The Nats’ Trade Deadline Matters. But The Draft Matters More.

This is not a mock draft, nor is it a look at who the Nationals could select in the MLB draft this weekend, during which they’ll pick 11th, then 42nd, then 78th and so on. It’s also not a breakdown of how the Nats might divvy up their bonus pool money, though the draft will be a fascinating glance at the new front office’s approach to working the system to collect the most talent.

No, the reason we’re here, sharing this tiny slice of the internet, is bigger than any one amateur player or signing bonus. The reason, to put it plainly, is that the draft is this new front office’s thing, the part of the team-building process that many of these executives have built their careers on. And with this draft in particular, it’s their first opportunity to meaningfully change the type of players in the Nats’ minor league system — and to really show why they’re the right group to turn the organization around.

Good, bad or otherwise, the results won’t be immediate. The draft isn’t set up that way, which is why the trade deadline has gotten much more oxygen in D.C. in recent weeks, including on this website. But the draft process has already offered the best illustration yet of how this front office operates, particularly with how it’s blending amateur scouting and player development.

Here are three things to know on that front, all based on conversations with members of the front office:

1. The Nats’ player development staff produced reports for the top 200 or so players on the team’s draft board, detailing how they would train them if they joined the organization. (The PD staff also did the same for a handful of players the front office might be interested in in later rounds.)

2. When the front office remade the PD staff this winter, that included hiring a director of hitting (CJ Gillman) and a director of pitching (Grayson Crawford). When it spoke to candidates for each role, it stressed that the directors would be involved in player acquisition, which would include a significant role in draft preparation. In turn, when the Nats interviewed more than 40 players at the MLB draft combine in June, Gillman and Crawford were in the room. During those conversations, the directors walked prospects through the team’s development plans for them.

3. This week, many members of the PD staff have been central to discussions in the draft room at Nationals Park, a notable increase in their input compared to the previous front office’s process.

This is the stark change that was promised with new people in charge, starting with Paul Toboni, the Nats’ 36-year-old president of baseball operations. The idea, which is far from novel across the sport, is to mesh draft strategy with the org’s strengths in player development. But even if, on the surface, this is more the Nationals catching up than innovating, they believe they’re melding the departments more than the average team. Toboni’s first hire last fall was the earliest sign of that.

Devin Pearson had run amateur scouting in Boston, which was also where Toboni came from. But instead of offering him that job with the Nats, Toboni asked Pearson, now one of the Nats’ assistant general managers, to oversee player development. If that seemed odd to outsiders, it made total sense to the two of them. As Boston’s amateur scouting director, Pearson had helped integrate amateur scouting and player development, which Toboni wanted to be a major part of their identity in D.C.

“It seems like it should be easy, right?” Pearson told me. “An organization should be aligned on what you believe in with developing players, and you should draft to those beliefs, you know? But it’'s not always that easy, so we’ve spent a lot of time with our scouting group understanding their process. And then as we talk through guys in the draft room, it’s like: ‘Alright, we’re projecting on this guy improving velocity, but what is our confidence level we can actually do that with this player?’”

It’s certainly better to ask those questions before the draft than after. Pearson was also quick to credit the two people most responsible for the Nats’ draft prep: Justin Horowitz, the team’s new assistant GM in charge of all acquisitions, and Desmond McGowan, director of amateur acquisitions (focused solely on the draft).

Horowitz most recently ran amateur scouting for the Pirates, though he previously worked with Toboni and Pearson in Boston. McGowan was the Mets’ manager of data science before coming to D.C. Toboni has worked in both of these areas, leading amateur scouting for Boston before he was promoted to oversee that department and PD at the same time. So all together, they’re plugging a ton of inputs on each player into their draft model: analytics, biometrics, traditional scouting and the public perception of a prospect, among other things.

Nationals manager Blake Butera previously worked in player development for the Rays. Jess Rapfogel/AP Photo/Jess Rapfogel

The goal, at least broadly, is to find players with traits the team believes are hard to teach. Then, once they identify a player with at least one of those rare traits, they’re looking for flashes that tell them they could help him learn additional high-level skills in the future. Maybe there are indicators he could add a considerable amount of bat speed down the line. Maybe, for a pitcher, they see signs that later adding a new pitch, like a sweeping slider, could make him take off. This is where the player development staff is key, especially if they’ve been part of the discussions from the beginning.

And then there’s the bonus — and this is critical — of both departments feeling a shared responsibility for each player’s success (or failure). Take it from first-year manager Blake Butera, who used to work in player development for the Rays, a progressive org that has long blended PD into their draft process.

“Once you get both of them under the hood before that player is in the organization and start to have some of that dialogue, then when the player is either having a lot of success or is going through it, there has already been that line of communication,” Butera said. “And it’s not like we’re going to point fingers and be like: ‘Why’d you take this guy?’ … ‘Well why’d you change his swing? “There is a lot of: ‘No, no, we saw what he looked like before, we had this conversation.’ And it just allows that dialogue to continue throughout their minor league career, and not feel like it’s PD and scouting [separately]. It’s the Nationals.”

That kind of finger-pointing happened way too often under the previous front office, according to conversations with team officials — past and present — over many years. Now, once a player is drafted, the expectation is that there will be a thorough plan for his first month of development. Then the PD staff will plot out his next 30 days, adjusting if need be based on the early feedback. Then they’ll repeat those steps over and over.

But in the meantime, in the leadup to the draft, the front office will keep toying with what they call their scenario calculator. That looks something like this:

If we pick this player and sign him for a number that’s this exact amount lower than the bonus assigned to his draft slot, then …

Or how about if we pay this amount OVER slot value for this player in the third round, then go under slot for these players in the sixth and seventh. Maybe then we could …

“And we’re just obsessed with it,” Pearson said with a laugh. “And it can get really, really crazy.”

Yes, some in the new front office know each other well, going back years of using a scenario calculator in different rooms in a different city. But it’s also their first draft as a full group, meaning Pearson is already picturing how the process can be better.

Beyond the first month after the draft, could they eventually project how a player’s development might look, in granular detail, in two years? In three? Heck, what about four?

“I don’t think we’re there yet as an org, just with all of us being new,” Pearson said. “But over the next few years, we’ll have the confidence to project this guy to physically look like this in X amount of time, to throw this hard in X amount of time, to move the bat this fast in X amount of time.’ That’s just going to take time to prove that we can do that.”