If every trade is a peek inside a front office’s collective brain, the Nationals’ latest deal — sending Luis García Jr. to the Yankees for four right-handed pitchers on Sunday — only furthers what we’d already learned about the new group running the team: They view pitching as a real organizational weakness and are willing to trade controllable bats to change that.
And rather than always hunting one or two high-upside prospects in trades, they’re up for swapping established talent for a handful players, which reads as having high confidence in their development process.
In this case, the big haul included Jack Cebert, Ben Grable, Yovanny Cruz and Jake Bird. None of them ranked in the Yankees’ top 10 prospects on Baseball America, which slotted Cebert at No. 11, Grable at No. 19 and Cruz at No. 24. Of the four, Cebert is the only starter, a 24-year-old who’s dominated AA in recent weeks. Grable, also 24 and in AA, has an intriguing fastball that’s generated a lot of in-zone whiffs in the minors. Cruz, a 26-year-old with four big league appearances, can run his four-seamer into the triple digits. Bird, 30, has made 227 relief appearances between the Yankees and Rockies and never finished a season with an ERA better than 4.33. Unlike the others, he is no longer a prospect.
Each has their flaws, of course, which is why they were part of a four-player package for a high-end platoon player. But the head says this is a definite win for the Nats, especially given their need for pitching — and especially given that García, 26, was treading water before this season and then turned into a valuable trading chip. Instead of cutting him loose, Paul Toboni, the club’s first-year president of baseball operations, made him a full-time first baseman who mostly played against righties.
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The Yankees, first in the American League wild-card standings, will almost certainly use him in a platoon, too. In 374 plate appearances, García has already set a career high with 23 homers, all but three of them against righties. He also has the best slugging percentage (.560) in the National League. And he’s under team control for another season beyond 2026.
So if you’re a Nationals fan, it may feel a bit more complicated for the heart. Signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2016, García was the team’s longest-tenured player, the last on-field link to the best era in the franchise’s short history. Trading him now, as the team is finally on a jagged upswing, can be both strategically sound and emotionally fraught. For five summers, the team has often traded away its most recognizable players, leaving the city starved for reliable connection points. At some point, in theory, the Nats’ short-term ambitions might outweigh the benefits of selling high on a player like García to improve future rosters. That point just isn’t this week.
The trade deadline is 6 p.m. Monday. For the last couple months, ever since the Nats’ strong start proved more than a statistical oddity, Toboni has been saying that team performance could affect his deadline approach. Or put another way: If the Nationals kept winning, Toboni seemed willing to bend his long view to the present.
At the start of last week, with five games to the deadline, the Nats were 55-53, smack in the middle of the wild-card race. Then they lost five in a row, dropping to 4½ games out of the final wild-card spot with four teams in front of them.
Still, despite a crowded, fragile path to the playoffs, Toboni has seemingly sold and bought at the same time. For the Nationals’ first trade of the deadline season, they sent infielder Curtis Mead to the Red Sox for left-handed pitcher Connelly Early, who is on the injured list but could return this month. With the package for García, both Cruz and Bird could immediately contribute to a bullpen that has blown 27 saves. That doesn’t mean the present was the main focus for either of those deals. It does, however, show the front office is interested in addressing short- and long-term needs this summer (and capable of trying both within the same transaction, results pending).
Bird was optioned to AAA after the deal was completed Sunday, as was right-handed reliever Riley Cornelio. That indicates that Cruz could join the team ahead of a series opener in Philadelphia on Monday night. The Nats will have to fill García’s and Cornelio’s spots, at a minimum, since they could also make more trades. Abimelec Ortiz, acquired in the five-player return for MacKenzie Gore last winter, is the logical replacement for García, a left-handed first baseman with a compelling offensive profile. If the Nats use him just like García, he’ll pair with Andrés Chaparro in a platoon at first. The offense, still ranked first in runs scored by a good margin, will need some new energy after losing two players (García and Mead) with an OPS over .850.
And as for what the Nats could do before the deadline, Foster Griffin, their all-star starting pitcher, has attracted a lot of interest. So has shortstop CJ Abrams, though the chances of him moving are far, far lower than the Nationals flipping Griffin for future parts, according to multiple people familiar with the team’s thinking.
The market for starting pitchers has thinned in recent days, with Tarik Skubal (Tigers to Dodgers), Luis Castillo (Mariners to White Sox), Freddy Peralta (Mets to Rays) and Kevin Gausman (Blue Jays to Cubs) all off the board. Broadly, those deals have favored the buyers, though a scarcity of front-line arms could now work in the Nationals’ favor. Then D.C. will make a full assessment of Toboni’s first deadline after 6 p.m.
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