Spend some time with Washington Nationals new President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, and you can begin to get a sense for his agenda. Some of the words and phrases he espouses can give you clues into how Toboni will operate.

Per a source who spoke to us on a condition of anonymity, he told us that, “TBone wants to build this the right way just like what was working in Boston. I don’t think he believes in spending his way into contention until the team is ready to contend. The timing is important here and getting the right group put together is how you contend for a long time.”

Contending for a long time sounds like the ultimate goal here along with winning championships to be that “envy” of sports. Before any offseason moves are made, the Nationals came improve in three ways:

1. Better personnel in coaching and player development
2. More effective strategies
3. Making players better

Better personnel in coaching and player development

Of course Toboni believes that he has been bringing in better personnel in all facets of his front office and coaching staff. He retained Mike DeBartolo as an SVP, and hired Justin Horowitz, Devin Pearson, and Andrew Wright for his front office.

On the field, Toboni hired manager Blake Butera who is assembling a coaching staff that brings in personnel with strong analytics and player development experience.

More effective strategies

Every team has to define who they are and strategize to take advantage of that. Too many teams fail by trying to be a team that they are not. Are you a power or a finesse team? Typically teams have a line of demarcation between power hitters and finesse hitters. Don’t force square pegs in round holes.

With Daylen Lile, he is perhaps the best example of a player who is a finesse type and finds his power on doubles and triples with the occasional home run. James Wood is a power hitter. You should not be teaching Lile the same way as you teach Wood. You do want to teach Nasim Nunez, Jacob Young and Robert Hassell III like you would teach Lile. In the middle is CJ Abrams who is a power/finesse type of hitter. You get both with him. Still to be defined is Dylan Crews and Brady House. For now, you need them both making more contact. Improve their contact before you push for the power.

The team was second to last in team defense and last in catcher’s defense. The middle infield defense ranked last in baseball. By identifying those issues, you have to strategize on how you will fix it. That will factor directly into making your pitchers better.

Making players better

You have heard Toboni talk many times about finding another gear for players. That is analogous to the cyclist or race car driver who kicks it into the highest gear for greater output.

“I think there’s another gear to tap into with many of them.”

— Toboni said in a media session

If you follow Nationals players on social media, many are already showing you what they are going in their own continual improvement. Luis Garcia Jr., Young, and Hassell have all had many workout videos posted. Garcia is running hills, Young is in the batting lab at Driveline, and Hassell is working with weights.

Each player who was under team control with the Nats got an offseason plan. If I had to guess, Garcia looks like he is going to get in the best shape of his life. Young, last offseason, did strength training, and this offseason travelled to workout with hitting guru Travis Fitta at Driveline. I kind of wish that Hassell was in a batting lab.

What we wrote about last month was that several Nats players were behind on bat speed. While you would think that strength training is the answer to quicker bat speed, the answer is yes — but there are specific workouts tailored just to bat speed improvement. Toronto Blue Jays hired a hitting coach a year ago named David Popkins, and he immediately got on bat speed training. Popkins was once an instructor at Driveline. And per his former employer, “Overall, the Blue Jays tied for the sixth-greatest improvement in team bat speed year over year, from 70.7 mph to 71.5 mph (from 2024 to 2025). And that improvement accelerated late in the year as the team bat speed averaged 71.8 mph in August and 72.2 mph in September, which ranked 12th in the majors. They were trending up. The Blue Jays ranked 27th in the majors in bat speed in 2024.”  

Are you a believer now? We will see if JY can improve his hitting in 2025. We wrote an article on him a year ago that his bat speed had him profiled in a tier with Luis Arraez. The difference was that Arraez had a low trajectory line drive swing that was almost like a tennis swing. Just meet the ball and serve it into the outfield for singles. What we identified was that Young had a very predictive contact pattern. This season Young had an unlucky .283 BABIP. League average BABIP was .291. But given Young’s speed profile he should be at or above his .321 BABIP from 2024 — we had hoped. I believe that the drills that Young was working on at Driveline of hitting the ball through an imaginary hoop above the shortstop is the key like Travis was working with him on. More line drives and less flyballs and groundballs. And less predictive contact by spraying the ball more. HIT ‘EM WHERE THEY AIN’T!

How do you get Dylan Crews into another gear? We can actually add Brady House to this same discussion. Pitch recognition and plate discipline is a major problem for both. And bad habits have creeped in. Both have been suckers for fastballs above the zone. Those who have been Nats fans for a while have seen that as an issue prominently in this system with Michael A. Taylor and Danny Espinosa. Besides Taylor’s breakout 2017 season under the tutelage of Dusty Baker, he was never able to replicate that .806 OPS season again. Neither of them adjusted and it led to former GM Mike Rizzo parting ways with both. Taylor went on to have a 10-year career, and Espinosa made decent money. Both were loved by Nats fans. But if Crews and House can’t improve, this could be a fatal flaw that will keep them from reaching that star potential. As Taylor showed, with other tools you can have longevity in the league. The Nats didn’t draft Crews at No. 2 overall to be a bench platoon bat and defensive replacement. Same with House who was drafted at No. 11 overall.

This is a good time to say that not every player can be fixed. Sometimes you have to know when to move on. For instance, the extensive personnel time, money, and effort put into fixing Elijah Green has not yielded the expected results. It has taken assets away from those who needed it. The time is finite. The pick was flawed to begin with. Any evaluator who ranked him in the Top-5 prospects in the 2022 draft should have their credentials taken away. Unless you were convinced you were drafting Adam Dunn, you have to pass on flawed players until latter rounds. To draft Green at No. 5 overall was one of the worst moves of the Rizzo tenure. There were plenty of others — but that one stands out. Is Keibert Ruiz a lost cause?

Moving on, the pitchers as a whole will all get better just with better defense and better catchers. That is like a whole team bonus. But individually, every pitcher can benefit from getting into a pitching lab and working on their craft. When the baseball world fell in love with the sweeper pitch it seemed to be short-lived. If you like at pitchers like Yoshinobu Yamamoto, his repertoire is based on horizontal, diagonal, and vertical movement. That seems to be splitter, curveball, and an assortment of fastballs. The splitter, split-change, circle change, and spiked breaking pitches are that vertical pitch that were the nastiest pitches we saw in the postseason.

For some reason, Josiah Gray came to the Nats from the Dodgers and had a nasty spiked breaking pitch that was changed to something with more horizontal movement. At one point in 2023, he was throwing a curveball, slider, and sweeper. He had a cutter and a 4-seam fastball too. Throwing six pitches with the changeup seemed like the idiom, “jack of all trades, master of none.” You need ‘plus’ pitches. The best pitchers have that special putaway pitch. Those six, seven, and eight pitch at-bats were running up Gray’s pitch count. We have seen this as a Nats problem with many pitchers in the past several years.

If you look at every pitcher on this staff, they all have to work on getting better. As we wrote in yesterday’s article, they all have room to improve. The new braintrust as we wrote have to figure out if Jake Irvin is salvageable. With his average fastball velo dropping from 93.9 mph in 2024 down to 92.4 mph this year, that’s a 1.5 mph drop and troubling for a 28 year old pitcher who is arbitration-eligible with a projected price tag of $3.3 million.

The entire bullpen group could use a lab session like the Tigers put Kyle Finnegan through. Just by changing his pitch mix and spin on his splitter, Finnegan went to the Tigers and put up a 0.00 ERA in the month of August. He had a decent September also. What we saw in Finnegan besides his pitching was that he has had an issue with controlling his heartbeat. We have seen that with Jackson Rutledge, Cole Henry, and MacKenzie Gore. The Blue Jays have a mental strength coach with a guy named John Lannan. Yes, that Lannan who was once the Opening Day starter for the Nats. After retiring as a player, he earned a Master’s degree in Sports Psychology and Clinical Mental Health Counseling and obtained a Certification in Mental Performance Consulting (CMPC). The Nats had this type of person, but I question if that person was effective.

Improvement comes in the form of mental improvement along with physical improvement leading to better process which always leads to better results in larger sample sizes. Yogi Berra had the right idea, even though his math was off when he said, “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” 

Better fundamentals will also as a team move them up a gear. And running to first base or as Joe Maddon called it, a Hard-90 is the bare minimum to ask of any player. That is the least a ballplayer can do for their teammates is play hard all the time.

These are just some of the thoughts without writing another 3,000 words on the subject.