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Mike DeBartolo’s first week on the job as the Nationals’ interim general manager was consumed with the Major League Baseball Draft. His second and third weeks on the job are now focused on MLB’s upcoming trade deadline, and a critical question he must confront: How committed is the organization to its current group of young players?
The Nats will be sellers at the deadline for the fifth straight year, that much DeBartolo concedes. Veterans on expiring contracts like Kyle Finnegan, Michael Soroka, Josh Bell, Amed Rosario and Paul DeJong will be shopped.
But the asking price for those two-month rentals isn’t likely to be steep. If DeBartolo is interested in making more significant changes and acquiring more prominent prospects before July 31, he would need to consider dealing players still under club control beyond 2025.
First baseman Nathaniel Lowe, who has one year of arbitration eligibility remaining, is one possibility. But what about MacKenzie Gore, one of the key prospects acquired in the 2022 Juan Soto blockbuster and a first-time All-Star, yet one who only has 2 1/2 years left of club control (same as Soto at the time of that trade)?
DeBartolo didn’t straight up shoot down the possibility when asked Saturday in a session with reporters following No. 1 draft pick Eli Willits’ introductory press conference. But he did make it fairly clear he’s not interested in breaking up what he believes is a solid foundation of young players already at the major league level.
“I’m looking to keep the young, core group of our best players together,” DeBartolo said. “Certainly in my job, if someone calls, you always listen to what they have to say. But trading away our really high-quality young players is not something I’m looking to do right now.”
Asked specifically about Gore, who enters today’s start against San Diego with a 3.02 ERA, 1.196 WHIP and 11.3 strikeouts per nine innings, DeBartolo equated the 26-year-old left-hander with other key building blocks like James Wood, CJ Abrams and Dylan Crews.
“I’d put him in that group in terms of our young, really talented players,” he said. “That’s not a focus of mine to move him.”
The larger question confronting DeBartolo and the rest of the Nationals front office as they navigate their way through a hugely disappointing season is how close this franchise truly is to contending again. When the original rebuild began with the trading away of eight veterans at the July 2021 deadline, and certainly following the next summer’s trade of Soto, former GM Mike Rizzo was adamant the organization was in better shape to complete this rebuild in a shorter time frame than the previous one he oversaw from 2009-12.
The belief was that the Nationals would be ready to win by now. Reality says they’re currently on pace to lose 98 games, which would represent a seven-game drop-off from their back-to-back 91-loss seasons in 2023-24.
Are they proceeding as if they can finally achieve their long-awaited goal of contending in 2026, or have recent events left them conceding the rebuild process is going to take longer than that?
“I would say we’re still in the evaluation process of timelines and things like that,” DeBartolo said. “Being in the job for two weeks and everything, still evaluating timelines. But I think we’re looking to just acquire young talent and to bolster what we have and try to be competitive as soon as we can. But I don’t want to put a timeline on it.”
