Goodbye to Mike Rizzo and Davey Martinez

On Sunday, shortly after the Red Sox had completed their sweep of the Nationals, word came that Mike Rizzo (general manager and president of baseball operations) and Davey Martinez (manager) had been fired. Rizzo was in his 20th year with the Nationals and 17th as GM, while Martinez was in his 8th season. On an interim basis, Mike DeBartolo (senior vice president and assistant general manager) will take over for Rizzo and Miguel Cairo (bench coach) will serve as manager.

When a team plays poorly for a number of years (the Nats have a .407 winning percentage since 2020, second worst in MLB) and are not showing any signs of improvement (their winning percentage when the firings took place was .411, 27th among the 30 MLB teams), it’s not surprising that either the manager or the GM, or possibly both, get fired. The timing of the sacking was a bit more surprising, with the MLB draft beginning next week, on July 13 (with the Nationals holding the #1 pick) and the trade deadline following on July 31. A lot of the commentary sees this as a major problem for the Nats, but I think that with the selection of Rizzo’s top lieutenant as acting GM, it will probably be fine. He’s worked with the team’s scouting people and should be able to step into making those decisions.

Many, perhaps most, baseball fans believe that they can judge the performance of manager or general manager, but I’m not sure how true that is. We simply aren’t aware of much of their work that goes on behind closed doors. Did the manager help a player get through an emotional crisis? Did the general manager try to make a great signing that got vetoed by ownership? We simply can’t know, so I will try to refrain from making sweeping judgments.

Mike Rizzo

I do think it’s interesting to point to some of Rizzo’s decisions that I think we can safely classify as great, good, or bad.

Great decisions:

• Trading for Gio Gonzalez and then signing him to an extension. At the time, I wasn’t sold on the trade—I felt that the Nats may have been giving up too many good prospects—but Gonzalez turned out to be the reliable # 2 or # 3 starter that the team needed to boost a rotation with some outstanding pitchers into greatness. In seven seasons with the Nats, Gio was worth 20.6 bWAR.
• Trading Steven Souza Jr. for Joe Ross and Trea Turner. Ross (5 WAR with the Nats) alone would have been a fair return for Souza (5.7 WAR with the Rays and D-backs), but the Nats also got Turner (22.3 WAR with the Nats, 39.4 career-to-date) who might wind up as a borderline Hall-of-Fame candidate.
• Signing Max Scherzer. At the time, Scherzer’s 7-year $210 million contract was widely panned as an overpay, but in retrospect I think it is arguably the best mega-contract ever in terms of value to the team. During his tenure with the Nats he was worth 39.0 WAR, had a 92–47 record, won two Cy Young Awards, was named to six All Star teams, and helped lead the Nats to a World Series championship. Fangraphs says that he was worth $317.8 million during his 7-year contract.
• Signing 16-year-old Juan Soto for a $1.5 million signing bonus. When Rizzo became GM, the Nats’ international operation was a scandal riven disaster. Soto sort of sneaked up on everyone and quickly established himself as one of the best hitters in baseball. In his 5 seasons with the Nats, Soto was worth 21.4 WAR and currently (at age 26) has accumulated 40.2 career WAR. It would be a great disappointment if he doesn’t eventually make the Hall of Fame. He finished second in the Rookie of the Year contest in 2018, and in 2020 and 2021 finished fifth and second in the MVP contest despite playing for a last place team.
• Trading Juan Soto and Josh Bell for prospects including MacKenzie Gore, CJ Abrams, James Wood, Robert Hassell III, and Jarlin Susana. The Nats were criticized for trading Soto, but it was unfortunately clear that the Nats weren’t going to win before Soto reached free agency, and that he would be too expensive to sign to a long-term extension. Gore, Abrams, and Wood have already been selected as All Stars. And 21-year-old Susana (currently at AA Harrisburg) is listed by MLB Pipeline as the team’s # 2 prospect (# 55 in their top 100), so there is a good chance that he will eventually be a quality major league starter.

Good decisions:

• Signing Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper as # 1 draft picks. These decisions only rate as “good” because essentially everyone agreed that they were the obvious choices. And while we could quibble that in retrospect Mike Trout would have been a better choice than Strasburg, 20 other GMs also had a shot and passed him by before the Angels finally selected him, so he clearly wasn’t an obvious choice at the time. Strasburg and Harper were the core of the team during its 2012–18 period of excellence, and Strasburg, of course, was the World Series MVP.
• Signing Jayson Werth to a 7-year, $126 million contract. Widely panned at the time as an overpay, in retrospect it seems that the Nationals got their money’s worth from the deal. And while Werth was never the team’s biggest star, he did help anchor the team during its advance to contention.
• Signing Ryan Zimmerman to a contract extension in February 2012. Because injuries forced Zimmerman to move from third base to first base, Fangraphs shows the extension as a slight overpay. But there’s value in having a really good player with local roots spend his entire career with the team, which continues to pay off under his on-going personal services contract with the team.

Bad decisions:

• Poor draft picks, especially from 2014 to 2019. From 2009 to 2011, the Nats did very well in the draft with Stephen Strasburg, Drew Storen, Bryce Harper, and Anthony Rendon. They had two supplemental first round picks in 2011 that didn’t work out so well—Brian Goodwin and Alex Meyer—but their overall draft success was pretty good. In 2012 they picked Lucas Giolito, whom the Nats traded to the White Sox in the Adam Eaton deal, but he’s had a few good seasons. But for the next several years none of their first-round picks worked out at all—Erick Fedde (2014), Carter Kieboom (2016), Dane Dunning (2016), Seth Romero (2017), Mason Denaburg (2018), and Jackson Rutledge (2019). And really no surprise successes from subsequent rounds either. Since 2020, there are several picks where we’re still watching to see if they make good—Cade Cavalli (2020), Brady House (2021), Dylan Crews (2023), and Seaver King (2024), with the outlook especially bright for Crews. But unless he turns things around soon, Elijah Green (2022) appears to be another dud. The success rate for first-round picks after about # 10 isn’t great, but you still should expect maybe half of them to become everyday players with at least some medium-term value. The Nats’ draft history, especially from 2014 to 2019, is simply awful.
• Not making a real effort to sign Bryce Harper when he hit free agency. We’ve seen from Harper’s deal with the Phillies that he was mostly interested in finding a stable long-term home. I think if the Nats had made an offer similar to the $330 million 13-year deal that the Phillies ultimately gave him, he would have accepted it. Instead, the Nats low-balled him with an offer that was nominally worth $300 million but was actually worth much less because it included a lot of deferred money. Harper has so far rewarded the Phillies with an MVP award and 24.6 WAR over his seven seasons there.
• Signing Patrick Corbin to a 6-year contract. There were warning signs that Corbin wasn’t really the kind of pitcher who merited a 6-year contract, but Rizzo ignored them. It worked out great for one season, but the next five turned out to be pretty dismal.
• The second extension of Stephen Strasburg. I thought the first extension signed in 2016 was reasonable (7 years, $175 million), but the second extension signed when he opted out of his contract after the 2019 World Series (7 years, $245 million) was just too much for a player of his age and injury history. Of course, it turned out much worse than we imagined at the time—probably the worst mega-contract in baseball history.
• The 8-year extension signed by Keibert Ruiz in March 2023. The deal, which covers his five seasons of club control and first three years of free agency, cost $50 million, which at the time seemed like it could be a bargain, as Ruiz had been worth 1.5 WAR in 2022 and was only 24 years old. But his performance has slipped in the following seasons, and the deal is looking more and more like an albatross tying the team to a sub-standard catcher.

Again, I’m not trying to judge Rizzo’s performance as a whole. I think the simplest measure of his success or failure as a GM is in the successes and failures of the team. From 2012 to 2019, the Nats’ winning percentage of .563 was the second best of any team. They made the postseason in five of eight seasons, won the division in four of them, and won the World Series in 2019. That’s a record that should make any GM proud. On the other hand, as we have already observed, the Nats have been one of the worst teams in baseball for the last six seasons. While accountability needs to be shared by the owners, managers, coaches, and players in addition to the GM, Rizzo certainly is one of the most accountable figures.

Davey Martinez

I’m not going to write as much about Martinez. In looking at responsibility for the team’s poor performance over the last several years, I would place the ownership group at the top. They haven’t provided the resources needed to field a competitive team. Then comes Rizzo, who has made a number of bad decisions, including many that I haven’t listed above. But managers in modern baseball seem to me to be pretty much interchangeable. They are now all “players’ managers” who try to be supportive of players. In-game strategy is getting more and more taken over by front office staff. The days of managers like Casey Stengel, Earl Weaver, and Whitey Herzog, who each had a somewhat unique and identifiable style of managing the team, seem to me to be gone. In other words, I think Davey has been fine as a manager, but I also think Miguel Cairo will also probably be fine, as will whoever eventually takes his place. I wish Davey well but am neither shedding tears nor cheering for his departure.

Mike DeBartolo

I don’t really know him, but I watched his first meeting with the press yesterday and liked much of what I heard—especially about planning to improve the analytics and technology areas. It will be interesting to see how he does and whether he can succeed in getting ownership to invest in the team.