We're two games into the Nationals' 2025 campaign. In the span of those two games, the bullpen has allowed 16 runs in eight innings to the Philadelphia Phillies. The fact that the Nationals bullpen has come out like a wet fart isn't a particularly surprising development--the team acquired valuable talent when it moved Hunter Harvey and Dylan Floro at the deadline and Robert Garcia in the offseason, but did little to replace it besides bringing back Kyle Finnegan and adding Jorge López who's realistically a middle reliever that's going to be expected to fill an 8th inning role.
But the fact that year in and year out, the Nationals front office is incapable of producing a capable bullpen is baffling. They're projected for the 3rd lowest bullpen WAR in baseball by FanGraphs, ahead of only the Rockies, who historically have pitching issues, and the White Sox, who lost 120 games last year.
This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, over the last ten years, it's exceedingly rare the Nationals place outside of the bottom 10 in the league in bullpen production in any given season. This simply cannot sustain a winning team, especially in an era where starting pitchers are valued by effectiveness over bulk more than ever before. It figures--in 2019, the year the Nationals won the World Series, the bullpen had a 5.68 ERA, second-worst in baseball, but that team's success was sustained almost entirely on the workload of Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Patrick Corbin, Anibal Sánchez, and Joe Ross; that is to say, the 2019 Nationals threw fewer innings in relief (and their starters threw almost 40 more innings) than any other team in baseball. That rotation combined for the most fWAR from starters in baseball. Even their World Series opponent Astros, who had a murderer's row rotation including Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, and Zack Greinke, had 55 more innings come from their relievers. That's a bygone era now; the team's young core of up-and-coming starters currently headlined by MacKenzie Gore cannot be expected to stay healthy under those kinds of conditions.
Constructing a good bullpen is difficult. As the Dodgers are showing us early in the year, relief pitchers are a case that you can't necessarily solve by throwing money at (though money certainly helps). It's not even just about developing young players and having them debut out of the bullpen. You have to be able to bring in 30-something-year-old outcasts, identify key points in their release, their pitch grips, or their mechanics, and parlay that into a valuable late-inning asset. The Nationals, for all intents and purposes, are exceptionally bad at this, to the point where they were implicated by professional scouts in January as one of the worst organizations in baseball at identifying talent in a survey conducted by Baseball America.
I wanted to go through the last 16 years of Nationals baseball (since general manager Mike Rizzo took the sole helm of the team) and see how the team's bullpen ranked in MLB based on workload, run prevention, and FanGraphs Wins Above Replacement. Here's what I found.
2009: 5.09 ERA (30th), -1.7 fWAR (30th), 523 IP (8th)
2010: 3.35 ERA (5th), 3.9 fWAR (8th), 545.2 IP (1st)
2011: 3.20 ERA (5th), 2.4 fWAR (16th), 520.2 IP (4th)
2012: 3.23 ERA (7th), 3.2 fWAR (16th), 515.1 IP (7th)
2013: 3.56 ERA (17th), 3.1 fWAR (19th), 477.1 IP (19th)
2014: 3.00 ERA (4th), 5.6 fWAR (2nd), 468.1 IP (23rd)
2015: 3.46 ERA (10th), 3.9 fWAR (11th), 468.1 IP (25th)
---Statcast introduced, usage gradually becomes more refined over time---
2016: 3.37 ERA (2nd), 5.3 fWAR (8th), 499.2 IP (25th)
2017: 4.41 ERA (23rd), 3.5 fWAR (16th), 473.2 IP (30th)
2018: 4.05 ERA (15th), 1.0 fWAR (24th), 528.2 IP (27th)
2019: 5.68 ERA (29th), 0.7 fWAR (24th), 500.2 IP (30th)
2020: 4.68 ERA (23rd), 0.5 fWAR (22nd), 205.2 IP (24th)
2021: 5.08 ERA (29th), -0.2 fWAR (29th), 566.2 IP (26th)
2022: 3.84 ERA (15th), 1.7 fWAR (24th), 638 IP (7th)
2023: 5.02 ERA (27th), 0.4 fWAR (29th), 599 IP (14th)
2024: 4.14 ERA (21st), 4.3 fWAR (11th), 582 IP (18th)
This reinforces what we already know: the Nationals were blessed with one of the better rotations in baseball in the mid- to late 2010s, not just in terms of production but in terms of workload. As Strasburg, Scherzer, and Corbin got hurt, left, or became generally ineffective (in that order) without anyone to really take their places, the team's failure to construct a competent bullpen became more and more exposed. 2024 had the undertones of capability, but the two most promising pieces of that 'pen were traded: a necessary evil. Relievers are volatile beings; only the truly elite continue to produce year in and year out, but as more young starters hit the scene in Washington (and, hopefully, the team attracts a top free agent or two), they will need a quality bullpen to back them up.
It's unrealistic to expect to build a Mariners- or Phillies-caliber rotation that can still throw 900 innings; in 2024, the Nationals ranked in the upper half of starter innings pitched, but 23rd in starter ERA. Not every team can be the Rays or Brewers, developing a notoriously high hit rate on pet project relievers that become 7th or 8th inning wunderkind, but the Nationals don't need to be--they just need to bring in enough fresh faces to help close the analytical gap Washington has found itself stranded by. The addition of Sean Doolittle to the coaching staff was an excellent start, but in the modern age, winning teams are also employing the types that can help reshape a front office in the image of a true cutting-edge ballclub.
So it's one step forward, two steps back for the Washington Nationals, who now have starting pitching depth characteristic of a contending baseball team but not the bullpen depth to back it up. After 6 straight years of placing in the bottom 10 in baseball in reliever fWAR, they took a huge leap forward with a bullpen headlined by Robert Garcia, Derek Law, Dylan Floro, and Hunter Harvey. The Nationals have since traded three of those players, and all three of those trades benefited the team, but they have not taken the steps needed to replace them at the level they once had, instead opting for the likes of Lucas Sims and Colin Poche, the latter of which has a rather evidently low ceiling given his career.
For a team that tries to position itself in the public sphere as being right on the cusp of contention, the 2025 Washington Nationals are shockingly deficient in that one crucial area that has been so necessary for regular and especially Postseason success. But it's still March, and there is still ample time to find hidden gems on the waiver wire, much like Robert Garcia was when he was arbitrarily cast off by the Miami Marlins. One can only hope Mike Rizzo's front office makes the right calls along the way; the Nationals are once again unlikely to truly put on more than just the facade of an intent to compete, but when the time comes, be that next year or the year after, the team will need late-inning reinforcements.