This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.
You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.
--
The Nationals’ young talent makes their ongoing unwillingness to go into the free-agent market frustrating. They had a 74-win roster last year, one that has a core of five players 26 and under (Wood, Crews, CJ Abrams, Luis Garcia, and MacKenzie Gore) and one of the lowest payrolls in the game. This is the moment to spend money to get better, and whether a Lerner family decision or a Mike Rizzo one, they have simply stopped trying. Signing Mike Soroka, a fifth starter, for $9 million has been their only move this winter.
If they had shown any life at all, I’d have been all over the Nationals as next year’s surprise team. As it stands, I have a hard time caring more about the team’s playoff chances than its owners do.
