The Nationals aren’t here quite yet but that won’t mean they’ll be easy to deal with in 2025.
The Washington Nationals might’ve finished 71-91 but don’t be fooled — this could be a sneaky-tough team to deal with going forward. They’ve got holes, sure, but they’ve also got a core of young guys that could support a contender sooner rather than later.
How did they do in 2024?
The Nationals finished 71-91 for the second season in a row, but the good news for them is that they’ve got a bit more optimism following this particular 71-win season than the one that took place in 2023. That has to do with the fact that their core (while young) is very talented and poised to take a step forward here in 2025. As far as 2024 went, this was a season of seeing that young talent emerge in order to make their presence felt in the bigs.
James Wood made his much-anticipated big league debut and while he only played 79 games in his first season, he still finished fourth in fWAR among their hitters (1.2) and quickly established himself as one of the most dangerous hitters for the Nationals. He wasn’t the only young player to make a splash, as Luis Garcia Jr. emerged as bright spot for Washington as he delivered 111 wRC+ with 18 home runs. Jacob Young may not have been lighting up the scoreboard with his bat but he was certainly making his presence felt with his glove. Dylan Crews is another guy who the Nationals have very good reason to feel excited about, as well.
Still, this is a pretty young team and it certainly showed. CJ Abrams had a weird season where it seemed like he took a step forward when it came to offense but went backwards while having a bit of a tepid season in terms of his expectations. Washington’s pitching staff also has some promising arms in it but they showed a it of their inexperience last season. Jake Irvin may have served as the personal sleep paralysis demon for both the Braves and the Mets last season but he was a bit homer-prone and ended up as just an innings-eater overall.
The bottom line was that the Nationals didn’t hit well and fielded really quite poorly in 2024, which really dampened their record relative to the solid pitching they got from six different starters, and some amazing relief work from their top five bullpen arms.
What did they do in the offseason?
The Nationals did what you’d expect a team in their rebuild cycle to do at this point: supplement the team with low-cost options that could probably be traded for a decent return in the middle of the season, provided they worked out in Washington. Their moves included:
- Re-signing Trevor Williams (an amazing 2.0 fWAR in just 66 2⁄3 innings last year) to a two-year, $14 million deal;
- Trading for Nathaniel Lowe;
- Re-signing Kyle Finnegan;
- Signing Michael Soroka to a one-year, $9 million deal; and
- A smattering of small signings of guys like Josh Bell, Amed Rosario, Jorge Lopez, Shinnosuke Ogasawara, Paul DeJong, and Lucas Sims.
Basically, they committed under $50 million in total, most of it on one-year deals, to shore up depth, make some upside plays, and give them some 1B/DH options.
What’s expected of them in 2025?
Will all of this result in an improvement? Yeah, probably. Will it result in a meaningful change in the team’s fortunes in 2025? Probably not. While the Nationals now project to be a mid-70s win team now (somewhere in the 72-77 range), they’re still rebuilding and waiting for a bunch of guys to take steps forward before they can look like a contender, even if the idea of a “contender” has been heavily diluted in recent years.
Luis Garcia Jr. (who finally broke out last year after four years of uninspiring play) and CJ Abrams could be a productive up-the-middle duo, and James Wood already hit well as a rookie and will have a full season to strut his stuff. MacKenzie Gore will lead the rotation again and really improved in 2024, so another step forward could give them a legitimate ace in the rotation.
Surrounding that, though, stuff is just okay, rather than inspiring. Though there are few red flags, like Paul DeJong as a prospective third base solution for some reason, and hoping that Josh Bell can turn back the clock a few years, there’s just not much there to push the team into contention unless there are a bunch of great breakout stories. The Nats’ best hope is probably that they get excellent pitching from unexpected sources for a second season in a row, but the projections aren’t optimistic in that regard.
Braves 2024 Head-To-Head
As we alluded to earlier with Jake Irvin, the Nationals gave the Atlanta Braves fits last year and won the season series 8-5. The Nats set the tone early in this season series, as the two teams played a pair of four-game series in late-May and early June and the Nats went 6-2 in those eight games. Atlanta had to wait all the way until they saw each other again in August to finally get some sort of edge in the series but by that point, the Nationals had basically run out of gas while the Braves were already in a position where they absolutely had to have those wins.
Still, the Nationals didn’t make it easy for Atlanta — well, at least they. The 3-2 walk-off win on August 23 was frustratingly dramatic and the Nationals quite literally threw the game away but a win’s a win, right?
The Braves went on to eventually win that series before the two teams finished their season series in mid-September with a pair of games that basically summed up how the 2024 Braves operated. The first game of the two-game series saw the Braves break out for 12 runs (including a two-homer night from Michael Harris II) and pick up what was to that point their largest margin of victory in the season.
Then Jake Irvin started the next game — enough said. Needless to say, the Braves will likely have to do better against the Nationals this season if they want to put themselves in the best position possible for October baseball.