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Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across the MLB. Each week we ask questions of the most plugged-in Washington Nationals fans and fans across the country.
Washington Nationals’ GM Mike Rizzo has been on-message about what he’s been calling an organizational reboot since the club traded away expiring contracts (and a year-plus of Trea Turner) at last July 30th’s trade deadline. It wasn’t an easy decision, but as Rizzo and Co. have explained since, they decided they’d gotten everything they could out of the last championship-caliber roster they assembled, and after a decade of competing for division titles and winning one World Series championship (in 2019), it was time for a reboot.
Rizzo was asked by 106.7 the FAN in D.C.’s Sports Junkies last month for an updated time frame for the whole enterprise and he offered an answer similar to what he’s been saying since late last July: the model or blueprint for the organizational reboot is the complete and total transformation the organization made between 2009 and 2012.
“You look at — just look at the history,” Rizzo told the Junkies.
“We’ve done it before. Our front office has done this before. We took over in 2009 and we were a last place team, and then in 2012 we won 98 games, so you do the math. And see how long it takes. And that was from when MLB owned the team, right before that, and we’re in a way better place this reboot than we were at that time when we were rebooting, and it took us a few short years to win the most games in Major League Baseball.”
He has the confidence of a GM who took an organization to the top, via some real bumpy roads, but they did get there, and more important than the one year they won it all, is the fact that they were contenders for a long, long time before they stripped the organization down to the studs (pun sort of intended).
“We think that we have the blueprint to do this thing,” Rizzo reiterated last month. “We have the knowledge and the front office staff to do it. We have the coaches and the managers in the big leagues and the minor leagues to do it. We’re all on the same page with ownership on down that this is the plan we had since the trade deadline last year, and I think that we’re accomplishing a lot of our goals, but the main goal is always to win at the big league level, and we’ve got to start playing a lot better to do that.”
“We think we’re well on our way to putting together that core group of a championship-caliber club,” Rizzo added at another point.
What do you think of the job Rizzo and Co. in the Nationals’ front office have done since they kicked this reboot off last July? Is it too early to judge?
Did you think the team would be better this season, or is this about what you’ve expected?
What about the talent they got in last July’s trades? Some of them are in the majors already, and making an impact.
Will you hold off on judging the success of the reboot so far until this year’s trade deadline, and after you see the draft class they add to the system later this season?
Hey, this would be a good place for a poll:
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