This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.
You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.
--
Long National Nightmare Ends. Maybe.
Last night, Nationals Managing Principal Owner -- I don’t make the titles, folks -- Mark Lerner fired GM Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez for their failure to force Lerner to spend money on good baseball players.
Rizzo, who turned Juan Soto into a championship-caliber core making no money, was hamstrung by two generations of Lerners over the last six seasons, as ownership navigated the MASN debacle and readied itself for sale. The Nats’ cash payroll is lower this year than it was in 2014. Rizzo built the 2019 World Series champs and had a good start on building the 2029 ones. He simply wasn’t allowed to do the rest of the job.
Martinez did the best with what he had in recent seasons, and certainly deserves some credit for the development of the young players Rizzo acquired as he tore down those ’19 champions. I saw the Nats close up a week ago in a game they lost as a succession of replacement-level pitchers came out of the bullpen in Anaheim to kill off a potential win. The first one I’d seen before, the second’s name was vaguely familiar, the third was almost certainly an AI hallucination. Nats relievers have the highest ERA and highest FIP in baseball, and only the Angels have a worse bullpen fWAR. Managers in the modern game have their greatest impact by selecting and deploying relief pitchers, so Martinez may deserve a little blame, but Tony La Russa at his peak couldn’t make a good bullpen from the guys the Nats have in hand.
The Nationals are where they are because they have bad ownership. As I have said many, many times, the Nationals lost more to the pandemic than any other team did, unable to capitalize at the gate on their championship season. The Lerners, first father then son, exacerbated that problem, forcing a rebuild, slashing payroll, and failing to let Rizzo put better-paid pieces around a very impressive group of young, inexpensive players. Firing the management team just before the draft and trade deadline is the kind of impetuous move that underlines that Mark Lerner is in over his head.
The Nationals didn’t solve any problems by firing Rizzo and Martinez. Until there is new ownership, not much is going to change in D.C.
