The weather outside is frightful, and most Washington Nationals fans are indoors and things are not delightful. You can keep your chin up and hope for better days ahead. The offseason hasn’t even reached the halfway point. The Winter Meetings don’t even start until tonight. Surely we can find some optimism, right?

Yes, for some, the headlines in NatsTown had been depressing. The trade for catcher Harry Ford made things a little better. Will there be a shift to the next piece of business up?

Our 2025 All-Star pitcher, MacKenzie Gore, could be gone in a matter of days if you trust Buster Olney’s latest writings. Reports have said that at least 15 teams are “in” on Gore. But Paul Toboni, the President of Baseball Operations, and certainly team principal owner Mark Lerner, would be weighing in on trading the Washington Nationals best trade chip.

Acquired in the Juan Soto trade of mid-2022, Gore arrived injured, and has only logged 89 starts in a Nats’ uni. Due to injuries and service time accrual, Gore only has two seasons of team control remaining. At that time in 2022, if former GM Mike Rizzo just took Gore off the IL and optioned him during or after any of his four starts in Rochester that year, Gore would have three years of team control remaining. For some reason, Rizzo didn’t do that and just shutdown Gore and let his season end in Rochester on the MLB IL accruing service time.

Some might say Rizzo was fair and didn’t want to take a year of control away from Gore. But most teams do these types of moves as a matter of the way things work with the CBA. That’s the business of baseball. The Nats kind of did the same with Cade Cavalli who is already arbitration-eligible despite only pitching in 11 MLB games.

So we sit here today, and Gore only has two years left before free agency because Rizzo seemingly wasn’t paying attention to Gore’s service time. While you might want him extended to a longer contract, Gore’s agent is Scott Boras who has rarely gone that route. That leaves Toboni in a tough situation.

In 2023, Gore made his Nats’ debut. The Nats coaching staff in Washington sure didn’t seem to be connecting well with Gore. Should he have been an ace? Even going back to his draft as the №3 pick in the first round, he was seen by some as the best pitcher in the draft that year. We learned recently that Tobomi scouted and talked with Gore when he was in high school in North Carolina.

By the way, statistically speaking, Gore actually pitched to a worse ERA in 2025 than 2024 because of Gore’s second half demise after the All-Star game. His career ERA is a 4.19 with a 4.02 FIP. Most teams want to acquire him because they know he should be an ace. The real crime here is that the Nats didn’t get the most out of Gore.

Leading into the All-Star break this year, Gore had a 3.02 ERA. After the All-Star break, he finished the season in his final 11-games with a 6.75. His frustration on the mound was evident. His swing and miss rate dropped, and he seemed to struggle to find a putaway pitch. He wore his frustration on his sleeve. There were those times that his manager never had his back so Gore would take matters in his own hands and argue with the umpires after innings.

Yes, Gore wasn’t imagining it. Between his catchers who couldn’t frame legitimate strikes to incompetent umpires, you would see Gore not get a call then get heated, and then on the next pitch would miss location and the ball would get hit into orbit for a home run. Or a fielder would screw up like Victor Robles once did and Gore would go after him. This is a player who cared about everyone else getting it right — but many times Gore got it wrong and didn’t get it done in key spots. Not every blemish could be blamed on the ump, his catcher or a fielder. But where was the coaching to get him to the level most believe he could achieve?

Again, watch and see if Gore is traded and another team turns him into a bona fide ace. While Gore by default is the No. 1 pitcher in the Nats rotation, he has never put in a full season as an ace. His 2025 Opening Day start was masterful if you remember his 6.0 innings of 1-hit scoreless baseball. Of course Rizzo’s assembled bullpen with Lucas Sims blew the game in the very next inning, and a possible Opening Day win turned into an extra inning loss. That kind of set the stage and foreshadowed how bad the bullpen was going to be with the Sims and Colin Poche meltdowns in front of a sold-out Nationals Park with 41,231 fans as witnesses to the worst bullpen construction in Nationals’ history. If you think 6 earnies in 4.0 innings was bad by that bullpen, hah, that was nothing.

Again, Gore deserved better and so did the fans. It is what it is. Gore has just two seasons of team control remaining, and either you trade Gore soon or gamble on July 31, 2026 at the trade deadline.

Now the most amazing stat about Gore is that the team was horrific during his starts. The team amassed just 10 wins to 20 losses in his 30 starts for the 2025 season which was a pathetic .333 winning percentage. So the question goes, why was the team so bad in Gore starts — even when Gore was so good? The easy answer is the offense wasn’t scoring enough runs in Gore starts. Maybe there is some silver lining here that the team’s .425 winning percentage without him shows there was some team chemistry issue of intangibles that defies rational explanation. The team never had a positive winning percentage for Gore.

Toboni has a plan, and he isn’t telling anyone besides Lerner and his close confidants what he is doing. We have to trust in the process.

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