But it seems difficult to say that this move was about money to me.

- The Nats are paying the remaining $1.5 million on Nick Johnson’s salary
- Nick wasn’t likely to re-sign with the club during the offseason, and (in my eyes) reports are that he’s asking for more money than he’s worth
- There’s no guarantee that Johnson earns Type B (the kind that would get any compensation at all if they’d lost him to free agency) free agent status. In fact, the latest reports still don’t have him quite there, though he is rising:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18014543/Rankings-080109

We’d all like to see the team spend a little more money. For some of us, it’s a question of where we’d like to see that money allocated, though. It’s my belief that if you have a team that lost 102 games last season and seems well on their way to 100+ losses this season, that money should probably be spent more heavily on drafting & development than at the major league level…. particularly considering that the majority of the offensive core is 29 or older.

If the Nats were really trying to shed payroll as heavily as some of you are saying, we probably wouldn’t be seeing Dunn ($12 million next season) and Willingham (just under $3 million this season, but due for a hefty raise through arbitration) the rest of the way. In my eyes, moving at least one of them (who the Nats wouldn’t have had to foot the bill for and would have seen significantly better returns than Aaron Thompson for) would have made plenty of sense.

As for Thompson, it’s clear that Rizzo sees something there. All of the rumors are that he could have accepted a deal that involved Ryan Tucker (a higher ranked prospect in the Florida system heading into the year) as well as a second (most likely just filler) player without paying the cash for Johnson, but he wanted Thompson enough so that he threw in the cash and took Thompson alone. We’ll have to see if he’s right, though I imagine we won’t see Thompson until the middle of 2010 at the earliest.

Lock up the draft picks (particularly He Who Must Not Be Named [until he’s signed]), find out the rest of the way whether Dunn or Hammer can stick at first defensively, and start building for 2011. I’d hope that they show some improvement the rest of the way (and in 2010), but they’re clearly a half dozen players or so away from contending. There are two primary ways the front office can handle this:

- They could waste a bunch of money on 2 or 3 of those half dozen players they need to try and build a 75 win team next season. I’ve seen teams try this plenty of times, and the result is usually that they get into a cycle where they’re between 74 and 84 wins on a consistent basis for a decade.

OR

- They could try and find a few of those core players (Zimmerman, a healthy Flores next season, Morgan [?], Dunn [?], Willingham [?], Lannan, Zimmermann) to keep around on the big club while spending a lot more of the money on drafting & developing young talent that hopefully won’t just complement the core players, but possibly even surpass them.

The likelihood of having a magical (and perhaps somewhat fluky) season where everything goes right are better with Option A. The likelihood of developing a consistent winning team depends on how well you draft (and trade for) & develop players. If done right, the chances of the Nats ever developing a consistent winner should lie with Option B. Part of the problem is that…. well…. between the past two GMs the Nats have had (Minaya and Bowden), one of them made one of the most lopsided trades in the history of the game for a rental of Bartolo Colon & the other was obsessed with toolsy players who didn’t really show much development.

I’m still reserving judgment a bit until we find out how He Who Must Not Be Named turns out in two weeks, but I currently would be against the Nats retaining Rizzo… though my reasoning lies on the opposite side of the fence. There should have been more trades of high priced vets… and they should have been made earlier on, before there was a panicky feel to them (netting a lesser return).