A year after the Washington Nationals cut ties with Davey Martinez and Mike Rizzo, the franchise looks like a different operation.
The change came on July 6th, 2025, when the Lerner family dismissed the manager and the President of Baseball Operations after a disappointing stretch left the club at 37-53. Martinez and Rizzo had been the faces of the 2019 World Series run, but by then the Nationals had clearly drifted into a place where the old setup no longer fit where the organization was headed.
Now, with Paul Toboni and Blake Butera steering things, the Nationals are above .500 at 46-45, and the shift has been obvious. The club has leaned hard into modern tools and analytics, and this spring the new technology around the team stood out - the trajekt machine, weighted bats and more. The message was clear: Washington was finally operating like a team that had caught up to 2020’s baseball.
What makes the turnaround more striking is how little the Nationals spent to get there. Toboni’s biggest free-agent additions were Miles Mikolas, Zack Littell and Foster Griffin.
The real splash of the offseason was subtraction, not addition. After months of speculation, MacKenzie Gore was sent to Texas for a five prospect haul, and early returns suggest the move is working, with Devin Fitz-Gerald emerging as a top 100 prospect while Gore has not taken the next step.
Toboni has not been flawless. The Harry Ford for Jose A.
Ferrer swap and the Jake Bennett for Luis Perales deal both look questionable right now, and the bullpen remains a problem, just as it was under Rizzo in the final seasons. But the overall impact has been hard to dismiss.
The Gore trade, the Foster Griffin signing and the Curtis Mead trade have all helped, and the bigger story is the development system now in place.
That system has the Nationals leading baseball in runs scored. A roster that already had some talent is getting more out of almost everyone, and the biggest gains have come from players who had been easy to overlook.
Luis Garcia Jr. is the clearest example. His bat has taken off in a way that changes the way he looks as a player.
He is swinging harder, hitting the ball harder and lifting it more often, and the results have been wild: 10 homers in his last 15 games. He has already reached a career-high 19 home runs.
Keibert Ruiz has delivered another major example of what the new staff can do. After last season, his future looked bleak.
He was struggling badly at the plate, was a liability defensively and had injury problems, making his long-term contract look like a burden. With help from catching coach Bobby Wilson and the rest of the staff, Ruiz has turned in a career year.
He is hitting .285 with a .788 OPS while playing well above average defense. The offensive upside was always there to some degree, but the defensive leap has been the real shock. It happened fast, and it says plenty about the new staff - and about the old one.
By the end of his time in Washington, Martinez had become increasingly rigid, unwilling to move away from his coaching group even as problems piled up. His “never on coaching” rant became the defining image of that stubbornness.
A year later, the contrast is hard to ignore. Coaching is making a difference.
Ruiz, Garcia and Mead have all been unlocked in different ways, and the room for growth is still there. But for the first time in a while, the Nationals look like a team that is actually improving players, not just collecting them.
Butera fits that approach perfectly. At 33, he came from player development with the Rays, and his emphasis on pre-game work and the idea that big leaguers are still unfinished products has become part of the culture. Even veterans like Miles Mikolas are being pushed to get better.
That same mindset is showing up on the farm, too. Seaver King had a rough first pro season, but after working with the new braintrust, he looks like a different player. He is hitting the ball harder, chasing less and whiffing less.
A year after the firings of Rizzo and Martinez, the Nationals are in a far better spot. Plenty of the key pieces were acquired under the old regime, but the new one is the group getting the most out of them.
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