The Nats’ Past Doesn’t Matter to Paul Toboni. That’s a Good Thing.

In the eight months and seven days since Paul Toboni was hired to run the Washington Nationals, he has, in some loose order, moved his family, including four small children, from Boston to Georgetown; overhauled a front office; hired a whole new major league coaching staff; turned over an entire minor league operation; traded the team’s top pitcher; introduced words like alignment and synergy to the organization’s vocabulary; then watched the Nats, projected by Vegas to win around 65 games this year, enter June with a winning record and the most runs scored in Major League Baseball.

But because he’s just one 36-year-old man, Toboni, the Nationals’ president of baseball operations, hasn’t done everything he’s wanted to. Like, for example, he would love to travel with the team a bit more. Or, when he thinks about it, he hasn’t spent a ton of time imagining himself as a Nats fan in recent years. (Can you blame him? Would you inhabit that headspace if you had the choice?)

“So this is going to sound bad, but honestly I think to myself sometimes that I’m not sure I’ve empathized enough with what the fans have gone through,” Toboni told me at Nationals Park earlier this month. “Just because I am so focused, as we all are, on: ‘Hey, we’re new to this and we just want to do it right. Forget about what happened in the past, we just want to do it right.’”

For the four years before Toboni arrived, the Nationals often used the future to deflect fans’ attention away from the present. Tired of losing? Here’s a player in Double-A hitting his stride. Sick of watching your favorite players suit up for division rivals? Maybe we can interest you in the technology we’ve reluctantly added in the bullpens. This is a preferred mental trick of wayward franchises: The future is whatever you need it to be.

But Toboni doesn’t dodge the tension between then, now and later while trying to build a sustainable winner. And by not understanding the pain of the post-World Series years in D.C., he seems suited to cure it in a meaningful way, seeing as he’s much more interested in that outcome than slapping a Band-Aid on your wounds.

“What I always think about is when I was a fan of the San Francisco Giants growing up, if we were in this spot and we went out and signed a couple big free agents and they were popular names and whatever, but we weren’t really ready for it, and then we lost in two, three, four years and we were in the same spot we had been in, I would be pretty upset,” Toboni said. “Far more upset as a fan than if I was led to be just a little bit more patient and thoughtful about how we do this right.”

Shortstop CJ Abrams is off to a strong start for a Nationals team that has surpassed expectations. Nick Wass/AP

With these early asks for patience, Toboni has two things going for him: The first is that, again, he’s new and has brought in dozens of new faces, including 33-year-old manager Blake Butera, to remake the Nationals’ culture. And the second is that, through more than a third of the season, the Nationals (33-33) are within spitting distance of a playoff spot, which can be fun and refreshing no matter the sample size or whether it proves to be predictive. It was the first time since 2021 that the team entered June with a record above .500.

There is still some dissonance here, though, in that a process that’s new to Toboni is certainly not new to Nationals fans, who are rightfully sick of seasons that end with way more losses than wins. Toboni rejects the popular sports narrative that laying a foundation has to come with baseball that’s miserable to watch. So when he talks about doing things right, one element of that is continuing player development in the big leagues, which is clearly influencing results.

Keibert Ruiz, once one of the worst defensive catchers in the league, has turned into an above-average receiver with the new coaching staff. By focusing on pulling the ball in the air more, center fielder Jacob Young has already smacked eight homers, three more than his career total (in 1,006 plate appearances) before this season. After struggling down the stretch last season, James Wood, the team’s star outfielder, is the National League’s leader in walks and runs scored, to say nothing of his 17 home runs, which are tied for second, and .936 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, which ranks third behind Shohei Ohtani and Kyle Schwarber. Shortstop CJ Abrams is tracking toward a career year, right behind Wood with a .914 OPS.

Plus, in the minors, the team’s internal data says it ranks among the top systems for overall offensive production and pitching velocity.

This doesn’t mean the Nats are full-on contenders quite yet, even if May was their best month in years. (For reference, from 2020 to 2025, only the Colorado Rockies lost more games.) It does, however, mean they have a flammable offense that will have to hit — and hit, and hit — to keep propping up a pitching staff that’s allowed the second most runs in the league. That offense scored 14 runs and crushed five homers Friday night. It’s still the most productive in the sport. And so it may not surprise you, given how this is going so far, and given Toboni’s general disinterest in looking backward, that he’s made a conscious effort to not use the word “rebuild.”

He is stubborn about this, too, same as he’s stubborn about sticking to his vision, to the idea of steady growth, unless the Nationals were to win at an even higher rate and force the front office to adjust. Of course, eventually, parts of trying to compete for championships will be out of Toboni’s control. The Lerner family will decide whether to spend more on the roster. Even the most promising players can fail to reach their full potential for a variety of reasons, with injuries high on that list. But for one of his first core philosophies as the guy in charge, Toboni has decided to not saddle the Nationals with the losing that happened before he arrived. And it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change.