After a 12-3 loss last Wednesday, the Nats were no-hit Thursday. A few days later, they got walked off on consecutive nights in St. Louis and Arizona. The latter was especially brutal because all-star closer Kyle Finnegan should not, with hindsight, have pitched in the last game before the trade deadline. He blew an 8-4 lead thanks to five hits with an average exit velocity of infinity. His ERA jumped from 2.47 to 3.48 in 15 minutes.
On Tuesday, the Nats couldn’t get a good enough offer to merit dealing Finnegan. Minus stalwarts Lane Thomas, Jesse Winker and Dylan Floro — all traded during the week — the Nats celebrated with a 17-0 loss.
It’s not really this bad, honest. Before the recent misery began, the Nats were 47-53, and their year had been defined by the emergence, in their first or second seasons, of right-hander Jake Irvin, center fielder Jacob Young, left fielder James Wood and southpaw starters Mitchell Parker and DJ Herz.
Nonetheless, the past week has brought into focus an eternal question for mediocre or losing teams and their fans — in other words, more than half the sport. We know you may have to tear down before you can build back better. But does every rebuild have to be a total gut? Shouldn’t teams try to keep enough decent players — the kind who are unlikely to bring back star prospects in return — for the sake of some dignity?
The Nationals and General Manager Mike Rizzo appear to have been committed to trading every single established player who was having a solid enough season to bring a credible return, all for the sake of 2025 — or more likely 2026. In “Team Building 101” — at least the current version — this is the right method.
The six prospects the Nats got for two expiring contracts (Winker and Floro) and two players under team control through 2025 (Thomas and reliever Hunter Harvey) are an organizational upgrade. That’s just the proper operating assumption with Rizzo deals. From the World Series team alone, Trea Turner, Joe Ross, Howie Kendrick and Daniel Hudson were added at a cost, in trades, of outfielder Steven Souza Jr., assorted minor leaguers and cash.
Despite Rizzo’s history — including the 2022 Juan Soto trade that brought all-star CJ Abrams, lefty MacKenzie Gore, Wood and two of the Nats’ other top 12 prospects — I’m quite glad Finnegan is still around.
Of all the players the Nationals “should” have traded, given that indefinable commodity of “a good return,” Finnegan is the only one I hoped would stay. Why? On a team with five fairly promising starters in its rotation — Gore, Irvin, Parker, Herz and, pretty soon, Cade Cavalli — you absolutely need a solid closer; otherwise, panic will filter from the ninth into earlier innings and ruin the good work that your young arms have produced.
On the other hand, if you do have the ninth inning covered — not with an 89 percent success savior such as Mariano Rivera or a star such as Kenley Jansen but just a credible Finnegan — then you can, maybe, patch together late innings of winnable games with folks such as Derek Law (3.17 ERA), Jacob Barnes (3.98), Robert Garcia (4.23) and younger arms such as Jose A. Ferrer who need auditions.
Subtract Finnegan, and the risk is unpalatably high that your season, and much of your tightknit team culture, could disintegrate into humiliating rubble. It could anyway. Trading four of the better players on a team that’s on a 73-win pace can lead to a lot of ugliness.
But all four moves were smart or close to inevitable.
The Harvey trade was a clear winner because it freed up so much extra slot money for the Nats to lure high school players into their farm system rather than choose college. An SEC campus looks like paradise compared with life in the minor leagues. But if you add $1 million or even $2 million to sign, that equation can change. Harvey also netted one of the Royals’ top prospects, third baseman Cayden Wallace. While both teams may win, the Nats could win bigger.
Winker and Floro were signed to one-year deals so they could be flipped if they panned out. Both did. So, flip ‘em.
As for what the Nats got in their six prospects plus that pick: I last covered a minor league game when Ronald Reagan was president. Even granting Rizzo’s good record in such deals, the hard truth is that if the Nats get three big leaguers — just two of them good — out of the seven, it’s a win.
Lefty Alex Clemmey, a 6-foot-6 19-year-old with high-ceiling fastball-curveball stuff but hit-the-ceiling poor control, and Wallace, 22, are now ranked as the Nats’ sixth- and seventh-best prospects, per MLB Pipeline. That’s good. It puts them just behind Cavalli (fifth) and ahead of outfielders Robert Hassell III and Cristhian Vaquero and starting pitchers Jarlin Susana and Travis Sykora, all of whom are considered probable future big leaguers.
Nats fans may think trading Thomas, who had an .833 OPS in his last 55 games with the team after an awful start, was a difficult decision. It probably wasn’t. To a degree, the Nats’ two best hitting prospects, Wood and Dylan Crews, currently in AAA, made Winker and Thomas expendable. But it was really the unexpected value of Young — a Marvel Universe center fielder who ranks as the Nats’ second-best everyday player (after Abrams), according to both FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference — that made a trade of Thomas so logical.
Sometimes the best trade is the one you never make — or in the case of Finnegan, the potential trade that you happened to screw up. MLB front offices know Finnegan’s 3.52 ERA in 272 career games more accurately reflects what advanced metrics say about his true ability. This year, his stellar ERA was part illusion, owing to a .204 batting average on balls in play before Monday’s implosion. Reversion was due. But the Nats should have kept that illusion intact, hoping one team would want a 28-save all-star.
Did Monday’s shelling influence Tuesday’s non-trade? Did the Nats miss a chance for another deal such as all-star reliever Matt Capps for Wilson Ramos, a starting catcher for six years? We’ll never know, though “probably not” is the historian’s view.
It’s possible that I put too much emphasis on finding pleasure in watching the Nats’ next 216 games. We live in a “where’s my ring?” world, where the next parade is regarded, by some, as the only measuring stick. Titles are the ultimate goal, of course. But not everything can be measured by a player’s yield in prospects.
In Finnegan’s case, a solid closer is vital to giving the low-scoring Nats a decent chance to be competitive and watchable until all those “promises, promises” come true.
With almost all franchises, watching a team rebuild is part of the lifelong experience of being a fan. There will be pain. But for the sake of fans’ pleasure and players’ morale, you don’t want to feel like that new building will fall on your head every night. With Finnegan in again, maybe it won’t.
