The reports say the Nationals are going to trade Juan Soto at some point in the next twelve days. To whom? To be determined. For what? A lot, presumably, but we don’t exactly have good historic comparisons for what happens when a player as impactful as Soto and under as many remaining years of club control as Soto is dealt at the deadline. Not in agreement on an extension with the superstar right now, the front office is opting to get that future value in other forms, bringing in what could be an historic quantity of prospect capital and, eventually, spending those hundreds of millions of dollars that would have gone to Soto on a variety of other players.
Even without Soto’s departure, the rebuild writing would be on the Washington wall. The Nationals are among baseball’s worst teams this year, and the foundational pieces of a future contender are few and far between. With the franchise expected to be sold this offseason, it’s a good time for transition. New ownership will get to chart its own course on the how and the what behind the next hoped-for iteration of contention. Present administration has, if the Soto sale does happen, decided for them that the course will contain dozens of millions more dollars in annual financial flexibility, a few more prospects with high-impact potential, and one fewer Juan Soto. It’s undetermined what impact this will have on the pace of the rebuild, but if the trade’s a good one, it’ll speed it up, as the Nationals contending in the years remaining before Soto’s free agency would require outrageous feats of rapid minor league development or prodigious work in the free agent markets.
It’s tempting to ask what went wrong for the Nationals, they who won a World Series so early in Soto’s Major League career. That frames the era incorrectly, though. Plenty of things went wrong—Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin faded, Victor Robles and Carter Kieboom are not as promising as they once were, the franchise’s farm system has produced no one of note post-Soto—but what’s happening to the Nationals is not the closing of a window the World Series opened. It’s the end of the epilogue of a story in which the World Series, we now know, was the climax.
The Nationals were a contending team for roughly a decade straight. There were down years within there, sure, but they were isolated, products of a design that was expected to work not, in the end, working. The 2015 meltdown was noteworthy (prior to Jonathan Papelbon’s dugout violence) because the team, on paper, was good, and while it’s better to be good on the field than good on paper, the two are naturally linked. Good teams on the field are almost always good on paper as well. The Nationals were, for roughly a decade, good on paper, and for nearly the entirety of that decade, they were good on the field too.
When you contend in today’s baseball for roughly a decade straight, it gets harder and harder to sustain. The Nationals team that did win it all was evidence of this. That was not a superpower triumphing over a rival superpower. That was a team with a few dominant players managing to wring every possible out and every possible walk and hit out of those pillars while getting just enough from role players—role players by design, role players by underperformance—to get over the edge. That team was 14th of 15 teams in the National League at a point in May. That team was a significant Division Series underdog heading into Game 5 of the Division Series. That team needed every one of the seven games they played against Houston to emerge with a title in hand. The Nationals didn’t win the World Series because phenoms Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg carried them there. Bryce Harper wasn’t even on the 2019 team. The Nationals won the World Series by, well, probably by being good for a decade straight. They put themselves in position enough times, and in one of those times—the last of those times—they broke through.
There’s more to being a good franchise than winning titles. The goal is to win titles, but there’s a secondary goal as well, and that’s to never have to rebuild. Rebuilding stinks. You lose a lot of games. You trade beloved players. You enter a period of high uncertainty, relying on the inexact sciences of prospect acquisition, prospect development, and free agency bargain-hunting to give you a base from which you can ascend once more. The Dodgers and the Royals have won the same number of titles over the last eight years, but the eight years have been decidedly better for the former than for the latter. You don’t only measure success based on World Series titles. That’s the primary variable in the equation (almost anyone would trade a title for a rebuild—which is a big reason why rebuilds happen), but there are others as well, and by almost any mode of calculation, the Nationals were among baseball’s best franchises over the 2010’s. With the upcoming sale, and with Juan Soto’s expected departure, that era is ending. Strasburg and Corbin remain, but not as what they were, and not for too much longer now. The future of baseball in Washington belongs to players likely yet unknown.
Is this the beginning of the rebuild? Not really. The rebuild started more with the sending of Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the West. Is this the end of the era in Washington? That could be argued, but it’s hard to close the book with Stephen Strasburg still under a Nationals contract. More than anything, this is a waving of the white flag, and the determining of the ultimate course. There were two paths. One was a rebuild with a Juan Soto-shaped throughline to the past. One was an open rebuild, with only the shells and husks of the Nationals’ golden decade remaining in the room. The course has reportedly been chosen. It’s an open rebuild.
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Full notes return tomorrow along with MLB games, though we may not be fully caught up ‘til Friday. We’ll bite off as much as we can on the news we’ve missed, and we’ll try to let as little of interest as possible vanish beneath the sands of vacation.
