Nationals Move on From Mike Rizzo and Dave Martinez

Last night, exactly one week before they’re slated to make the first overall pick in the 2025 draft, the Nationals fired president of baseball operations Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez. After ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news, the team announced assistant general manager Mike DeBartolo will serve as interim GM. Bench coach Miguel Cairo was named interim manager this afternoon.

Rumors that Rizzo and Martinez might finally be on the hot seat had made the rounds over the past several weeks, but the timing is less than ideal. According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the last time a team fired its GM before the trade deadline was when the Twins got rid of Terry Ryan on July 18, 2016. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale provided an explanation, reporting that both Rizzo and Martinez had contract options for 2026, with mid-July deadlines for those decisions. Even for a franchise that just fired its POBO and manager, it’s a bad look to let money dictate the timing of the decision when so much is at stake.

The son of a scout and a 28th-round draft pick in 1982, Rizzo spent three years in the minors and 12 as a scout. He became the Diamondbacks’ scouting director in 1998 and moved to Washington as an assistant GM in 2006, the team’s first hire after the Lerner family bought the franchise. Rizzo was named interim GM in March 2009, after Jim Bowden resigned in the midst of a bonus-skimming scandal. The team removed the interim tag in August, and Rizzo went on to become the game’s third-longest tenured GM. The Nationals finished in last place in both 2009 and 2010, giving them five last-place finishes over their first six years in D.C.

Those lean years gave the Nationals the first overall pick in both 2009 and 2010, drafts that featured slam dunk top choices in Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper. Rizzo handed out his first major free agent deal before the 2011 season, signing outfielder Jayson Werth for seven years and $126 million. At the time, the contract was viewed as a wild overpay, but it was intended as a statement. The Nationals were ready to compete, and they wanted to announce that intention to potential free agents.

They crawled to one game below .500 in 2011, then ran the best record in baseball the following year. It was their first postseason appearance since they relocated to Washington before the 2005 season and just their second in franchise history; the first came in 1981, when the Expos took advantage of the strike-interrupted campaign to reach the playoffs despite not finishing with the best overall record in the NL East. From 2012 to 2019, the Nationals won 730 games, second only to the Dodgers, and Rizzo became known for taking big risks. Under his leadership, the Nats signed Max Scherzer for big money and swung a three-team trade to get Trea Turner (as a player to be named later). In 2018, they called up a 19-year-old Juan Soto after just 340 minor league plate appearances and let Harper walk to a division rival when he became a free agent after that season. They grabbed high-upside prospects who only fell to them in the draft because of concerns about injuries, makeup, or signability that scared off other teams.

For all their regular-season success, the Nationals couldn’t get over the hump or find a long-term manager for the bulk of the 2010s. Jim Riggleman took over for Manny Acta in 2009, but in a move that had some echoes last night, Riggleman resigned abruptly in June 2011. On a one-year contract for the third straight year, he finally got the team over .500 and demanded to know whether his contract option for 2012 would be picked up. Said Rizzo at the time, “I felt that the time wasn’t right for me to pick up the option, and certainly today’s conversation put to me in the way it was put to me, you certainly can’t make that decision in a knee-jerk reaction. It’s too big of a decision.”

Riggleman quit. Davey Johnson filled in, but wasn’t expected to be a long-term solution. Matt Williams lasted two seasons, never quite clicking with the club. The Nationals agreed to hire Bud Black as manager, but that fell apart after they lowballed him with a one-year offer. Dusty Baker led the team to back-to-back division titles in 2016 and 2017, with Game 5 defeats in the NLDS each year, but Rizzo let him go as well, bringing in Martinez.

Martinez spent 16 years in the majors with nine franchises (including the Expos), then served as bench coach for the Rays and the Cubs. The Nationals missed the playoffs in 2018, just barely finishing above .500. When Martinez finally led the team to the championship 2019, it was no longer as a juggernaut. The Nationals sneaked into the postseason with a Wild Card berth and went the distance in both the NLDS and World Series. Martinez pressed Patrick Corbin into relief duty between starts to cover for a bullpen bereft of reliable lefties.

They were top-heavy, too. While Rizzo was building the Nationals into a championship-caliber team, the rest of the league was catching up to him. Washington lagged behind as analytics came to supplement or supplant traditional scouting and player development. As a result, the organization became a cautionary tale. “In recent times,” Jarrett Seidler wrote in the 2023 Baseball Prospectus Annual, “the Nationals have systematically overvalued hitters who look good by traditional scouting methods — sweet-looking swings, nice shows of power in batting practice, old-school notions of physical projectability — while ignoring glaring flaws exposed by analytics — poor in-zone contact rates, low exit velocities, high chase rates.” They overvalued fastball velocity and undervalued fastball shape. They’re still one of the only teams in the game without a Trajekt Arc pitching machine.

That’s not to say Rizzo didn’t recognize his own shortcomings. Twice in the past few years, the Nationals have publicly announced they were going to change how they did things and get on board with the analytical revolution. The second proclamation occurred before the 2024 season, and it came with sweeping changes in the scouting and player development departments. Rizzo really did try to catch up. It just hasn’t seemed to work.

The Nationals have picked the wrong players and they’ve failed to develop them, leaving the cupboard bare. The table below shows the team’s first-round picks during Rizzo’s tenure, along with the WAR they put up for the franchise. It will take time to see what the team gets from more recent picks, but the drop-off after Anthony Rendon in 2011 is staggering. From 2012 on, the team’s first-round picks have put up a combined -1.1 WAR with Washington.

Things fell apart following the 2019 season. Corbin turned into a pumpkin, while thoracic outlet syndrome effectively ended Strasburg’s career just after he signed a seven-year deal. Exciting young players like Victor Robles, Michael A. Taylor, Carter Kieboom, and Tanner Rainey stopped looking so exciting, and the farm system didn’t hold any young players who could fill in. So the Nationals decided to embrace the rebuild ahead of the 2021 trade deadline, when they sent away Scherzer and Turner for prospects; a year later, they swapped Soto for more prospects. The team has only spent money in order to net more prospects, signing veterans on one-year deals and hoping to flip them at the deadline. In 2022, Mark Lerner announced the family would look to sell the team, then changed his mind. Over the past six seasons – in other words, since the day after the 2019 World Series – only the Rockies have a worse record than the Nationals.

That brings us back to the original question. Why move on from Rizzo and Martinez right now? Any time over the past few years would have been easily justifiable. As I wrote in the 2024 BP Annual, the Nationals became the only team since the Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack to record four straight last-place seasons without firing either their manager or their GM. Not only that, but they gave both Martinez and Rizzo contract extensions before the 2024 season, for which they were rewarded with a refreshing fourth-place finish. You could argue that no team has ever been so patient.

It can’t really be because the team has been a disappointment this year. Before the season, we had the Nationals with a projected winning percentage of .444. They’re currently at .411. At most, you can say they’re underperforming their expectations by three losses.

Washington clearly held similar expectations. In February, Mark Lerner revealed the Nationals wouldn’t be spending money on players because Rizzo didn’t think they were ready to compete. “When Mike calls me in and says, ‘We really need to think about it,’ for next winter, we’ll talk about it,” he said. “Right now, he doesn’t think – and I agree with him: There’s no point in getting a superstar and paying him hundreds of millions of dollars to win two or three more games. You’ve got to wait until – like Jayson [Werth]. Jayson was right on the cusp of [the team] being really good, and it took us to the next level.”

This was, in its way, a vote of confidence for Rizzo. Lerner has clearly changed his mind in the last five months. It’s possible that he figured he’d give Rizzo and Martinez one last shot to figure things out in the first half. But even if that were the case, this doesn’t seem like the right moment. This season has already had a pretty clear rock bottom. It came from June 7 through 18, when the team went through an 11-game losing streak, with six of those losses coming at the hands of the lowly Marlins and Rockies. That’s also when Martinez made headlines for comments that defended his coaching staff a bit too vigorously, leaving the impression that he was blaming the players instead. It’s hard to imagine any logical rationale for changing things now rather than two weeks ago.

The timing is also awkward for the franchise as a whole. The team has been rebuilding for years now, and the new, young core has arrived in the form of James Wood, MacKenzie Gore, CJ Abrams, Luis García Jr., and Dylan Crews. Unfortunately, the new, young core is neither young enough nor good enough to build around. The Nationals are once again in last place in the division. They don’t have any pitching, and they’re below replacement level at first base, catcher, and right field. García and Gore are in their first year of arbitration and are only under contract for two more years. Abrams will enter arbitration next year. That leaves just Wood and Crews under contract past 2028. Whoever takes over this franchise will have to navigate some difficult decisions. They may well start by initiating yet another rebuild.

They may also be taking over a job that is messier than we realize. In the Washington Post, Barry Svrluga painted a picture of an organization without a decision-making process: “Ted Lerner died in February 2023. Even before that, his son, Mark, had served as the club’s point person. But the reality is that decisions were made by a group – Ted Lerner’s sons-in-law, Edward Cohen and Robert Tanenbaum, as well as his daughters, Debra Cohen and Marla Tanenbaum. A third generation – Ted’s grandkids – is sometimes involved. There’s a herding-cats element to it all, and it can make it hard to find consensus, with an individual decision as well as an overall direction.” Rizzo reinforced that notion with a text message to Svrluga last night: “The sun will come up tomorrow,” he wrote. “That’s the job. I had a great run. Navigated that ownership group for almost 20 years.”

Rizzo and Martinez will have complicated legacies in Washington. It’s hard to put too much blame on Martinez. He inherited a good team that underperformed a bit in his first season, then steered what might have been a less-talented roster to a World Series title, an achievement that required some deft tactical maneuvers. In recent years, he’s led a team that no manager could’ve turned into a winner. The Nationals have been sloppy in terms of baserunning and defense, but until his comments a few weeks ago, he’d also avoided any major missteps. Before he arrived, Washington’s managers averaged less than two years apiece. Since the franchise moved to Washington, he has the most games managed, the most wins, and the only championship. But he also has the second-lowest winning percentage.

Rizzo inherited one of the worst teams in baseball, built it into one of the best, won a championship, then oversaw its return to the very bottom. Regardless of how things ended, it’s not hard to argue that he deserves a statue outside Nationals Park. His attempted rebuild was too little too late, but it’s there. We can see it. He’s the guy who signed Juan Soto as an amateur in 2015 and the guy who traded Soto for James Wood in 2022.

As for the Nationals, it’s probably time for a new regime. The big league club isn’t ready to compete, and as Eric Longenhagen wrote earlier today, the farm system is still below average. Virginia native Thad Levine, who parted ways with the Twins in October, has already been mentioned as a possibility to lead the front office. But in the meantime, somebody’s going to have to decide whom to draft first on Sunday.