Months after new Nationals president of baseball operations Paul Toboni declared his intent to shape the Nationals into a "scouting and player development monster," the next step in that plan is taking shape.
A report Sunday from the Washington Post's Andrew Golden shed some light on a new initiative Toboni and assistant general manager Devin Pearson, who oversees player development, are starting in a week's time. A "supplemental training camp," as Golden puts it, will be held from January 20 through the start of minor league spring training for about 60 Nationals prospects and other minor leaguers. The piece also includes some details on the broad scale of the team's improvements technologically at all levels; specifically, the introduction of two Trajekt machines, one at the team's home base in D.C. and one at their spring facility in West Palm Beach.
The camp is designed to familiarize coaches new to the organization at both the major and minor league levels with the team's players, as well as assimilating players into the new philosophy driving the team forward. Beyond that, the goal is to address each players' individual needs. Pearson, who came over to Washington from Boston with Toboni at the start of the offseason, implied that he hopes to establish the same culture of buy-in from the organization's players that they were able to create with the Red Sox.
It's an enormous departure from the approaches of front offices past. The Nats, now armed with five figureheads at the top (Toboni, Pearson, general manager Ani Kilambi, and fellow assistant GMs Mike DeBartolo and Justin Horowitz), have instituted a complete overhaul of what defined the organization's tactics on all fronts.
The Trajekt development is the most striking of the group. The Trajekt Arc is a machine that painstakingly recreates the movements and characteristics of every pitcher in Major League Baseball, using publicly available pitch movement data to deliver pitches identical to the way that pitcher might. Pitch trajectory, velocity, spin, and delivery are all taken into account. A report from WaPo's Spencer Nusbaum in June indicated that at least 25 of the 30 teams in MLB utilized the technology; the Nationals were not among them.
The Nationals fanbase was often left wondering what the cause of these technological lapses were. It was theorized that perhaps it was a financial barrier; that the Lerner family who comprise the Nationals ownership group were unwilling to commit to spending the money required to bring the team up to speed. A Trajekt Arc device costs, conservatively, $15 to $20,000 a month over the span of a 3-year lease, after all.
This offseason has been a damning indictment on that idea. It's become clear that the primary factor holding back the team was former baseball ops president Mike Rizzo and an organization-wide unwillingness to embrace modern developments, instead choosing to wallow in a self-righteous feeling of superiority by virtue of only needing to implement traditional methods of scouting and development. The obvious answer was always blending traditional techniques with more modern innovations, but Rizzo stood by his ways to the bitter end, to the point where it was ultimately the breaking point that cost him his job when he refused to fire manager Davey Martinez.
Toboni, in the meantime, has said publicly that he feels that the organization is now properly equipped with the technology it needs to remain competitive on the scouting and development side of baseball operations. With less than a month left until the start of spring training, all we can do now is wait and see what the eventual benefits of this new approach to development will be.