Nationals fire Dave Martinez AND GM Mike Rizzo! Here’s why the timing DID NOT matter!

When Dave Martinez was hired, it was looked at as a fantastic hire, not realizing they’d win a World Series the next year. But when the wheels fell off the wagon, there’s several things that contribute to a team losing its way. One, if you do not hit on a overwhelming majority of the trades you make when you trade away highric players, if you don’t get back at least one piece per trade, you don’t have to do better, but one piece per trade, you’re not going to succeed. Some trades, like with the Sodto deal, they got three pieces that are all working. But if you average one real major leaguer, not average, above average major leaguer, you win that trade. Second, it’s in the draft. It’s you draft players, which means you have to have good amateur scouts. It means you have to not just be analytic. It means you have to have people with eyes on the ground looking for players, looking at players, fighting amongst themselves as they put together a draft board. And then once the players are drafted, they move over to the development side. And so you need the scouting department to feed players into a system that the development side then takes over and teaches the players how to be major leaguers, how to be productive major leaguers, how to play the Nationals way. Yes, of course. It’s not just the Cardinals way. It’s not just the Red Sox way. All 30 teams say it’s our way cuz they all have a way. So you have scouting, you have development, and then what you try to do is throughout your organization, you try to have one guidepost, one north star. What are we? Are we pitching? Are we speed? Are we defense? Are we hitting for power? Are we hitting for average? What is it that defines us? And what the Nationals thought they had was a rebuild that was going to be finished already. When it turns out that the Nationals were not performing this year, they decided unceremoniously to make this change. But people are viewing it incorrectly. You’re going to read a lot of articles today that how could you make a change a week before the draft? It’s impossible to believe because yes, it’s true. Major League Baseball draft is coming up and the Nationals have the first pick. But when you have the first pick in a draft, you really don’t need to have a GM in place. Though they’ll have an interim GM, which who they named they they uh promoted their assistant GM to interim GM. They haven’t even named their manager yet. They’ll name him today at some point. But when you’re number one, you don’t have any arguments up to the point when you’re on the clock. You’ve decided well before now who your top pick is going to be, who your first pick is going to be. You’ve already decided whether you’re going for someone who’s going to get more than what’s slotted or less, whether you’re going to use a extra amount of your total draft allocated budget or less. And you’re going to spread it out to other players throughout the draft. Those are financial decisions that each team has. You get a bucket of money and then you decide how to allocate it. And there are limits to what you can do per pick except you can go over those limits, but you get in trouble and you can lose money, you can lose picks, all sorts of rules in order to keep salaries down. It’s not collusion. These are collectively bargained rules of the draft of the amateur draft. It’s all in rule four. You can Google it and read it. But when you’re 1-1, as you know, you’re not subject to the whims of another team. If you’ve got the second pick or the eighth pick, you have so many iterations on your board. What happens if the team in front of us drafts X? What happens if the team in front of us by two picks drafts Y? Then what are we going to do? The way we used to solve it is we had a draft board that we would number. So we would number every player we wanted. and is when a player got drafted by another team, we’d cross them out and we go to the next person on our board. And so it didn’t really matter to us what round it was except when money was involved. So when you’re drafting in the first round, and the second round you have slotted money and you do pre-draft deals, totally illegal, not allowed, but every team does it. You communicate with the player you want to draft and negotiate what you want to pay that player and you find out whether that player will sign at that dollar. And if he will, then next to his name on your board is the number he is on your board, then the name, and then signable, not signable. You put on the board whether it’s a two sports star, whether they may play football instead of baseball. You put on the board, is it a high school college? If it’s a high schooler, what college did they commit to? What’s the likelihood of that player going to that college? Or is it just a fake? So that board is done. So firing Rizzo now is not going to impact in any way, negatively or positively, how the draft is run because you’d be shocked to know that the GM of a team, the president of baseball operations, they don’t run the draft. Did you know that? the scouting director, the head of scouting, VP of scouting, whatever title you want to give, that’s who runs the draft room. Now, the GM’s involved, the president, the owner, you’re informed, but that room is for the scouting director. That’s his job. It’s their Super Bowl. They are hunkered into a room and they stay there for seven days before the draft using blackout shades and making sure that no cleaning people come in who could take a picture of the board. We have to clean our own trash in that room, which is totally absurd to me. Like the people who clean the stadium give a crap what number 69 is on the draft board. I guess if the price is right, they would. So when the Nationals made this announcement yesterday, my reaction was not, oh, you know, it’s too close to the draft. My reaction was, let me hear what the statement is and what the reason is because did something acute happen with Mike Rizzo? Because we know Dave Martinez was going to get fired. We gave you a wait to see in June that he was going to get fired. Back on June 17th, we told you Dave Martinez will not be the manager of the Nationals next year. We got it right. Why did we say it? Remember when he came out and talked about, hey, it’s not on the coaches, it’s on the players. And I told you that was it for Dave Martinez and that was it. What would explain when you do the GM and the manager? Well, when you go to the GM and you say, “We want to make a change.” There are GMs who would put their foot down and say, “I’m not doing that. I do not want that manager to be fired.” And then you say to the GM, “No problem. Are you sure?” Because if you don’t want him to get fired, we’re going to fire you, too. It’s not like you have two separate conversations and you decide two separate ways that you’re going to fire a GM and a manager. It’s like a package deal. And when you read the statement that Mark Learner released starting with of course because it’s what I described to you on behalf of our family because that’s what it is. I first and foremost Mark Learner said want to thank Mike and Davey for their contributions to our franchise and our city. Again, I have a tear in my eye. Our family is eternally grateful. Well, not eternally because our gratefulness ends on July 6th, but anyway, our family is eternally grateful for their years of dedication to the organization, including their roles in bringing a World Series trophy to DC. While we are appreciative of their past success, and here’s where the music plays in the background. What have you done for me lately? While we’re appreciative of their past success, the onfield performance has not been where we or our fans expected. I love that. You got to put the fans in there. You got to make it just so we’re not the ones upset that it’s also the fans. You’re upset. You wanted us to make a move. You wanted us to can everyone. Our fans expect. This is a pivotal time for our club. And we believe a fresh approach and new energy is the best course of action for our team moving forward. Amen. Brother, way to go, Mark. Here’s the thing. When you do a mid-season change, because there’s different press releases you do if you fire someone during the season versus firing someone during the off season, you take a different approach. The midseason firings are meant to change something immediate. like when the Rockies or the Pirates when they fired their manager. I would argue during the season that the Rockies just did it because they were on track to lose 175 games and they didn’t necessarily want Bud Black to have to be associated with that. So, it’s almost like they did him a favor. When the Pirates fired Derek Shelton during the season, they said, “Hey, there’s a chance. We have the best pitcher in the game. We have a chance still to turn this around. There is no way the Nationals are looking at their team right now and where they are at this date on July 7th and saying we have an opportunity this year to make noise to be in a playoff race to invoice people for playoff tickets. They know that’s not happening. So short of something acute, why make the change? And then we found out because the way that Rizzo and Martinez contracts read is that by the middle of this month, either they had to pick up the option, there was an option for the 2026 season for the GM and the manager. Either pick up the option or let it lapse and they’re not under contract. Therefore, now’s the perfect time. Except you can do what the Marlins did with Don Maddingley. You or Skip Schumacher. You can say we’re not going to bring you back. We’re not bring picking up the option, but manage the rest of the year. And then say your goodbyes and that’ll be it at the end of September. So for the Nationals to try to convince us that this is a move for today, it it just doesn’t hold water. And the reason why I called it unceremonious is that when you are a team that has an interesting April and May, which the Nationals had, and then you go into June and you’re 9 and 23, and you say to yourself, “Oh, that really has changed our season.” You’re just deluding yourself. And we’re going to talk about this throughout the show today, but a 9 and 23 month is terrible, no doubt. But the Nationals were not a playoff team this year. They went into this year knowing they were not a playoff team. And what they did in April and May is the story that we like to think about in a front office. And what we talk about on Nothing Personal is do we want to believe what we’re seeing or believe what we think we were going to see? And you’ve got to make the right decision. There’s a point when what you thought you were going to see is not what you see and you have to believe what you see. But if you do that too early, you make mistakes with your team. I did this. So the Nationals are going to name a manager today. Likely they’ll bring up a could bring up a guy from TripleA. Promote the bench coach. Whatever it is, they’re going to end up in last place.

#nationals #baseball #MLB

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14 comments

  3. I'm praying we see a new ownership group in DC soon. Let the interim GM and interim manager ride out the year, but start 2026 fresh with a new owner, GM, and manager to take the club in a different direction. I feel like the Nats have really fallen behind the 8 ball with player development, analytics, and international scouting (aside from the Soto jackpot).

  4. They’re using the Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasberg excuse to not do anything for 6 years spending wise. Imagine a team letting go of Rendon, Soto, Trea Turner, Bryce Harper you could’ve at least tried to keep one of them fr fr and lock them down. But the thing is they do the bare minimum and act and tell there fans they “tried”. Now for the marlins ownership needs to sell to someone to Tennessee Florida doesn’t work in baseball

  5. Imagine this lineup:
    1B – Bryce Harper

    2B – Daniel Murphy

    SS – Trea Turner

    3B – Anthony Rendon

    OF – Lane Thomas

    OF – Juan Soto

    OF – James Wood

    C – Keibert Ruiz

    DH – Kyle Schwarber
    The Nats could have kept all of these players. Instead, they only have Wood and Ruiz.

  6. I’m not surprised by this move at all, been waiting for it to happen. I think Snitker in Atlanta is not far from joining Martinez. The Braves being a publicly traded company instead of an active involved owner is most likely helping extent Snitker’s time in Atlanta.

  12. 6:55.. good on Martinez for saying that its on the players!! these cry baby players complain when they get criticized by management. but players can complain about management to the media when they dont like how things are going.. like Tyler Oneill and Cal Raleigh did. Epitome of Hypocrisy.

  13. Word of the Day…obvious. Neither Rizzo nor Martinez are worthy of hire or retention. The end of their lengthy tenures with the Nats isn't unceremonious…it's illustrative of the Lerner's infinite patience.

    Consider:

    1. The Nats have won 71 games the past two seasons and are on pace to win another 71 this year according to Fangraphs….despite having three star players. That's bad on any level, but given the breakout seasons of Abrams, Wood, and Gore, winning only 71 again without above average injuries means the franchise has regressed elsewhere. Some "rebuild."

    2. Davey Martinez's record since 2020 is 325 and 473 or a winning % of .407 since winning the World Series. Zero winning seasons since the WS. That's nearly 6 years. Who survives that?

    3. Per reports this morning, the Nationals have, according to analysis using WAR, the lowest value of Draft talent accumulated since the 2012 Draft. That's right…the lowest. Dylan Crews appears to be a bust and is currently lost on IR with not a single recent media inquiry appearing as to his status or likely return date. Talk about impact.

    4. Two expensive contracts recently still on the books are to players (Strasburg and Scherzer) who are no longer on the roster. Strasburg required an expensive retirement buyout deferring in part his remaining $105MM from his 7-year deal. Scherzer, now on the Blue Jays, is owed $15MM annually through 2028. Another extension in 2023 – to Keibert Ruiz…is now considered a bust.

    5. Rizzo oversaw two of the most disastrous contracts in franchise history – the inexplicable and heavily criticized long-term extension of Strasburg and the 6-year deal for woeful Patrick Corbin. It was reported that Rizzo was also irritated that the Lerners apparently prevented him from extending Anthony Rendon – a subsequent disaster for the Angels – prior to his free agency.

    6. Yet, Rizzo decided for some reason to trade Trea Turner to the Dodgers for little in return…including the below average Ruiz noted above and the oft injured and ineffective Josiah Gray.

    7. While Rizzo is properly credited with dealing Soto before free agency, he learned that lesson the hard way. He steadfastly refused to trade Bryce Harper at the deadline before his FA, which would have netted a huge return that would have put the Nats well on their way today. He stubbornly refused to sell Harper because he said that Harper was more likely to stay with Washington if they didn't trade him. Harper left for Philadelphia a couple of months later.

    8. Rizzo put Strasburg on an innings limit in 2012 potentially costing them a trip to the postseason. Rizzo maintained that the limit would ensure Strasburg's health and that the Nats would regularly see the postseason over the next several years so losing a single season wasn't a big deal in the big picture – both wrong. There remains no evidence that pitch counts or innings limits are protective of a pitcher's health, and even if they were, why not start him after the All-Star Break to allow him to pitch into the postseason?

    Given this, are we still surprised that they were "unceremoniously" fired or continue to stupidly blame the Lerners for "not spending enough money" when Rizzo has shown no real ability to translate that spend into wins?

    Or let’s look at this from another perspective. The game of baseball today is a radically different game than in 2006 when Rizzo was hired. The skills that Rizzo successfully brought to the table 19 years ago are less relevant for today's GMs, while others – building an analytics and technology culture – are far more important. What that means is that Mike Rizzo would likely not be interviewed today for the open position that he occupied for 19 years. Same with Davey Martinez. Both are unlikely to be hired at similar levels for any other team. It would seem that the game has moved on from both of them.

    Why should the Nats as a measure of artificial pageantry be required to continue to stay indefinitely with two anachronisms in senior positions when no other team will likely hire them if let go?

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