Perhaps the quietest offseason the Nationals have experienced in a long time will perk up with a little bit of news today. All major league clubs have until 1 p.m. EST to agree to salary terms with their arbitration-eligible players or else formally submit competing offers to the league, setting the stage for hearings next month.
It's not necessarily the most important day of the offseason. We're not talking about decisions that affect whether someone will be playing for the Nationals in 2017...
Some random thoughts on a Thursday morning in mid-January, with the Nationals now having gone a full 30 days since making their last player transaction ...
* It's about that time in the calendar when projections for the season begin to come out. FanGraphs.com, for example, has its 2017 standings projections up now, and though these can and will change as teams make more moves before spring training, it's interesting to note how the Nats stack up with the rest of the league.
FanGraphs has the...
Max Scherzer won't be pitching for Team USA this spring, but it appears Tanner Roark will wear the stars and stripes.
Roark has committed to pitch for the American squad in the World Baseball Classic, according to MLB Network's Jon Morosi.
The Nationals right-hander will leave the club in early March and miss at least a week while Team USA competes in the tournament's first round in Miami. He would then potentially travel to the West Coast for second-round games in San Diego and the...
Teams across baseball tend to take a break around the holidays, but they usually get back to work right after New Year's Day and continue altering their rosters as the clock to spring training starts ticking down.
That holiday break, though, seems to have extended into mid-January this time around. Because there's been an awful dearth of news so far in 2017, unless the signings of Trevor Plouffe and Colby Rasmus, and trades involving Yovani Gallardo, Seth Smith, Jarrod Dyson and Nate Karns...
Max Scherzer was genuinely excited to pitch for his country in the World Baseball Classic this spring. For all his career accomplishments to date, the Nationals right-hander has not been part of a big international competition like this before, so when Team USA manager Jim Leyland came calling earlier this offseason, Scherzer jumped at the opportunity.
"I have so much respect for Jim Leyland," Scherzer said last month, "that when he asks me to play, you don't say no."
On Monday, though,...
Max Scherzer won't be pitching in the World Baseball Classic after all.
Scherzer will have to sit out this spring's international competition while recovering from a stress fracture in the knuckle on his right ring finger, the Nationals announced this afternoon.
The team didn't say when or how Scherzer sustained the injury but said the pitcher still will be a "full participant" in spring training.
Scherzer had accepted an offer to pitch for Team USA in the WBC earlier this winter, jumping...
Given the lengths of contracts, the aging of players and the overall circle of baseball life, it's popular to look at the Nationals and say they have a limited window in which to enjoy peak success.
What, though, is that window? Is it confined to one season? Two? Three? More?
Or has the window already closed shut? Remember, in the last year alone the Nationals have lost Ian Desmond, Jordan Zimmermann, Denard Span, Doug Fister, Wilson Ramos and Mark Melancon to free agency.
The reality is this:...
Yesterday, we tracked down some former Nationals position players to see what has become of them since we last saw them. Today we look at former pitchers, with some particularly notable and memorable names in this bunch.
ROSS DETWILER The sixth overall pick in the 2007 draft had a few big moments during his Nationals career - most notably, he tossed a gem in the must-win Game 4 of the 2012 National League Division Series against the Cardinals - but he never could sustain it. The Nats decided...
Baseball rosters are a constantly changing entity. Teams make moves throughout a season and offseason, calling up this player, sending another player down, trading this one away, signing this one off the open market.
In the process, a lot of players who become well-known and popular among fans, teammates and media alike disappear, never to be heard from again in these parts.
The Nationals, like every other team in baseball, have parted ways with plenty of once-popular players over the years....
The Nationals have made an addition to their pro scouting staff, hiring De Jon Watson as a special assistant to the general manager.
Watson spent the last two seasons as senior vice president of baseball operations for the Diamondbacks, overseeing the club's scouting and player development programs. Arizona let him go in September, electing not to pick up his contract option for 2017, one of several moves the franchise made in a front office shakeup.
A veteran of 31 seasons in professional...
Though the Nationals' offseason is only about two-thirds complete at this point - for these purposes we're talking about from when the postseason ended until the day pitchers and catchers report for spring training - barring a surprising turn of events, they already know who's going to be in their opening day lineup.
Of course things can change between now and then, whether injuries or trades or late signings, but the Nationals by all accounts aren't actively seeking anybody at this point...
It's been an awfully slow-news couple of weeks for the Nationals, who haven't announced a roster transaction since Dec. 13, when they signed Emmanuel Burriss and three pitchers to minor league contracts. They haven't made a move involving a member of the 40-man roster since the Dec. 10 trade of Danny Espinosa to the Angels.
This isn't unprecedented. Most major league clubs go mostly silent over the holidays, and there hasn't been much news made anywhere in the sport since late December....
It may not feel like it, not with bitter cold temperatures coming later this week, but we actually aren't all that far away from baseball season.
We're only 41 days away, to be precise.
Yes, only 41 days from now, Nationals pitchers and catchers will officially report to their new spring training facility in West Palm Beach, Fla., the club announced yesterday. That's Feb. 14, for those who have trouble counting. Not a bad way to spend Valentine's Day, though my wife may beg to...
There was no shortage of domino effects from last month's trade for Adam Eaton, which cost the Nationals three top pitching prospects, including two hurlers who figured to be the club's first options for rotation depth in 2017.
In dealing Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez to the White Sox, general manager Mike Rizzo thinned his organization's pitching ranks in order to acquire a dynamic outfielder who could make a major impact on a daily basis. But the Eaton trade also puts added pressure on...
And so 2017 has officially arrived at last. And not a moment too soon for many people who won't have fond memories of 2016.
Leaving politics, celebrity deaths and other topics aside, 2016 was a particularly frustrating year for Washington sports fans, who once again had countless opportunities to get their hopes up only to have those hopes dashed in cruel fashion.
The Nationals, of course, enjoyed another fantastic regular season, winning 95 games and a division title. Then they were knocked...
First of all, a public service announcement: I'm heading out of town (actually, out of the country) for the next week. Byron Kerr and Pete Kerzel will have you covered, though, so be sure to keep checking the site for any Nationals news over the holidays.
Since you won't be hearing from me again until 2017, this seems like an appropriate time to take a step back and view 2016 in its entirety.
This was an eventful year, to say the least. (And we're only talking about baseball here, let alone...
If you missed it yesterday, ESPN announced its "Sunday Night Baseball" schedule for most of the first half of the 2017 season. It includes one game involving the Nationals: April 23 against the Mets at Citi Field.
And that's the only game involving the Nationals so far on ESPN's slate. That could change, of course, because only 12 of the 26 scheduled Sunday night tilts have been announced at this point. But it does continue a surprising trend that has left the Nats very much on the outside...
Any and all talk of the as-yet-undetermined identity of the Nationals' 2017 closer has boiled down to two conclusions: Either the Nats need to acquire an experienced reliever who has a track record of success pitching the ninth inning, or they should give one of their young, in-house relievers (most notably Koda Glover) the opportunity to seize the job.
Along the way, though, we seem to have glossed over one other potential resolution to this problem. It's another in-house candidate, but one...
We conduct a poll every spring, asking Nationals beat reporters to make a bunch of predictions for the upcoming season, and the results are always fun to track throughout the year.
One of the most interesting predictions, I think, is guessing who the Nats' sixth different starting pitcher will be in a given season. Basically, it's trying to predict when one member of their opening rotation will go down and who will take his spot.
And that could be an awfully tricky thing to predict for...
After so much time spent wondering who the Nationals would acquire this winter to become their new center fielder in 2017, it's easy to forget the organization thought it knew the answer to that question a year ago.
The Nationals had a promising, young center fielder with all kinds of skills. And had Michael A. Taylor put those skills together the way many hoped, this month's trade for Adam Eaton might never have been necessary.
Alas, 2016 was not kind to Taylor, who despite ample...