Now this is the part where, based on interviews, my observations and some cherry-picked statistics, I’m supposed to tell you if the Washington Nationals overachieved or underachieved in 2026. We like to boil our sports down to binaries like that, the most popular one, of course, also being the most elemental: Did the team win, or did it lose? Let’s begin, then, with that test.
These Nationals, as we knew them, lost on two basic levels. They finished with more losses (85) than wins (77), ending the year with a 6-4 victory over the Mets on Sunday. And, starting Tuesday, almost half the league will compete in the playoffs, and they will not. That has been the case for seven years running, for every season since they won the World Series in 2019. It’s worn on the fan base, which is not, it turns out, something you just have to trust me on. The total attendance for the year, 1,839,116, was the lowest for any post-title season not affected by the pandemic. Social media may be the fastest way to poll a team’s popularity (or lack thereof). A way better measure, though, is when fans stop opening their wallets.
But like with most things outside of the actual games, it is hard — impossible, even — to judge this year within the binary of good or bad. The bullpen, if you hadn’t heard, was definitionally bad, blowing 42 saves, five more than the previous MLB record. By contrast, the offense was all kinds of good, scoring more runs than every team but the Cubs and Brewers, who are both in the playoffs.
Those extremes are probably the best way to distill the central tension of the season. It is fair to say that, by spending very, very, very little on an obvious weakness last winter, the Nats wasted the kind of offensive performance that may not come back around for a while, even when (or if) the Lerner family decides to run a competitive payroll again. And yet, after Vegas had the Nationals winning about 65 games, they comfortably beat that projection because the offense was so ahead of schedule — a credit to the players, yes, but importantly the new coaching staff, too.
Trending
No one’s ever hung a banner for talking about bat speed and launch angle more. But after most of the front office and staff turned over, talking about bat speed and launch angle more was clearly a necessary start. The new regime also sped up their own honeymoon period by leading the team to a surprising amount of success in the first four months of the season. They’re facing real expectations sooner than expected, which is almost always better than the alternative.
“We haven’t experienced what it’s been like over the course of the last five years here, six years, whatever it is,” Paul Toboni, the Nats’ first-year president of baseball operations, said in his end-of-season address Friday. “And my guess is that it might just be a feeling of: ‘Hey, we’re in September and we’re out of it. Let’s just look forward to the season ending.’ And we were very, very adamant about that not being the energy in the clubhouse.”
“We would send messages like: ‘We have to carry out the day like we are tied or a game back in the wild card, even though we’re not, even though we’re six, seven out, whatever it is. Because at some point here in the near future we are going to be tied for the wild card or a couple games up, or whatever it might be, and I don’t want the feeling to be foreign to them.”
On Friday, ahead of the last series of the season, manager Blake Butera said that if the Nats had just an average bullpen this year, they’d have probably made the playoffs. It was a self-aware quote that may also be tough for fans to read, especially given how fast the team faded after trading Curtis Mead, Luis García Jr. and Foster Griffin at the deadline, making for an August and September that looked and felt too familiar. Once again, it was all in service of the future, which is rarely said when the present is going well. But now that we’ve dipped into the overplayed coping mechanisms, what’s the harm in a little more?
On Saturday, in the AAA national championship game in Las Vegas, Jarlin Susana, one of the Nats’ top prospects, threw the hardest pitch of the AAA season, a 104-mph fastball. Never mind that the Rochester Red Wings, the Nationals’ AAA affiliate, lost after … blowing a save, then allowing three runs in the tenth. There was a 104-mph fastball! And on top of that, all 17 of Susana’s heaters were clocked at at least 101.5 mph. The pitch averaged 102.8 for two innings. We can easily apply the binary in this case: That is good!
Susana, 22, joined the organization as part of the return for Juan Soto four summers ago. He’s among the minor leaguers who could really help the Nats in the near future, to say nothing of the blue-chip hitters a bit farther away, starting with Eli Willits, the first pick in the 2025 draft, and Chris Hacopian, the 11th pick in 2026. When Toboni took over as the Nationals’ big boss, he said he wanted to build a “scouting and player development monster.” At the very least, with staffing and messaging alone, the Nats seem to be on a much better track to that than they were this time last year. That’s a point toward calling the year a success.
“The farm system, I think for the most part there have been a bunch of great strides there,” Toboni said. “But I think like most things in this game, that’s pretty fragile and doesn’t necessarily mean that those strides are going to continue into the future if we don’t really stay on it. So there’s like this probably underlying sense of … I’m not a very anxious person, but anxiety like: We got to keep pushing forward because we’re not where we want to be.”
Then on Sunday, Andrés Chaparro, one of the Nats’ platoon first basemen, launched two home runs to cap a breakout second half. Out of the bullpen, Will Dion, Riley Cornelio, Jack Sinclair and Erik Tolman, none of whom were on the Opening Day roster, combined to pitch six scoreless innings. The season confirmed that James Wood, Cade Cavalli, CJ Abrams and Daylen Lile are the major league players most capable of headlining the next winning team in D.C. But to that end, even a hint of some supporting characters felt like incremental progress. Chaparro should get a shot to keep proving himself next season (whenever that begins, given the high potential for a lockout in the coming months). And in Tolman, a homegrown pitcher who came all the way back from a gruesome leg injury, the staff sees the outline of a high-leverage reliever.
But here’s the thing about discussing the Nats this way, about still putting more stock in what could happen than what is happening: It’s old. Whenever we’re viewing the Nationals from 30,000 feet, it’s worth recycling the idea that the new front office was tasked with building a sustainable winner, not rushing their process because of how bleak the past half decade has been. That means not discounting their wins, incremental or otherwise, because of how stale the act of looking to the future has gotten. For the time being, for at least a little longer, that feels logical, fair.
Yet on the other hand, something has to give for this fan base. And soon, too, to once again recognize the social contract between a team and its city. Nats fans deserve to actually watch a competitive core instead of projecting one. They deserve, as a reciprocation for spending on tickets, a television package and merchandise, for ownership to invest in a club that could reach the postseason one of these years. The labor battle could be a complicating factor for immediate plans with the roster and payroll. But it doesn’t make any of that less true.
Author
