“Offense sells tickets. Defense wins championships.” — Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant. Truth be told, the Washington Nationals need both.

We all know that the Washington Nationals need pitching and a leader on this team with a big bat. Those are the priorities. When you finish with the second worst team pitching ERA at 5.35, you know where your main problems start. The newly hired President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, believes that improving in coaching, player development, and scouting will get this team re-built on the right foundation. He is right.

When asked about his priorities, Toboni talked about the power of hiring the best people. That is where he will start in putting together his front office and rebuilding his dugout that begins with a new manager to replace interim-manager Miguel Cairo, who a source told us will not be returning in that role. That probably will not surprise anyone.

If you modeled yourself to any team, you might not find the Red Sox, Toboni’s former employer, as the model to follow, rather the Nats could look more like the Milwaukee Brewers. The Nats and Brewers both went into Opening Day with identical $140 million payrolls. The difference is that the Nats were carrying dead payroll of $35 million for Stephen Strasburg, but the Brewers had dead payroll also. Best laid plans of yesteryears often fail, as we know. Front Office Sports today wrote an article about the Brewers titled, Milwaukee Moneyball: Brewers Are Beating MLB’s Deeper Pockets.

As the Brewers roster stands, only five players came via MLB free agency with the rest coming via trades, the draft, and international free agency. They finished with the best record in baseball despite trading their ace, Corbin Burnes, last year for Joey Ortiz who is their light hitting defensive whiz at shortstop. Ortiz finished with a .230 batting average and a .593 OPS. That is all part of their top defense up the middle that supports the Brewers’ pitchers. Somehow they got to this point. How far they go in the postseason, nobody knows. Is it defense makes better pitching, or better pitching makes a better team? Probably a little bit of both.

The Brewers ranked second in pitching ERA at 3.58 and third in runs scored at 806. They were sixth in total team defense with a 21.6 rating. And number one in baserunning at 15.1. It is no fluke why the Brewers finished with the best record in baseball. How they got there is more of the mystery. Christian Yelich might be their biggest name, but he finished ninth in WAR on their team. Manager Pat Murphy and GM Matt Arnold do it their way.

“We need to create a really robust scouting and player development process and R&D process. The name of the game is graduating high-end, cost-controlled talent to the Major Leagues. So the more of those guys we can have, the better — and I think if we build a foundation of talent like that, we’re going to have a really good shot. That’s where it all starts.”

— Toboni said this week

One point that Toboni made is that when you draft players up the middle you should get the added bonus of athletic players who can give you better defense. If you look at Boston’s draft record over the past three years, the drafted position status of each player (excluding pitchers) were all up-the-middle position players from catcher, shortstop, second base, and center field. One of those catchers from the 2023 draft was one of Toboni’s favorite picks, Kyle Teel, from the University of Virginia. They packaged Teel up as the headliner in the trade for Garrett Crochet.

The advantage of Toboni’s former team is that they are a cash rich team that could add ultra high-end free agents if they wanted. What might surprise you is that in the past five calendar years, they traded two homegrown superstars in Mookie Betts and Rafael Devers. And Nats fans still weep over trading Juan Soto. The difference is the Nats are only viable because they got James Wood, MacKenzie Gore, CJ Abrams in that trade along with Robert Hassell III and fireballer Jarlin Susana. The Red Sox didn’t do well on the Betts trade — the jury is out on how they did on the Devers trade that freed up $31 million in salary. It almost seems like the Red Sox do not want to be a luxury tax penalized team.

Much like the Brewers, we all know that the Nats will not be throwing tons of money at the problem. Why? The team is currently a small market team in revenue per CNBC. The team’s revenue dropped to $316 million per CNBC. Only the White Sox, Rays, Marlins, and Athletics made less. Finally, the Lerner family is making revenue a priority. In August, they hired Chris Zaber as their Chief Revenue Officer, and for the first time, the Lerners will be hiring a President of Business Operations. We might finally see the Nationals climb back to mid-market status. The team has added key sponsors in the past few months with AARP, Nightwing, Qualcomm, ABM, Anduril, and Peraton. They plan to add more and hope to unveil a stadium naming rights sponsor for next season.

“The more money that the team generates on the business side, that money will flow [directly] into what we can spend on players.”

— Toboni told us in a conversation after the press conference

Truth be told, when you look at how most teams spend money in baseball, they don’t spend where they are going to lose money. They are spending excess net revenue generated based on projections. Even the Yankees were projected near a breakeven on EBITDA. Unfortunately for the Washington Nationals, they have a debt issue. If CNBC is accurate that the Nats made just $10 million in EBITDA, then certainly the Nats lost money after they paid interest on their debt. Yes, that crushes all of those narratives that those $15 beers are going straight to profit. And certainly the drop in attendance in 2025 didn’t help matters.

We all know winning is the ultimate answer. You can try gimmicks to get people to the ballpark, but as the new Athletic Director of the University of Maryland, Jim Smith, knows coming from the Atlanta Braves is that winning sells out stadiums.

“We’re going to focus on revenue. Make no mistake about it — if we want to compete with the top schools, not just in the Big Ten [Conference], but across the country, we have to increase our revenues.”

— Smith said during his introductory press conference on May 22

Incredible, even at the collegiate level, the spoken truth that revenues matter. The Terps are trying to increase revenues through attendance and corporate sponsorships. Smith arrived at Maryland from the Atlanta Braves where he served as the Senior VP of Business Strategy. The Lerners should spend some time talking to Smith about revenue building. They probably should have hired Smith.

The Kansas City Royals are a small market team that cannot afford a $200 million payroll. They won a World Series in 2015 based on a formula of building a good lineup with a great bullpen and a decent starting rotation. The following year they collapsed and only won 81-games. By 2018, they were back to losing 100+ games and collecting top draft picks. The following year they picked second in the draft and got their franchise player in Bobby Witt Jr. They devised a plan to build with middle tier starting pitchers buoyed by great defense and Witt as their star hitter.

Last year, the Royals extended Witt through the 2030 season to give them a window, and they won a Wild Card spot and beat the Orioles in that Wild Card series. They didn’t make it this year — but got close with a winning record of 82-80. That’s the thing, your margin for error is smaller when you are a lower payroll team. How the Royals rose last year was by acquiring Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha for an average of $15.5 million in salary to take them to $160 million in CBT payroll. Certainly that is a lot for a small market team and a big gamble. They went on a different tangent on Moneyball by not going for a Billy Beane high OBP team — rather they would finesse teams by great defense to support their entire pitching staff and make each better.

Good defenders can be cheap if they have middling bats like the Brewers have done with Ortiz. Strikeout pitchers are expensive, and free agent aces are out of small market budgets. The Royals would analytically find pitchers who they could improve by getting their FIP to equal their ERA, and possibly have an inversion of the curve with an ERA that is better than FIP. As it turned out, their team ERA and FIP were exactly the same in 2024 at 3.76. They tied with the mighty Yankees with that 3.76 ERA for 6th best in baseball.

The Yankees paid Gerrit Cole at $36 million, Carlos Rodon at $27 million, and Marcus Stroman at $18.5 million for a Big-3 total of $81.5 million. The 2025 Royals entire 5-man starting rotation only cost $5 million more than Cole’s salary. What happens if an expensive ace gets injured or an expensive starting pitcher doesn’t meet expectations? The Yankees saw that with Cole’s elbow surgery and DFA’ing Stroman.

An advantage of the big budget teams: They can purchase “balance” while the smaller market teams must be creative in how they build their rosters. But improving defense to make your pitchers even better with extra run creation through small ball has been a trademark of successful small market teams in recent years in this Moneyball approach.

The Nats did a lot of talking with their prior regime, and finished with the second worst defense in baseball.

“Defensively, we’re going to be better — I promise you, which will make our pitching staff better — I promise you.”

— Rizzo said at a Hot Stove event

This formula is so commonsense that even large market teams like the Boston Red Sox, Giants, and Cubs have all quietly moved in this direction too. The Red Sox were one of the worst fielding teams last year at 25th in baseball. How did they improve so much? Better coaching and better players.

Mike Petriello of MLB.com writes, “You may not think about defense as being quite as important as a blazing fastball or a massive homer, but that doesn’t mean there’s not considerable value in it. After all, last year, five of the top eight fielding teams made the playoffs – and all of the eight weakest fielding teams missed the playoffs. You saw how Game 5 of the World Series turned on poor defense, didn’t you? … Put it all together, and we get team projections. If we just look at teams with playoff odds of at least 20% (via FanGraphs) as ‘contenders,‘ then which ones most improved their defensive projections from what they did in 2024? The answer: The Red Sox, Giants, and Cubs. Let’s explain why — and then tell you which two contenders might be shockingly weaker with the glove. ”

This year, five of the top six defensive teams made the playoffs. A larger percentage than last year showing how the trend has been quietly moving. It is good to see that other writers are also recognizing this trend on defense that we discuss incessantly in “Defense Matters.” All of this factors into winning. The Blue Jays, Cubs, Guardians, Red Sox, and Brewers, all trended up in defense and were all playoff teams. You see more of a mix this year of large market teams getting in on this trend. The smart money is moving in that direction.

If you are looking at new beginnings, stop the talk and put it into action. Put Nasim Nunez at shortstop as a stop gap, move Abrams to second base, and keep Jacob Young in center field. Most of all, improve at catcher. Create your big run producers on the corners. Then improve from there. This is working for other teams.

Yes, improve the pitching through acquisitions, but improve the pitching overall through great defense. Find a big bat for DH, and coach up players. Again, the Brewers starting shortstop has a .593 OPS. The Brewers didn’t have one player with more than 65 games played with an .800 OPS. Besides Yelich, no other player had more than 81 RBIs. But somehow they score a lot of runs by putting pressure on the other team’s defense.

This is why the Brewers and Royals, in roster construction, would be a good model for the Nationals. The Red Sox should be the model for how to build the infrastructure of coaching, scouting, and player development.