Nationals’ reset with Soto trade a situation Jays hope to avoid with Guerrero, Bichette

TORONTO — As the trade deadline approached in the summer of 2022 and extension talks with Juan Soto hit the wall, the Washington Nationals were forced to pick a lane.

Time had slowly peeled away layers from their 2019 World Series championship roster and even after the 2021 deadline blockbuster that sent Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Los Angeles Dodgers, their farm system still ranked in the bottom third of the majors, all while a third-straight last-place finish in the National League East loomed.

One possible road back to contention was securing Soto long-term and building around him, but that was off the table once he rejected a $440-million, 15-year extension. So, rather than trying to regroup in free agency to leverage the superstar’s two remaining seasons of contractual control, the Nationals instead dove into a rebuild, making a monster trade with the San Diego Padres that returned the foundation of their emerging core.

“The worst thing an organization can do is go halfway,” Nationals GM Mike Rizzo said of the club’s thinking at the time. “We decided what we needed to do, we implemented a blueprint to do that and we executed the blueprint. That’s how we handled our situation.”

In doing so, the Nationals turned two-plus years of Soto into the two players atop their lineup right now in shortstop C.J. Abrams, an all-star last year, and left-fielder James Wood, plus right-fielder Dylan Crews and a rotation linchpin in lefty Mackenzie Gore, who struck out 13 in his season debut and starts again in Wednesday’s series finale versus the Toronto Blue Jays.

Making the haul even more impressive is that Jarlin Susana, a 21-year-old righty in high-A with triple-digit velocity, and triple-A outfielder Robert Hassell III, the eighth-overall pick in 2020, are still in the farm system from the Soto deal, which also sent Josh Bell to the Padres.

Factor in that they also turned half-a-season of Scherzer and a season-and-a-half of Turner into catcher Keibert Ruiz and starter Josiah Gray, a 2023 all-star recovering from reconstructive elbow surgery, and it’s a masterclass in asset management from the Nationals, painful as it’s been living through it.

“My job is to make sound baseball decisions and we thought that this was the sound baseball decision that we had to make at that particular time,” Rizzo said of dealing with negative fan reaction. “It’s all about evaluating your system and where your franchise is at in that given moment. My job is to forecast the future of the franchise. You have to put all that together. You have discussions and communication with the baseball staff, with the ownership and make the best decision we can.”

Notably, when the Nationals were still within their competitive window, they took a different approach to their marquee pending free agents, keeping Bryce Harper (although ownership nixed a deal to the Astros for prospects ahead of the 2018 deadline) and Anthony Rendon until they hit the open market and joined other clubs, while re-signing Stephen Strasburg once he’d tested free agency.

Holding the asset to expiry rather than reallocating is also the path the Blue Jays are currently following with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette this season, although that could still change depending on how 2025 plays out.

Taking this route is understandable when there’s a strong supporting cast on the roster to help sustain winning — the Nationals, for instance, didn’t go to the playoffs in Harper’s last year in Washington but then won the World Series without him in 2019.

The Blue Jays are banking that an off-season spent adding the likes of Anthony Santander, Andres Gimenez and Jeff Hoffman, along with last summer’s deadline haul, will make hanging on to Guerrero and Bichette for their walk years worthwhile.

But if not and they need to pivot to sell before the deadline, Guerrero and Bichette won’t fetch the type of haul the Nats got for Soto, since an acquiring team gets only one run with them, instead of the three that came with Soto, or two that went with Turner.

Rizzo understood that dynamic and walked the line between trying to compete and waiting until it was clear the Nationals needed a wider-scale reset to help build the critical mass of young talent necessary to open a new window.

After all, once a team chooses the rebuild lane, getting all the young talent to time up for a return to contention is far easier said than done. Player development is neither linear nor reliably predictable.

“Everyone’s got a gameplan until they get punched in the mouth, as Mike Tyson said,” Rizzo explained. “All players develop at a different schedule. They’re human beings, so it’s hard to forecast exactly when each is going to reach the big-leagues, each is going to reach this milestone and each is going to become the star player you think he is. Our timeline is fluid but we’re in a place that we want to win more games, we feel that we can win more games and the rebuild talk, for us, is behind us. We want to compete and win every night.”

Years of pain drove the gains to this point and there’s no guarantee of an eventual payoff. Still, the Nationals reached a point where they didn’t have a choice but to take this path, a situation the Blue Jays are trying hard to avoid this year.

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