In the eight months and seven days since Paul Toboni was hired to run the Washington Nationals, he has, in some loose order, moved his family, including four small children, from Boston to Georgetown; overhauled a front office; hired a whole new major league coaching staff; turned over an entire minor league operation; traded the team’s top pitcher; introduced words like alignment and synergy to the organization’s vocabulary; then watched the Nats, projected by Vegas to win around 65 games this year, enter June with a winning record and the most runs scored in Major League Baseball.
But because he’s just one 36-year-old man, Toboni, the Nationals’ president of baseball operations, hasn’t done everything he’s wanted to. Like, for example, he would love to travel with the team a bit more. Or, when he thinks about it, he hasn’t spent a ton of time imagining himself as a Nats fan in recent years. (Can you blame him? Would you inhabit that headspace if you had the choice?)
“So this is going to sound bad, but honestly I think to myself sometimes that I’m not sure I’ve empathized enough with what the fans have gone through,” Toboni told me at Nationals Park earlier this month. “Just because I am so focused, as we all are, on: ‘Hey, we’re new to this and we just want to do it right. Forget about what happened in the past, we just want to do it right.’”