals, waited as long as he did to fire the top operators of his wayward baseball operation. Here I, the sentimental fan, have the moral high ground: Unlike the Lerner family, who attempted and failed to sell the team mid-rebuild, I have not been actively hindering Martinez and Rizzo in the performance of their duties.
The Nationals have finished in the league’s bottom 10 in active payroll every year since the end of the pandemic-fucked 2020 season. They are a cheapskate operation, dreaded salary-deferrers, rickety at every level, conspicuously low on the doohickies their modernized competitors use to chisel out vital advantages. Mark Lerner, the team’s managing owner, all but announced prior to the season that he’s waiting for the team to be good before he will spend money on it, which is exactly the opposite of the point of having a wealthy owner. “There’s no point in getting a superstar and paying him hundreds of millions of dollars to win two or three more games,” Lerner told Barry Svrluga of the Washington Post, in February. As literal owner of the team, he’s been waiting for Rizzo to construct from draft picks and winter flotsam a roster that is “on the cusp of being really good,” and then he could see splurging on a player or two. Imagining himself a totally passive observer, and his obscene inherited wealth locked behind a trapdoor sprung only by an 85-win season, Lerner figures he shares the angst of fans. “You could get nauseous thinking about it.”
This is the source of whatever internal conflict is felt by Nationals fans at the unceremonious dismissal of two people who led the franchise to its only championship. You can only watch so much of various Colin Poches and Joey Gallos and Carter Kiebooms before you conclude, inevitably, that the person in charge of acquiring players for this organization simply has to be replaced. And you can only stomach so many brutal TOOTBLANs before deciding that anyone else on Earth deserves a shot at determining how these players are deployed on a baseball diamond. Rizzo and Martinez had to go, by normal baseball math, because the players stink and they play an insanely bad brand of baseball. On the other hand, there exists no mechanism in MLB for removing the person most responsible for stripping the operation of its resources, for forcing it into an indefinite holding pattern, for reducing each of the avenues for acquiring good players into something very much like a crapshoot.
Faced with an intractable failson-shaped obstacle at the top of the organization, fans eventually learn to rightsize their expectations. The Nationals have three pre-arbitration all-stars on their roster, one of whom is something like the seventh- or eighth-best hitter in the sport. Once upon a time it was possible to imagine a player of that caliber sticking around for the length of a career, but those days are long gone. Already the combination of team-building missteps and developmental shortcomings has stuck this team’s core of enjoyable young guys in limbo, such that the apologia will write itself if the Nationals go Expos mode and re-tank the tank. “Unfortunately, the new, young core is neither young enough nor good enough to build around,” writes Andrews, over at FanGraphs. “Whoever takes over this franchise will have to navigate some difficult decisions. They may well start by initiating yet another rebuild.” I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who expects the Nationals to do for James Wood what they refused to do for Rendon, or Bryce Harper, or Juan Soto.
The only thing worse than rooting for a team that gives itself no chance to be good is rooting for one that is pretending to try. If they can’t have a good team—if good baseball has been deemed unaffordable by the person in charge of such things—they might as well keep our guys, the crappy ones, the ones they can afford. Leave us something to root for, other than the people forcing the team to suck. The ones who were fired were at least silly enough to strive.