The Myth-Buster World Series

You hear it all the time that you have to spend to win, and the Washington Nationals bullpen sucked ### because the Lerner ownership didn’t spend enough to improve that bullpen.

Spending near the top of baseball has been a good formula for winning from 2016 to 2025. That was a 10-season run. This year is the anti-spend World Series.

For me, spending is preferred as opposed to trading top prospects to fill holes. Once you have a solid core, the weak links have been exposed, and it’s time to fill those holes.

Let’s discuss a few points:

It is how you spend your money not how much. The Guardians lost in the ALCS. They had the lowest payroll in baseball. Sure, you could say if they spent more, maybe they could have played better. Maybe. Who knows.
What did the Brewers and Rays spend on their bullpens? The answer is simply, “Not much.” On the Brewers, Aaron Ashby makes $5.7 million and Trevor Megill makes $4.6 million. All of the rest of the bullpen is on minimum salaries on the Brewers or were acquired in deadline trades. What did they spend on that bullpen? About $14 million. The Rays are paying Steven Matz $7.5 million and Bryan Baker makes $1.26 million and the rest of the bullpen is making league minimum. They are spending about $12 million on their bullpen.
Ownership provides the budget and the head of baseball operations acquires the players. Yes, the Washington Nationals bullpen did suck ###. But ownership didn’t tell baseball operations where to spend their money.

How did Tampa and Milwaukee end up with competent bullpens? Consider this tidbit, Tampa allowed their 2025 closer, Pete Fairbanks, to become a free agent when they declined his $11 million team option. They bet on Baker who had a rough 2025 season, and he shined as their closer this year. How is that any different from what the Nats tried to do with Clayton Beeter, Cole Henry, Brad Lord, and PJ Poulin? The difference is the Nats best laid plans turned to ###.

The Tampa gamble paid-off and they only had 19 blown saves in the 2026 season. The Brewers had 21 blown saves. The Nats had 42 blown saves, more than double the amount that Tampa had — and more than both teams combined.

What the Brewers, Tampa, Boston, and Cleveland have done over the years is build their bullpens internally with depth in their minor league system. Boston did sign Aroldis Chapman through free agency. But most of their bullpen was built internally. Boston had 14 blown saves in the 2026 season, with nine losses in blown save games. The Nats lost 24 games in blown save games.

What Paul Toboni of the Nationals has to figure out is the meta to build a successful and sustainable system for bullpen arms. This has to be a priority of the braintrust to solve this black hole.

Next year, the Dodgers will owe Edwin Diaz and Tanner Scott over $43 million combined in salary. That’s more money than the Brewers and Rays spent in total on the bullpens this year. The Dodgers had 23 blown saves in 2026 while paying the most money in baseball on their bullpen.

The Dodgers also spent $57 million a year on Kyle Tucker for a .715 OPS and a lower WAR than Jacob Young who made $760,000 for the season. Again, these might be extreme cases of spending gone wrong — but this is also part of the cautionary tale that Nats fans saw with Stephen Strasburg‘s $35 million deal that cost the team $40.833 million per game played under that contract.

“The team cutting payroll is treating their family where they’re staying in a neighborhood that has less protection,” super agent Scott Boras said years ago. “They’re not living in the gated community of Playoffville. And certainly they’re saving a de minimis property tax … There’s less financial analysts sitting in the press boxes. The rooms in their houses are less, so obviously you’re going to have less franchise players when you move to that 12-room home in Playoffville.”

When Boras client Eric Hosmer signed with San Diego, at the time, it was the largest contract in Padres history. Boras advertised him as “FedEx Playoffville” to try to portray him as the one key cog to deliver a team to the playoffs. He was released from the final 3-years of his contract and delivered poor WAR numbers. While FedEx has delivery guarantees, Boras doesn’t give refunds for non-delivery.

So there you go on spending. There are plenty of free agents who did well in the 2026 season. But as we know, few free agent deals for players aged over 30 years of age work-out in the long-term.

An aging curve of batters, constructed by simply averaging each batter-season WAR by age in the Statcast era (2015-present, excluding 2020), and includes only position players. The age range was strictly limited to players aged 21-35. In 2026, the average age of an MLB position player (hitters/lineups) on Opening Day rosters was 28.7 years old.