Photo by Intrepid/TalkNats
Changing long-standing organizational philosophies and moving in new directions are often needed when a company hits rock-bottom. And 10 months ago, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal jumped from the top rope and exposed how bad things were within the Washington Nationals with a scathing article critical of the drafting and player development. By the time the dust settled, most of the old guard was out — and replaced by the new “Moneyball” group led by President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni.
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— Toboni said after he was hired
We need to create a really robust scouting and player development process and R&D process. …
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In a short-time, Toboni brought in forklifts to install three huge Trajekt Arc pitching robots, and technicians to hard-wire computers filled with software to track everything from pinpointing a player’s location to their bio-rhythms, spin rates, velos, bat speeds, pressure points, and angles. What you need are geniuses to decipher all of the information — and Toboni hired layers of those people too. Most new hires weren’t taking lateral moves, and some weren’t even in pro baseball as they were plucking people from baseball labs like Driveline and out of college baseball.
Forget for a moment that the Nationals are 3-1 and tied for 1st place, because that is an aside to the change that happened over the winter. There was no hibernation. This was a full-fledged organizational rebuild.
This morning, a Tyler Glasnow interview caught my attention as he discussed R&D (Research & Development) aka analytics. We shared photos from Spring Training. The new tech and analytics people were everywhere. Check out the videos below:
So the team is 3-1, and if we told you at the end of December BUT that the team wouldn’t acquire a new player for more than $6 million, and that Dylan Crews and Harry Ford were both going to be in Triple-A, Josiah Gray would be placed on the 60-Day IL, James Wood was batting .118, and the team didn’t acquire a closer after trading Jose A. Ferrer — you would think that the team would be on the brink of disaster, right?
If everything went right with the Nationals, maybe they would be the 2022 version of the Orioles — a team that went from 52 wins to 83 wins by embracing analytics. They were bottom-3 in payroll. Their prospect stars were becoming MLB stars. Some of their dumpster dives turned into solid players, and if they got aggressive at the trade deadline — they might have made the playoffs that year.
That would be a stretch for the Nationals to win 83 games. But as they say in sports, almost anything is possible. Toboni’s goal was to build a strong foundation, and then build on top of that. All of that takes time.
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— Toboni said in various interviews including with MLB.com
We’re going to create a scouting and player development monster that hopefully leads to a winning culture — and one that lands us as a perennial contender.
… Placing an incredible amount of focus on creating a winning culture is front of mind for me. What that means is, we want to create an environment where our players are not just holding themselves accountable — but holding each other accountable.
I think we have a lot of the pieces that will be in place for the next Nationals run, whenever that might be.”
I’m a very strong believer that you win with the people that you have inside the building. When a pitcher pops a year from now or a hitter really takes off in our system, it’s not easy for people on the outside to follow the line of how it happened. When you’re on the inside, you start to realize, ‘There’s actually some really good systematic elements in place that are allowing this to happen.’
Hopefully we achieve whatever potential we have in 2026, but if our goal is to make this the envy of the sport and having a consistent winner year in and year out, I have to have a really good understanding of how these pieces are going to fall into place in 2027, 2028 and 2029.
It would be no different if I was leading a club that was one of the favorites to win the World Series this year. My guess is that person leading that baseball operations group is doing the same thing; it’s a huge part of our jobs.
If we were just focused on winning in 2026, and not focused on anything beyond that, we’re probably mortgaging the whole future for the present, which I’m not sure a lot of organizations would do right now.
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Now, maybe people are seeing that the money was spent on the foundation, and not building on top of it until the concrete is strong. What goes on top of that is, yes, a winning culture.
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