The Nationals were 20-10 in their last 30 entering Wednesday night, thanks to a 2-1 win in the Bronx Tuesday on the back of a pair of solo homers.
Their surge has helped earn manager Dave Martinez a two-year contract extension with a third-year option for 2026, and it looked earlier this week like GM Mike Rizzo was next – but as we heard Wednesday morning on the Sports Junkies, he deflected a question about an extension of his own, not long after Barry Svrluga Tweeted a bit of a conspiracy theory of sorts that Rizzo’s ties to Chicago and Jerry Reinsdorf could make a move to the White Sox make sense.
Svrluga joined Craig Hoffman later Wednesday with some more details that maybe shed a little more light on possibilities of why one is in the bag and the other is in the air?
“My understanding is discussions are going on with Rizzo, and this is strictly an ownership decision,” Svrluga said. “Yes, Rizzo supports Dave Martinez and is his boss, but my understanding is that extension came straight from ownership.”
Two years and maybe three for Martinez makes sense on the plateau of ownership wanting a short-term but stable brass in place when they do sell (or buy, in the next owner’s case), but Rizzo has long been at odds with the Lerner family in terms of security.
“What we’ve been told is that while any buyer wants to have a leadership structure in place, you also don’t want to sell with a lot of long-term deals in place, so this is not likely the time Rizzo gets a long deal,” Svrluga said. “And it’s sensitive, because Rizzo is clearly of the mind that ownership approved the Strasburg contract that crippled the payroll in 2020, and led to the rebuild in a way, and his argument was he did the best baseball moves he could, and the team is in the state it is because the front office made good baseball trades that led to the addition of promising players.”
That said, Svrluga expects Rizzo to eventually get the same deal as Martinez if he gets any, which is sort of the same deal Rizzo has always gotten from the Lerner family, even if that’s “under value.”
“This has never been easy, because he has always felt that as the guy who did the original build of this team and won a World Series, he has been undervalued,” Svrluga said. “But, there are only 30 of these jobs, and if he leaves on, there’s no guarantee he’ll get another one.”
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Yes, two or even three years is a short deal in theory, but only Brian Cashman, who has been with the Yankees for a quarter-century, has longer tenure than Rizzo, and even he has done so on several deals of less than five years, which is the general “high end” of an executive deal.
In DC, the Lerners have never been a ‘long-term commitment’ type of ownership, Svrluga remembering that they offered Bud Black a one-year deal with an option in 2016 before getting Dusty Baker and eventually Martinez.
“They do business on their terms, and aren’t really concerned with what the market looks like or industry standards are,” Svrluga said. “That’s how you end up with a GM who has been here since 2009, but still gets these short-term deals even though he built a sustained winner and looks like he might be again. It’s an odd situation for sure.”
So, then, what about a move to the White Sox for Chicago native Rizzo?
“That was more me sitting in a chair thinking about it,” Svrluga said, “but is interesting, and reporting by other folks seems to indicate the White Sox are already poised to go in a different direction. I can’t tell you there’s anything with the White Sox and Rizzo other than it’s a curious connection.”
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But if we gave Rizzo some truth serum, would we find he wants to run it back in DC?
“I don’t know this, but there’s a lot of appeal for Mike Rizzo to do what he did here a second time, because it would be different than just building a team that became a juggernaut – now, it’s ‘we had a consistent contender, finally won a World Series, then tore it all down and did it again,’” Svrluga said. “At 62, as someone who has more years in baseball behind him than ahead of him, there’s a real appeal to do what he’s already done here again and go out with another ring with the same franchise.”
That would make him a legend, as even Craig Hoffman admitted, as that’s “rare air” – and with “the right guy” still in place in Martinez, something that may not have been the case in terms of outward appearance as recently as this spring, this could be the way.
“I was prepared to think (Martinez) wasn’t the right fit for a full-on overhaul, but now we’re in late-August, and the criteria have changed,” Svrluga said. “Are certain players better in August than they were in April? In general, I think you can say the key players for the future have improved, and you can’t just totally divorce the staff from that, and even the players who are kind of here as just gap-fillers have played at a 90-win pace for close to a third of a season. This is not a 90-win team, but he is very good at the day-to-day that is really important in an everyday sport with no practice.”
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