Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo is heading to Nashville this weekend. He’s not going there to see the Grand Ole Opry.
The Major League Baseball winter meetings start Sunday in Music City, U.S.A., and Rizzo better be shopping for more than Garth Brooks T-shirts.
There are players to buy, and hopefully Rizzo will be shopping with a bigger pocketbook than last year, when the Lerner family gave the GM pocket change to field a competitive team — which, if you’re a paying customer and want a reason to come to the ballpark, is a reasonable expectation.
Thanks to Rizzo, they managed to be more competitive than expected and entertaining, winning 71 games — a 16-win improvement over 2022 — with a group of promising young players and spare parts. That happened in spite of the owners, not because of them.
This time, though, Mark Lerner, managing principal owner of the team (whose sale is on hold for various reasons, including a division within the family), is on the record that whatever Rizzo needs to accomplish the goal of being a consistent winner — not necessarily a playoff contender, but one where winning doesn’t come as a surprise — he will have.
“We are totally in on building this back to where we all expect it to be, to where our fans expect it to be,” Lerner told Dan Kolko in a Nats Xtra interview at the end of the 2022 season. “It’s his call how he wants to fill the holes in the lineup. He comes to me when he is ready, whether it’s a player or a free agent or whatever. Whatever he desires he has the resources and he has always had the resources since the day we took over the team to build a winner.”
Washington fans should hope that somewhere in that statement of nonsense, some truth exists.
Because the underfinanced and underdog Nationals, buried before the 2023 season started by many — including myself — outperformed expectations, that, along with the New York Mets gleeful $430 million collapse and the San Diego Padres high-profile, high-priced failure, somehow the notion spending money on players has become abhorrent.
Let me point out that the World Series champion Texas Rangers had a $251 million payroll and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on free agents — some of whom barely took the field — and went from 68 wins in 2022 to 90 wins and a world championship this past season.
“The commitment to a hard and painful rebuild at a time when you could lose hope very easily, no one understood how things could turn and how quickly something like this could happen,” Texas general manager Chris Young said.
He was talking about the vision of Rangers owner Ray Davis. There is no one “right way” to rebuild, despite the Lerner family propaganda.
Washington does seem on a good path to rebuilding. Shortstop CJ Abrams, after a season with 83 runs scored, 18 home runs, 64 RBI, 47 stolen bases and a .258 batting average, looks on the verge of becoming a star. Catcher Keibert Ruiz struggled behind the plate but had a solid season at bat, with 18 home runs, with 67 RBI and a .260 average. Outfielder Lane Thomas, with 28 home runs, 86 RBI, 20 stolen bases, a .268 average and a Gold Glove finalist, is an All-Star caliber player.
They have a core group of young starters — MacKenzie Gore, Jake Irvin and Josiah Gray — who all showed enough promise in 2023 to feel encouraged, if not confident, that they are ready to step up to become consistent, quality major league starters.
But they have holes to fill. First base is one of them. Free agent first baseman Rhys Hopkins and his 30-plus home runs would seem like a good fit. A third baseman, too, and a familiar face, Free agent Jeimer Candelario — traded by Washington at the deadline to the Chicago Cubs — would be welcomed back. And though a number of starting pitchers have already been signed, they still could use a veteran pitcher not named Patrick Corbin.
Did I mention Shohei Ohtani is a free agent?
If Lerner is telling the truth, Rizzo will come back from Nashville with more than a Country Music Hall of Fame snow globe.
You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
