Photo by Jake Stephens/Nats.Talk

With age comes life experiences and teachable moments. That’s all well and good until you find yourself standing on a pitching mound at nearly 38 years old with little remaining on your arm. Results matter here. Yes, Miles Mikolas turns 38 in August. All reports are that he is a great guy. Great news for his leadership, bad news if you were expecting some sort of resurgence from Mikolas.

Since he returned as a star pitcher in 2018 from Japan, Mikolas is currently carrying the highest ERA in his career from that point forward at 5.44 after his blowup last night in Boston.

What was Paul Toboni‘s plan when he signed Mikolas to a $2.25 million deal with hefty incentives bonuses? Shouldn’t that money Toboni paid for Mikolas, Cionel Perez and the decision to tender a deal to Josiah Gray have been better spent to take that nearly $6 million and placed that on a good reliever?

Those were just some of Toboni’s moves that confused people. Of course trading away your team’s closer, Jose A. Ferrer, for a catcher who didn’t make the opening day roster while also trading away one of your best starting pitching prospects, Jake Bennett, were head-scratchers too.

There is a saying, “Don’t make moves for the sake of making moves.” What that means is that some GMs make moves to show they are working hard — but many times they aren’t working smart. Bennett is a Rookie of the Year candidate now for Boston and just shutdown the Yankees on Saturday in 6 1/3 brilliant innings.

The pitcher the Nats got for Bennett is Luis Perales who is trying to get through 4.0 inning stints in Triple-A and has a 4.27 ERA. Bennett has a 3.27 ERA in the Majors in six starts. Trading away Ferrer might have worked if Toboni replaced him with a comparable closer in free agency — but he never did that.

For anyone who has read my writings for years, Bennett was one of my top pitching prospects and I was not happy when he was traded. Toboni made that deal with his old team, the Red Sox, where he certainly knew a lot about Perales. But did he know anything about Bennett? I reported from the Arizona Fall League after seeing Perales. Big blazing fastball but had a hard time locating it. Some said that had to do with his TJ surgery — but he had that back in June 2024. Bennett had his TJ surgery in September 2023.

Imagine if the Nats had Ferrer and Bennett and didn’t sign Mikolas, Perez, and Gray and used that money to upgrade the bullpen even more. Ohhhh we can dream, right? Ferrer would be the best reliever on the Nats, and Bennett would be the second best starter on the Nats only behind Foster Griffin.

As the pitcher of record, Mikolas has a 2-7 record. He’s been both a starter and bulk reliever. But the Nats needed more. He generally stresses the bullpen with short outings -or- like last night with his 6-earnies given up, manager Blake Butera had Mikolas who was shoved to cleanup his own mess and pitched 7.0 innings in the loss.

For all of the good this season, Toboni has been a mixed bag of results. Great job on the MacKenzie Gore trade for five minor league prospects. But Toboni did a terrible job on building his bullpen and the back of his starting rotation as well as his MLB bench. Yes, great job on signing Griffin and trading for Curtis Mead — BUT you only got Griffin for one year! No team options on there. Your best pitcher is no more than a 1-year rental right now. And the trade of Ferrer and Bennett are looking really bad. Good job to Toboni for rebuilding the player development staff and MLB coaching staff. But they aren’t miracle workers. Could anyone fix those bullpen arms?

❝I was driving home [Tuesday] night so freaking pissed off [after the loss]. It kind of hit me, that it’s a good thing. We have higher expectations than people had coming into the year. … This team will bounceback.

We’re not shying away from the fact that we could have a lot more wins right now if our bullpen was throwing a little bit better.❞

— Paul Toboni said on 106.7 The Fan’s Sports Junkies show on Wednesday morning

When Toboni places blame out there, shouldn’t he start by looking in the mirror? These games count. Yes, he deserves lot of credit for getting this team to .500 but he’s said in at least two interviews that the team has too many losses at the hands of the bullpen. The bullpen he built.

Basically the entire starting lineup, sans Mead, were all players from the 2025 Nats. They have certainly been coached up much better and utilized better to this point. Toboni deserves the credit for that.

The coaching has brought out better forms of almost every position player. Some of it, like getting more out of Keibert Ruiz by playing him less was commonsense that just never registered with the prior regime. We wrote about that incessantly. Much of coaching up players is commonsense. The final tweaks are where the great coaches thrive. But to be honest, James Wood and CJ Abrams were both really good players in the first half of the 2025 season too.

Yesterday, Toboni was a little less committal, “I don’t know what we’re going to be thinking a month from now.”

There is still just over half the season to be played. The final judgments and report cards are still incomplete. There is still time for Toboni to show that he has chess moves ahead of him to make the necessary tweaks to be a winner. Toboni, you’re on the clock.