Why the Washington Nationals had to fire GM Mike Rizzo

Don’t get it twisted, Mike Rizzo is a Washington Nationals legend. Someday there will probably be a statue of him outside of Nationals Park. However, all good things come to an end. Firing Mike Rizzo was the best move for the long term future of the Washington Nationals.

Rizzo was the architect of the Nationals golden age in the 2010’s. He had an uncanny ability to win a trade and had a run as one of the best executives in baseball. However, by 2025, he was not among the elite anymore, and has not been for a little while. We will go over why that is and how Rizzo failed to adapt to the modern game.

Drafting Failures:

The biggest cause of Rizzo’s demise was his failure to draft and develop players. In the last 10-12 years, his record in the draft has been ugly. Since 2012, the Nationals have been the worst team at drafting and developing hitters.

This is a shocking graph that shows the extent of the Nationals problems. It is hard to believe that the Nats haven’t even been able to stumble into a productive bat in the draft. Yes, they struck gold with a bat in the IFA market when they got Juan Soto, but that pipeline has dried up in recent years as well.

Since 2012, no Nationals first round pick has had more than 1.4 fWAR with the team. That is an unfathomable number in such a large sample size. There is some context needed here. A lot of these guys are still young and have a lot of baseball ahead of them. Dylan Crews will certainly pass the 1.4 WAR mark. Also guys like Lucas Giolito and Dane Dunning had some success elsewhere. However, even with that context, the list of names is ugly.

For each player, there are different reasons why they did not work out in DC. However, it is unacceptable to have this long of a dry spell in the draft. A lot of people were puzzled by the timing of when Rizzo was fired. Firing your GM a week before you have the number one pick seems strange. However, if you were Mark Lerner and saw this list, would you trust Mike Rizzo to make the right pick?

The Washington Post wrote a great long form piece about these issues and had a lot of strong sources. In it, they describe a scattergun approach where the Nationals are just looking for talent rather than looking for a type of player with traits they value and know they can develop.

Behind the Development Curve:

This leads us into the next reason Rizzo had to go. Even if you draft great talents, you have to have the ability to develop them. Development has become so scientific in baseball, but Rizzo has not been a big part of that analytical wave. Was this due to ownership or his old school mentality? I guess we will find out now that he is gone.

By all accounts, the Nationals research and development is lagging behind. Their player development staff is one of the smallest in baseball according to the Washington Post. Some of this absolutely falls on the feet of ownership. If they are unwilling to change that for the next GM, we will be in the same spot.

However, some of this also falls on Rizzo. A lot of teams with notoriously stingy ownership have massive research and development teams. For example, the Rays have a massive analytics staff despite not spending much money. On the radio with Craig Hoffman, Chelsea Janes was talking about how the Rays have analysts who solely focus on evaluating catcher performance and how they can get better at things like framing.

It is tough to imagine 64 year old Mike Rizzo who has a reputation as an old school scout asking ownership for things like that. The Post also mentioned how sources in the club lamented how the voices against change could often be louder than the pro-analytics crowd, especially when it comes to hitter development.

All of this makes it very hard for Nationals draft picks to reach their full potential. In 2025, you need to lean heavily into analytics. We know so much about the game now and not using that information will leave you in the dust.

In 2025, you need detailed plans to develop enough players to make a good roster. The James Wood’s of the world are talented enough to survive player development deficiencies, but there are very few humans built like James Wood on this planet.

Mike Rizzo can still make deals with the best of them, but there is more to being a GM than finding a good trade, especially in 2025. You need to have systems in place to get the most out of the players in your organization. The Rizzo Nats were no longer doing that well enough and it has resulted in them being left behind.

What is Next:

Now that Rizzo is gone, what is next for this organization? Well that really depends on whether ownership is serious about doing what it takes. Being serious is not just throwing money at free agents, it is also spending the money on research and development. We need to foster a culture where the best, most innovative minds want to work for the Washington Nationals.

The next GM hire is going to tell us so much. I really want them to find someone from outside of the organization who is a bright analytical mind. By all accounts, interim GM Mike DeBartolo is a smart guy and more analytically minded than Rizzo. However, making him the long term guy would once again be an example of the Lerner’s just doing the thing that forces them to do as little as possible.

We wrote about some potential candidates for the GM job yesterday. All of these names would be very good options and bring new ideas into the fold. They would bring the Nationals into the 2020’s.

Above all, I just want the Nats to not be behind the curve anymore. By the end of the Rizzo era, the Nationals were not one of the smart teams anymore and that was frustrating. The whole organization felt stuck in the past and the reports that have come out in the last couple days have only confirmed that suspicion.

There are so many smart people that are from this area. Of the three GM candidates we talked about yesterday, all of them have DMV roots. I want the Nationals to be innovators on the cutting edge of baseball. They were not in the later years of the Mike Rizzo era.

A lot of this comes down to the Lerner’s. Does this move show they have awoken from their slumber and are serious about the team again or are they just shuffling chairs on the Titanic. The great thing about actually making this move is that we will find all of this out and get the clarity we need.

Mike Rizzo is a Nationals legend, but it was time for a change. Things have become stale in DC and Rizzo was not adapting to the new game. Now the question is what will the post Mike Rizzo era look like and how will the Lerner’s move forward. The Washington Nationals are a vastly different organization than they were Sunday afternoon when they took on the Red Sox.