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Washington Post
18-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
If the Lerners won't run the Nationals properly, it's time to sell
The Lerner family either should run the Washington Nationals properly or sell the team. Because a labor-management battle is likely after the 2026 season, they need to decide in the next year. Are they 'in,' with all the risks attendant on being a competitive team? The price of poker is high. Or are they 'out,' selling the team for about $2 billion on their $450-million purchase price? (They also borrowed $200 million of that initial cost to leverage up their final return, and the team plays home games in a publicly funded park.) Ah, the agony of first-world choices. My preference would be for the Lerners to continue owning the team. The family has deep Washington roots. The late Ted Lerner forever will be the owner who brought D.C. its first World Series championship in 95 years. Legacy and continuity fuel long-term franchise success. But the current Nats, now in their sixth straight season with a sub-.440 record, are in territory that is seldom explored except by expansion teams — or the 1950s Washington Senators. This 'rebuild' is precariously close to becoming a collapse. To be the owners the nation's seventh-largest market should expect, what should the Lerners (or another owner) do? Usually, there is no easy answer to a big question. The aftershock of firing the team's two authority figures, team president Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez, leaves the Nats with a roster of kids mentoring kids, and the trade deadline will subtract even more veteran stability. But the future doesn't have to be bleak. There actually is an answer, if the Nats ownership is serious about competing: Double everything. By Opening Day 2027. If you have three coaches and one trainer at your Class AAA affiliate in Rochester, then double it to six coaches and two trainers. Why? Because your competitors have as many as 11 coaches and three trainers. If you have five major league scouts, then double it to 10. Why? Because a few years ago, the Nats had 14 major league scouts. How can you make smart trades by Aug. 1 if you have just five scouts scouring the 50-plus minor league teams of the dozen clubs that may be deadline buyers? As for grassroots organization-building investments, the small-market Rays dwarf the Nats' commitments. This infernal internal fuss-budgeting about expenses considered essential by well-run teams has made Rizzo, and Stan Kasten before him, beat their foreheads on their office walls for 20 years. It sounds like 'S.O.S.' Now, here comes the big one, though it isn't really big at all: The Nats need to double their payroll for players who are actually on the field on the 26-man roster. Right now, it's a pathetic $60 million to $65 million. By the start of the 2027 season, it should be $130 million. Why is that a reasonable ballpark number? For comparison, what team has the 20th-highest payroll? The Kansas City Royals at $130 million, according to MLB's analysis of the present value of all a team's contracts, which USA Today published in April. The D.C. area population is 6.3 million. K.C. is 2.4 million. The median income here is 43 percent higher. The Nats, with a bad team, are 20th in MLB in attendance this year. They can afford to spend. That same MLB analysis, designed to give a sense of what a team has to pay out in cash this season, showed the Nats with a 2025 payroll of $107.7 million. That includes deferred payments to Stephen Strasburg ($26.7 million a year through 2029) and Patrick Corbin ($10 million). Other smaller or less affluent markets surpass the Nats. The Orioles, Tigers and Twins have present-value payrolls of $162 million (15th), $143 million and $142 million. The Nats are 24th. But when you take out the Strasburg and Corbin payments, what they're spending on the on-field product is even lower. (And no sympathy will be extended for those dead-money costs. Owners, especially in large markets, have to take the ugly deals along with the fabulous ones; that's baseball. If you can't swallow a couple of bad breaks and rotten contracts and still match payrolls with Kansas City, then you shouldn't own an MLB team.) In baseball, for generations, owners may make or lose millions in a given year, but what doesn't change is the escalation of franchise values. Witness the $1.5 billion the Nationals have appreciated by since the Lerners bought them. When your MLB net worth is that much in the black, and you sell 'our rebuild is on track' to ticket buyers, you can't lowball your operational budget so much that your GM is scrounging the discount bin of the pitching market, as Rizzo was. And despite what this gruesome summer would seem to indicate, getting to 'competitive' really wouldn't require a reckless shopping spree. How do you win 88 to 98 games, the range for being a likely wildcard or winning a division? It's a basic question in the analytics age. There is a stat answer, and it can be found in WAR (Wins Above Replacement). A replacement player is a guy you get fast for nothing — a minor-league call up or a trade of nobodies. A team of replacement players, say the math PhDs, wins 48 games. For every win above replacement, add one to that 48. So a roster with a combined WAR of 40 to 50 will win about 88 to 98 games. Almost all of a good team's WAR comes from its best 15 players. The rest of the roster should cancel out to about zero. This isn't a law, just a rule of thumb. But look up the 2012, '14, '16, '17 and '19 Nats. Or any excellent team. You'll find four to six stars with WARs that, as a group, average about 4.5 per player. Max Scherzer, Juan Soto, Anthony Rendon, Harper, Ryan Zimmerman, Jordan Zimmermann, Strasburg and Trea Turner fell between 3.6 and 5.6 WAR per season while with the Nats. On playoff contenders, about five more players average WAR of about 2.5. That's Gio Gonzalez, Ian Desmond, Denard Span, Daniel Murphy, Tanner Roark, Jayson Werth and Adam Eaton. About five more need 1.5 WAR, like Adam LaRoche, Wilson Ramos, Danny Espinosa and Tyler Clippard. Along the way, you may need help from one big season from a Howie Kendrick, Corbin or Doug Fister. From year to year, players bounce from one group to another. They're not stat robots. But add it all up, and in your good years, your team WAR is 40 to 50. The toughest puzzle piece is getting the elite stars — and that's where these current Nats have it easy. This season, James Wood, MacKenzie Gore and CJ Abrams are on pace to combine for 19.1 WAR — all on modest contracts. In their five playoff seasons, the top three Nats totaled 14.2, 15.9, 16.5, 20.0 and 18.3. This is where ownership matters. It's doubtful your baseball people can come up with all the additional players needed to contend solely through draft-and-develop or scout-the-world-and-sign or trade-for-'em. Owners need to buy some, too. Rizzo's trades for low-cost young stars have left the Nats in strong position for free agents. His successor will have plenty of payroll space, if allowed to use it. The way Ted Lerner bought Scherzer, Corbin, Werth and, on shorter deals, Murphy, Span, LaRoche, Rafael Soriano, Aníbal Sánchez and others. Ted Lerner's payroll got above $200 million. The current luxury tax payroll is $241 million. Those levels are light-years away from a 2027 Nats roster that could be put together for $60 million. Who would be on such a cheapest-possible team? The Nats would still have Wood, Gore, Abrams, Dylan Crews, Brady House, Jake Irvin, Jacob Young, Luis García Jr., Jose A. Ferrer, Brad Lord, Cole Henry, Robert Hassell III, Daylen Lile, Cade Cavalli, Alex Call and every prospect now in the minors. So 'doubling it' on the current on-field payroll isn't asking a lot. And that's how you improve record, increase crowds, local TV viewership and every other revenue stream. Risky business. Always has been. How serious do you wanna play? Cycles turn and times for change do arrive. That's where the Nats are now: They're stripped for a sale, or they're lean, mean and ready for hardball — if the Lerners choose. Since Washington had its parade in 2019, the Lerners have been genial folks, perhaps complacent with their lovely rings. They've been frozen by family disagreement about direction and budget. They twiddle, economize and hope. They mean well. But in the big leagues, that's not 'owning.'
Washington Post
17-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
The Nats need a president of baseball operations. Here are some options.
The Washington Nationals enter the second half of the MLB season with an interim general manager and an interim manager, not to mention a record that's 20 games below .500. What's next: The Lerner family must hire a president of baseball operations to replace Mike Rizzo, the longtime executive they fired July 6.
Washington Post
09-07-2025
- Sport
- Washington Post
‘The foundation of this rebuild is solid,' Mike Rizzo says after firing
In his first public comments since being fired as general manager of the Washington Nationals on Sunday, Mike Rizzo expressed gratitude for the opportunity to lead the franchise for nearly two decades and suggested the team, which is mired in a faltering rebuild, is close to competing for a playoff spot again. 'I hold my head up high for the standards that we have developed here,' Rizzo said Wednesday during his weekly interview with the Sports Junkies on 106.7 the Fan. 'Remember, we took over from MLB and this place was a circus act. I did it my way for 17 years. The Lerner family allowed me to have the keys to this franchise and build it and develop it in my personality, and the way I wanted to do it. My goal was always to achieve greatness.' The Nationals, who also fired manager Dave Martinez on Sunday, won four division titles and made five playoff appearances under Rizzo's watch, and they captured their first World Series title in 2019, but six losing seasons have followed. Rizzo said he was 'a little surprised' but not 'shocked' by the timing of Sunday's dismissals, which came a week before the MLB draft. He also said the Nationals are 'really close to winning, and winning for a consistent period of time.' 'The rebuild is taking longer than anybody wants it to, but the foundation of this rebuild is solid, it's strong,' Rizzo said. 'The person that steps in here is going to see the [cupboard] is full. You've got some good service time to build around. … The next step for them is to add to that core and get more really, really good players. Get a deeper lineup, get a deeper roster and be able to withstand the rigors of 162 games in 185 days.' Rizzo said he met with ownership at least one a week since he was promoted to general manager in 2009. When they delivered the news that he was fired, he told them he still believed he was the best person to lead the organization to another championship. 'I still believe in the talent of this team,' said Rizzo, who declined to say which player he would have selected with the No. 1 pick in Sunday's MLB draft. 'We have a lot of good young players, we just don't match up with the big boys of the National League and the depth of good players.' Asked whether he felt handcuffed in his ability to add to the team's depth in free agency by ownership's tight budget in recent years, Rizzo didn't assign blame. 'The secret of being a good executive and a good general manager is you do the best you can with what you have,' Rizzo said. 'We've all gone through this, whether you're in baseball or in life in general, you do the best with what you have. In ownership's eyes, we didn't do enough with it, so they made a change.' Since his firing, Rizzo, 64, took advantage of the rare time off during the summer to take his young son to the pool and story time. He suggested that he's not yet ready to retire. 'I think I would like to lead another organization,' Rizzo said, 'and hoist a trophy one more time, and to do it with the right ownership group and the right mindset for an organization. I think that would appeal to me. I'm certainly not going to be egotistical enough to think that people are going to be throwing job offers at me, but my résumé and my personality and my background are pretty well known. If I fit the right criteria for some ownership group, I would be honored to continue to join the fraternity of general managers.'
Washington Post
07-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
The Lerners must make these firings a rethinking, not a reshuffling
The most shocking part about the Washington Nationals' decision to fire longtime general manager Mike Rizzo and Manager Dave Martinez — stewards of both a World Series winner and a franchise that has spent a half-decade since lagging behind the rest of Major League Baseball — is that it represented active engagement and decision-making by the ownership of the Lerner family. Now, the hard part: Who's next in each of those positions, and what do those choices say about the direction of a tattered franchise going forward? It's worth parsing the records of Rizzo, a Nationals' employee since 2006 and the head of baseball operations since 2009, and Martinez, the longest-serving manager since baseball returned to the nation's capital two decades ago. Both have strengths and weaknesses, and we'll get to them. But this crossroads for baseball in Washington is unlike any since the Lerners assumed ownership of what had been a vagabond franchise in 2006. In order, they have provided the infrastructure to build an annual contender that eventually produced a champion, stripped that franchise to the studs, said they were exploring a sale of the team, said they were not exploring a sale, and provided scant funding — not just on payroll for the big-league club, but in resources and personnel up and down the entire organization. Add it all up, and since the World Series championship of 2019, only one team in baseball has lost more games. That, apparently, is too much to take. Finally. For this to be a genuine pivot point and not just a shuffling of the deck, it will require a rethinking of how this entire operation runs. The inability to draft and develop homegrown players is on Rizzo and his staff. The lack of improvement by so many of his players — boneheaded baserunning, sloppy fielding, repeated mistakes on the mound — is on Martinez and his staff. The entirety of it all is at the feet of the Lerners, who now must reshape how they have done business for the vast majority of the time they have owned this franchise. This will be difficult. No significant decision has been made by Nationals' ownership since the death of Ted Lerner, the self-made family patriarch and who was the Lerners' guiding light. Ted Lerner died in February 2023. Even before that, his son Mark had served as the club's point person. But the reality is that decisions were made by a group — Ted Lerner sons-in-law Edward Cohen and Robert Tanenbaum as well as daughters Debra Cohen and Marla Tanenbaum. A third generation — Ted's grandkids — is sometimes involved. There's a herding-cats element to it all, and it can make it hard to find consensus, both with an individual decision as well as an overall direction. The task right now is to find that consensus, to decide what they want. What's most important: Hiring a new president of baseball operations. The interim is Rizzo's longtime assistant Mike DeBartolo, who began his career with the Nats as an intern in baseball operations in 2012 and quietly worked his way up to a senior vice president role. He is smart and thoughtful, and he cares — as do so many of the people who remain. Maybe DeBartolo should get the job. But that can't be determined until he makes a presentation that blows the Lerners out of the water with an honest assessment of where things stand now, what he would do differently, and how he would deploy badly needed resources to improve the Nationals' draft-and-development process. That presentation — should DeBartolo get the opportunity to make one — has to be stacked up against similar interviews with the best minds across baseball. Toss out some names: Thad Levine is an Alexandria, Virginia, native who served high-level front office roles in Texas and Minnesota, though never overseeing the entire operation. Josh Byrnes, who grew up in Washington and served as the general manager in Arizona and San Diego, has been part of the Los Angeles Dodgers' juggernaut since 2014, when he began overseeing a ridiculously good scouting and development process. Erik Neander is the sitting president of baseball operations in Tampa Bay, where the Rays annually do more with less. How the Lerners handle this process will say so much about their intentions with the club they may or may not want to own. The Nationals have lost an inordinate amount of talent from the business and philanthropic sides of the operation over the past few years. Almost without exception, the replacement for a departing exec has been the next in line. That's not saying any one character wasn't worthy of a promotion. But it's also simply a cheaper way to do things, and shows a lack of curiosity about who might be available and how other teams operate. That can't happen with a new head of baseball operations — who should be the person to choose Martinez's successor in the dugout. About Rizzo: He deserves a word of appreciation, and years from now, his and Martinez's legacies here should be secure. Rizzo arrived as a scouting director and took over baseball operations a few years later, when the franchise was in crisis. He built a franchise that, from 2012-19, won four National League East titles, made five postseason appearances — capped by that magical run to the crown in 2019 — and won more regular-season games than any team in baseball other than the Dodgers. The Nats were good, and Rizzo's deft trades — for Gio Gonzalez, for Trea Turner, for Sean Doolittle, for so many more — were a big reason. But while it's true that the Lerners haven't spent money on veterans to fill in around the promising young pieces Rizzo acquired recently — outfielder James Wood, shortstop CJ Abrams and left-hander MacKenzie Gore foremost among them, all in the 2022 swap for superstar Juan Soto — it's also true that Rizzo's draft-and-develop department largely has failed for more than a decade. That explains the woeful state of the last-place Nationals now at least as much as an unwillingness to spend on free agents. In many ways, these moves were coming. But I'll also admit something: When I went to spring training in February, I had long chats with both Rizzo and Martinez, individually and together. My takeaway at the time: Everyone around the Nationals was just a hair too comfortable. I didn't write it then, because a one-week glimpse at the beginning of spring training might not provide a full picture. But as this season spiraled into a disappointment, I couldn't shake the notion: Rizzo was comfortable in a chair he had occupied for a decade-and-a-half. Martinez was comfortable because he knew the Lerners liked him. What would prompt change? Change came Sunday. It was needed, and it should make everyone left with the Nationals uncomfortable — starting with the Lerners. Who they choose is important. More important: the process by which they come to those decisions. Be thorough. Be thoughtful. Be aggressive. Be inquisitive. Only then will we know how committed the family is to delivering a winner for Washington again.
