Photo by Sol Tucker for TalkNats

BREAKING NEWS: MacKenzie Gore has been traded to the Washington Senators Texas Rangers in a return of five players featuring Gavin Fien who was the 12th overall draft pick last year plus Abimelec Ortiz, Devin Fitz-Gerald, Alejandro Rosario and Yeremy Cabrera. Ortiz is on the 40-man roster and would conceivably take Gore’s spot. This was a 5-for-1 trade, but no Top-100 prospects in this package.

While there is promise here in this trade, the Nats did not acquire  Sebastian Walcott who is the Rangers’ top prospect. Fien was the Rangers’ second highest rated prospect as their system is weak — and now weaker after this trade. Fien was also named the Most Valuable Player of the 2024 MLB High School All-Star Game in San Diego where he shared the field with new teammates Eli Willits, Landon Harmon and Miguel Sime Jr.

Baseball America wrote up their trade analysis and in a separate tweet — Carlos Collazo wrote, “I love this for the Rangers. Pretty surprised this is the return.” Trades are best judged in hindsight. Plenty of trades swung the other way as a superstar emerged from a trade.

A note on Rosario, he was a top-50 prospect a year ago on both Baseball America (№49) and MLB Pipeline (№50). He blew-out his UCL ligament, and Nats’ President of Baseball Operations, Paul Toboni, said Rosario will be undergoing Tommy John surgery in the next few weeks and will track to return in 2027. Toboni called it a “worthwhile bet to make.“

In a separate move, the Nats reportedly made a move a via waiver claim of right-hander Gus Varland from the Diamondbacks, reports Chris Cotillo of MassLive.com. With Ortiz and Gore swapping out 40-man spots, the Nats will have to make another roster move to clear a spot for Varland.

With Gore’s salary set for $5.6 million for 2026, the Nats saved that salary, and once again created a big whole in this year’s roster. Gore was clearly the Nats’ №1 starter, and you would think they will find a free agent to fill that spot. Again, you would think. We have to wait and see on that. The payroll is back to $110 million by the way.

With the Gore trade, the #Nats payroll is now back at $110 million CBT where they coincidentally began at for the Winter Meetings. Now let’s see what happens from here. https://t.co/j2uFfSqTNW

— Talk Nats (@TalkNats) January 22, 2026

What is ironic on the timing is that Toboni just did an interview with the Baseball Isn’t Boring Podcast and said that Gore hadn’t been traded because, “A team hasn’t met [the high bar]” that Toboni had set. But with trades of other starters like Edward Cabrera and Freddy Peralta, the return seemed to be better in higher valued prospects per the rankings. Time will tell on this trade. This Gore trade feels more like the Shane Baz return.

Gore was originally acquired in a trade at the 2022 deadline with CJ Abrams, James Wood, Robert Hassell III and Jarlin Susana. Now you can make that trade tree even larger with Fien, Ortiz, Fitz-Gerald, Rosario, and Cabrera. That is now NINE active players in the Nats system on the Juan Soto tree.

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 Toboni 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, and also kind of wasted an extra year of team-control by not activating him off the IL when he pitched for Triple-A in the 2022 season.

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 argued with the umpires after innings.

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.

“I think we’ve got to be honest with ourselves. The truth is – and I don’t think this is a mystery to the fanbase, the media or anyone – we lost 96 games last year, and to turn it around in one year and make the playoffs … not to say it can’t be done, but it’s a challenge.”

“What we want to do is make sure we build this really strong foundation, so when we do start to push chips in, we can win for an extended period of time. That fits with that strategy for us. Our hope is that we can hopefully achieve our potential, whatever that is, this year. And then hopefully beyond this year win for years to come.”

“It wasn’t necessarily important to us that we needed a smaller package with really high-end talent, -or- a really big package with less than high-end talent. We were open-minded through it all, and this ultimately was the package that we felt most comfortable with.”

“Just generally speaking, we see high-end talent in this return, but we also see intriguing depth. For us, I think there are a number of ways the ball can bounce in the future. And we can look up in however many years and we have three, four, five really good players who have come out of this.”

— Toboni said

This an evolving story and will have more coming as news is available.

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