I haven’t needed an intro for 57 years, but here goes:
Glad to be back!
Now, where were we?
One of the rarest achievements for any baseball team is to lead MLB in runs scored, home runs and stolen bases in the same season. Only the most powerful, swift and dynamic offenses have done it since the Lively Ball Era began in 1920.
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Until now, that distinction belonged to the ’31 New York Yankees with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Billy Dickey and the Boys of Summer of the Brooklyn Dodgers with Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges and Duke Snider who performed the feat in ’52, ’53 and ’55.
Now, for the first time in more than 70 years, another team leads MLB in all three of those glamour categories.
The Washington Nationals.
You can now clean up the coffee you just spilled all over yourself.
Last season, the Nats were 24th in homers, 20th in runs and 10th in steals. With 41 games left, the Nats already have 13 more homers (174) than they hit all of last year.
If Washington baseball fans find themselves shaking their heads in delighted disbelief, there’s good reason. Since 1901, in a total of 91 previous MLB seasons for the old Senators of the American League and the new Nats of the National league, Washington has never had a team that led MLB in runs scored. Or homers.
Normally, I’m semi-friendly, but let’s make a brief exception. If the Nats owners had given new team president Paul Toboni an additional $10 million to $15 million in the offseason for his tiny payroll to provide for perhaps the 20th best bullpen in MLB, rather than Washington’s opening day dog mess, the Nats would’ve allowed about 40 fewer runs this season — implying a likely 90-win pace now. Playoffs, why not?
This is 20-20 hindsight. But it’s also a case of: Your sins will find you out. The Lerners should have ponied up for a pen out of common decency. When you charge the fifth-highest prices in MLB to attend a game, driven by the second-highest concession costs in the sport (according to my new research assistant, ChatGPT), then, no matter the bleak preseason prophecies, you don’t field a roster with No Bullpen At All. Even if you think you’ll go 66-96 again, as Las Vegas predicted, you still owe customers a bullpen that can hold a fat lead with two innings to play. Not turn a 9-1 lead into an 11-10 loss. Unless, of course, you want to drive your fans to drink — with a 16-oz beer for $15.40.
If the Lerners had been good MLB citizens, then they could still have made their sensible deadline deals of hitters Curtis Mead and Luis García Jr. to add young pitchers. No matter their record at the deadline, the Nats should have made a far harder push to extend All-Star pitcher Foster Griffin. Overpay him? Yeah. After all, they just saved $12 million on the ’26-’27 salaries they don’t have to pay García.
Enough with the “if only” regrets. This year just reinforces my Lerner view from last season: Fund it or sell it.
Instead, though, let’s focus on the Nats’ offensive shock waves. This season underlines that former general manager Mike Rizzo and his staff were excellent scouts of talent. Of the Nats’ 171 homers, 144 are by players from that regime.
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But it’s also clear that Toboni and a radically transformed organization, including three hitting coaches with three different specialties, are better at modern player development — at least in hitting.
The Nats’ marriage of preexisting talent and improved player development methods is likely to continue showing dramatic results. Player development now includes many new areas, including biomechanics and motion capture to record kinetic chain efficiency in live play, plus mechanical optimization to pinpoint pitching delivery flaws or improve a hitter’s swing path. Every degree of joint flex is debriefed.
The words get fancy. But, for me, one reason the Nats are on pace to score 178 more runs is that, whether they know it or not, they are following Babe Ruth. Asked how he hit, he said, “Pick out a good one and sock it.”
Picking out a good one is incredibly hard. Now, they use terms like “improved pitch recognition” or “controlling the strike zone” or knowing which pitches in which areas the computer says suit your swing the best.
But it’s still just “picking out a good one.” As for “sock it,” the two concepts go together. If the pitch isn’t a good one — for you — how can you belt it off the fence or over it? The Nats are looking for pitches to clobber, not just make contact, or they spit on ’em. That’s why they also lead MLB in extra-base hits, total bases and slugging average.
To make matters better, the Nats position players are the youngest in baseball at 24.9 years of age. As a group, they should ripen.
The Nats don’t figure to get much older any time soon. Just look at Rochester. Their AAA affiliate, the Redwings, are scoring even more runs this season (5.55 per game) than the Nats (5.34), despite home games in a “pitcher’s park.” And they are doing it almost entirely with talent the Nats already had on hand. For months, Rochester had so many players with gaudy stats they’d have needed 11 positions to use them all at once.
So, it was no surprise that Abimelec Ortiz (74 RBI in 312 at-bats at Rochester) homered in his first MLB at-bat, while Andrew Pinckney waited until his second MLB at-bat to homer.
Right now, slick-glove infielder Trey Lipscomb, who’s become a 20-homer, .858 OPS hitter this year, can’t get out of AAA. Neither can first baseman Yohandy Morales with 23 homers and a .926 OPS. Shortstop Seaver King, the No. 10 overall pick in ’24, has shot up to AAA where his OPS is .800.
Eli Willits, the No. 1 overall pick in ’25, has played 88 games at age 18 at A and A+ this year. The switch-hitting shortstop has 87 runs, 81 walks, 47 steals, 13 homers and an .893 OPS. Juan Soto and Bryce Harper are the only two Nats with such stats at age 18 or 19. They were both in MLB to stay at 19.
Helped by Toboni trades to add prospects, the Nats’ farm system was recently ranked the fourth-best in the game. For years, when the Nats were trading prospects to get the final pieces for a postseason run, they ranked low.
As every Washington fan knows, the Nats’ pitching (28th of 30 in runs allowed) is almost as bad as the offense is good. That’s why the Nats, outscored by 212 runs in ’25, have “only” outscored their foes by 28 runs this season.
Just look at -212 to +28 and smile: A 240-run-differential improvement in one season. The Braves have played in several towns since 1876. They’ve only improved their run differential by that much in a season twice, in 1897 and 1991. Yes, you can wait a century to get that much better that fast.
There are still many miles to go. The horrid pen may’ve improved recently — finally. But the larger question is: What about the Whole Darn Pitching Staff? Answer: That’s what hitting prospects are for! Mead and García, who was leading MLB in slugging when traded, won’t be the last bat-for-arms deals.
Those, like me, who bristle that ownership didn’t step up a lot to extend Griffin and improve the pitching picture immediately, should probably calm down. (Unclench your teeth, Boz.)
As much as a club ever does in a sport that shifts a team’s image like a kaleidoscope, the Nats have time on their side. The Nats didn’t lose anybody of consequence to free agency until CJ Abrams after ’28. They have so many high-pick maybe-elite middle infielders in the system that they’ll probably trade CJ for starting pitching at some point.
The only meaningful free agent who could leave after the ’29 season is pitcher Cade Cavalli, who may be extended by then. That’s it. Otherwise, everybody at Nats Park now, plus everybody in the minors, plus future draft picks and international signings, plus anyone acquired in a trade, plus any free agents that the Lerners — or possibly new, more confident, less frugal owners at some point — sign as free agents will still be under team control in ’30.
Almost everybody needs a lift these days. When the local baseball team is fun to watch, you feel better for three hours a day, 162 times a year and sometimes in October, too. Even on a flawed team, 865 runs, 230 homers and 175 steals is pretty fun.
Maybe, this season, the Nats will be the first team to lead the majors in runs, homers and stolen bases in the same year since 1955. Or maybe not. But these Nats pass the “enjoyment” test.
When waiting for improvement suddenly turns the corner into confidently expecting better days, watching that gradual daily process becomes its own sweet pleasure.
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