On January 21, 2015, the Washington Nationals announced the signing of right-handed free agent and 2013 American League Cy Young winner Max Scherzer to a seven-year, $210 million contract - the team's largest deal in history to that point. He joined Stephen Strasburg, Doug Fister, and Jordan Zimmermann in a rotation that led MLB in ERA in 2014, and entered an organization headed by Mike Rizzo, who oversaw scouting for the Arizona Diamondbacks team that drafted him back in 2006.
Flash forward five years. It's the 2019-2020 offseason, and Scherzer has been an All-Star every season of his Nationals career. He led the National League in strikeouts three times, the Majors as a whole twice, and struck out 300 batters in a season for the only time in his career in 2018, while also leading the Majors in innings pitched. He finished in the top 5 of Cy Young voting in every season, winning the award twice, and three times finishing 10th in the National League Most Valuable Player vote. Scherzer fought through severe neck spasms to pitch twice in the World Series, and was rewarded with his first World Series championship.
It's now 2025, as we approach the ten-year anniversary of the Max Scherzer signing. The Nationals appear to be on the tail-end of a once neck-deep rebuild, but one thing is missing that was present the last time the team was in the thick of contention: big-name acquisitions. As we stand today, the Nationals have signed several players to Major League contracts in free agency this offseason, but none to a deal longer than two years. In order to truly return to relevancy, the Nationals need to start treating themselves like a playoff team.
There is risk associated with every multi-year contract. Maybe a player gets hurt. Maybe he doesn't hit or pitch nearly as well as the team was expecting. But there is absolutely no reason the Nationals can't go out and afford someone like Jurickson Profar, who's projected by Spotrac to only command around 2 years and $26 million in free agency. The Amed Rosario signing was likely the nail in the coffin towards signing Alex Bregman (or even Ha-seong Kim), but Anthony Santander, who entered the offseason with his name frequently tied to the Nationals and who is importantly still a free agent, could easily slot into left or right field for a few years while Jacob Young takes on a fourth outfielder role and Dylan Crews starts in center.
Maybe Max Scherzer is a little too lofty. The free agent ace starters are largely off the board; it's hard to imagine Jack Flaherty commanding the kind of contract Mad Max got given his pedigree and the stagnancy of the market. But the point of the exercise is to illustrate the risk-reward game teams have to play if they want to improve. Consider a Jayson Werth-lite situation. Sure, the Nationals don't need to sign a hitter to make him the 12th-highest paid player in the Major Leagues, but as the clock ticks on and Pete Alonso's once-sure $200 million payday gives way to questions about a potential one- or two-year deal, you have to wonder if immediately committing to Nathaniel Lowe and Josh Bell is causing the team to miss the boat.
When you sign someone in free agency, you don't know how that's going to end. What the Nationals got out of Scherzer was probably somewhere around the 85th to 90th percentile of outcomes for a free agent starting pitcher. Ultimately, though, that's the game that front offices are being asked to play, and if you choose to never play them, you get left behind. Yeah, there's no Cy Young winners left on the market; the team was probably never really in consideration for Blake Snell, who the Dodgers were not going to be outbid for, or Corbin Burnes, who took a lower offer from the Diamondbacks in order to stay close to home; but when you start playing games of perceived risk over giving Nick Pivetta 4 years and $60 million when you just had Patrick Corbin come off the books... one only wishes Mark Lerner had the same passion for the on-field product his father did. Sometimes, risks pay off. When they do, you get a deep playoff run. That's how the 2019 Nationals won the World Series. That's the only way it's going to happen again. Until then, the Nationals are going to be, at best, the National League's Mariners.