The Washington Nationals are in their third season of a rebuild and after has seen a heckuva lot of talent depart. Despite being on pace for a better record this year than the last two, a summer of winning baseball still seems a few years away. So what does general manager Mike Rizzo see as the goals for the 2024 season?
"To win as many games as possible, to have more of our young players ascend to the big leagues and learn how to play the game and to kinda mesh into a group that's gonna be the next championship-caliber group," Rizzo said on Wednesday during his weekly appearance with 106.7 The Fan's The Sports Junkies, which is presented exclusively by our partners at MainStreet Bank — Cheer Local. Bank Local. Put Our Team in Your Office.
"I never put expectations [as] wins and loses number, I want to play good baseball, I'm there to win every baseball game we play," he said. "Today's game is the most important game of the season, is what I tell the guys. [Manager Dave Martinez] says 'Let's go 1-0.' That's his deal and that's how we go about our business.
Rizzo, again, stressed the importance of the young players learning to remain focused pitch-by-pitch.
"That's what young players have to learn to ascend to be a rookie player to a good player to a great player, that's the escalation of their mental capacity in baseball and it's exhausting sometimes," he said.
Some of the very young players who are getting regular time this year at the big league level include shortstop CJ Abrams (aged 22 season), second baseman Luis Garcia (aged 23 season), catcher Keibert Ruiz (aged 24 season) and starting pitchers MacKenzie Gore (aged 24 season) and Josiah Gray (aged 25 season).
Those goals in mind could be part of the reason the club decided to retain outfielder Lane Thomas at the trade deadline despite fielding calls from other teams. Rizzo told the Junkies that the 27-year-old Thomas is a "late bloomer [that] is just starting to come into his own" and they see "his arrow as still pointing north."
Through 106 games this season for Washington, Thomas has 26 doubles and 16 home runs with 57 RBI and is slashing .285/.331/.468 for a .799 OPS and an above-average 121 OPS+. And since joining the Nats in 2021, Thomas has a .765 OPS and a 115 OPS+ over 297 games.
"We went into the trade deadline with our eyes wide open on him," Rizzo said, "and with other teams when they asked about him, I would just tell them that we don't see him as just an extra player or a platoon outfielder, we see him as an everyday guy.
"And if you see him as an everyday guy we'll have a discussion about him, but if you see him as a good bench player or a good guy against left-handed pitching that's not the threshold that we're looking to get back in return in a trade."
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Rizzo said they had "some interesting ideas and some concepts" with other teams but those conversations "didn't reach the threshold that we wanted to get with Lane."
"We think this guy is gonna be a good player for us. We control him for 2.5 years," the GM added, "And for a guy at 27 years old he's been a guy that's taken a leadership role in that outfield and we wanted to make sure we had some good character veteran players to sprinkle in there with all the youth that we have.
"Because, in my opinion, you can't just throw all 22-year-old, 23-year-old players on the field and expect for them to know how to play the game right and to conduct themselves like big leaguers. You have to sprinkle in that good character guy."
Rizzo said that was the plan with Kyle Finnegan in the bullpen and Thomas in the outfield which reveals part of the Nationals' thinking headed into the offseason and free agency.
Long the mantra of the football franchise in town attempting to bounce back from a stretch of disappointment, Rizzo is a firm believer in establishing a culture and offering veteran mentors to shepherd the young core through their first big league experiences and learn how to compete at the big league level.
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