Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post - After making the Nationals respectable in two seasons, General Manager Mike Rizzo said the team was a player or two away from contention. But it seems ownership has not opened the purse strings to sign any significant players.
The Washington Nationals never really seem to learn. Or, rather, the Lerners don’t. As soon as you think they start to get it, they backslide again.
When are the Nats going to be allowed to be good? When will they get to build a winner with a roster that has a sensible margin of safety, rather than constructing a team that can succeed only in a best-case world?
When are they going to stop trying to build a suspension bridge with the minimum amount of steel and then, as happened in 2008 and ’09, act shocked if it collapses? After one 80-81 third-place year, have they forgotten the pain?
It’s happening again. All the signs are there. The Nats’ baseball people lay out clearly what they want to achieve in the offseason. None of it is terribly difficult. But there is risk and expense. Then, as the offseason unfolds, nothing happens.
Was Jayson Werth just the exception that proves the rule? Even his signing only nudged the Nats’ 2011 payroll over its ’05 level, when the team was an MLB chattel. Is what we’re seeing, again, really the distressing norm?
“We’re busy. We’re trying to be aggressive but broad-minded, we’re working behind the scenes,” General Manager Mike Rizzo said on Wednesday, adding that the Nats were working on “bench options.” Bench options? Pine or oak?
If you want to know why it’s almost Christmas and the Nats haven’t signed Mark Buehrle, Roy Oswalt or Edwin Jackson, why they haven’t bid on Yu Darvish or Yoenis Cespedes, why they haven’t been within a zillion miles of C.J. Wilson, Jose Reyes or Prince Fielder, and especially why they haven’t made a prospects-for-a-star trade such as the Reds for ace Mat Latos, it’s probably because ownership is tensing up, tightening the leash again.
It’s probably because real-estate gurus are giving the baseball lifers their opinion again on the value of ballplayers and the wisdom of deals.
Give the Lerners some credit: They do learn, but only glacially and always with setbacks. It’s one thing to sign amateur draft picks “over slot” in defiance of unwritten rules among owners. Those players are bargains even at the prices the Nats paid. The Lerners saw it. But when your GM says in public what you need in the offseason, that’s a vital component, too.
This is a particularly ugly moment for the franchise to appear paralyzed because at some point next year, the Nats will have a new deal with MASN that doubles or even triples their current rights fee. Now it’s between $25 million and $30 million. Soon it’ll be at least $30 million higher. The industry knows this elephant-in-the-room windfall is coming.
How much fresh revenue is that? It would soak up what the Marlins just spent in long-term money to sign Buehrle and Reyes. And the Nats’ payroll, currently headed to just the $70 millions (maybe), would be low enough that you could try to trade for a Latos or almost any name. Just saying.
So what’s up with the Nats? Three months ago, Rizzo came right out and said, “I think we’re an outfield bat away and a starting pitcher away from really being a contender in the division.” Three weeks ago, before the winter meetings, he said the same to me.
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