Sleep on the Washington Nationals At Your Own Risk

James Wood and Dylan Crews lead a roster that leads Major League Baseball in breakout candidates.

In the last week, we’ve talked about how both Keibert Ruiz and Luis Garcia could find another gear this year. Jake Irvin, arguably one last year’s biggest All-Star snubs after an incredible first half, added a slider this offseason that should help him carry that kind of success through a whole season in 2025. Michael Soroka has looked incredible in camp. Everyone’s raving about how nasty Jose Ferrer’s stuff looks.

That’s already five names to be excited about, and we haven’t even mentioned some of the club’s most talented names like James Wood, Dylan Crews, or MacKenzie Gore.

I started building out the content calendar for what I was going to write about over the next week, and quickly realized it was about to be another half-dozen articles about a different National who could take his game to a new level this year.

It was going to get redundant quick, so let’s put it altogether here instead:

The Nationals are baseball’s biggest sleeper this year.

The most obvious reason is the loaded division they find themselves in. The Phillies, Braves, and Mets all figure to be amongst the best teams in the league, making even a major year in D.C. unlikely to put them higher than third in the division if they’re lucky. But that’s artificially buried the team in preseason power rankings and debates.

If the Nationals were in the NL Central, would we be able to easily declare they couldn’t finish above the Pirates, Cardinals, and maybe even the Reds or Brewers if things fell the right way? That’s not to say they’re clearly better than 3-4 NL Central clubs, but there would certainly be more buzz about the team as a potential sleeper if they weren’t staring up at the NL East’s three-headed monster.

The same is true in the AL Central: While more established pitching likely gives ‘24 playoff clubs like the Royals, Tigers, and Guardians a leg up on the Nationals in preseason discourse, you also probably wouldn’t face much of a fight if you were to try and make a case that the Nationals could be this year’s “worst-to-first” breakout club and go mount a surprise run to the division title if they found themselves situated in that mix.

That’s not to discount the challenge Washington faces by having 51 games against the Phillies, Mets, and Braves. But don’t let the fact the Nationals are arguably baseball’s most obvious fourth-place finisher keep you from seeing how much gunpowder there is for a potential breakout.

Fangraphs projections currently have the Nationals as a 75-win (75.2 to be exact) team. And that’s entirely within the realm of possibility.

But when you’re trying to find a breakout team, projections are also sometimes unhelpful for young clubs because they tend to skew more conservatively. There’s less track record to project against, so the numbers are more helpful for finding a baseline than a ceiling.

For example, projections actually suggest Luis Garcia will be worth .6 wins less in 2025 than he was last year. If he were to even repeat his 2024 season, that alone would push the projections to near 76 wins (75.8). If he were to take a step forward, there’s another win and another step closer to a .500 year.

Then there’s Dylan Crews, who projects to be worth 1.7 fWAR, despite playing at a 2.6 fWAR pace in what was considered an underwhelming cup of coffee in the majors last year. That projection assumes only 134 games played from Crews, and also assumes just a .707 OPS. So if Crews is able to be even a league average hitter (.719 OPS) and play in 145+ games, there’s another win (or more if he breaks out).

So we’re already at 77 or more.

Paul DeJong projects for a full win less than in 2024 as well. If he can even play closer to what his ZIPs projection suggests (1.3 fWAR) than what the Fangraphs Depth Chart (FGDC) model projects, that’s roughly another half win. If he repeats closer to his 2024 projections, that’s another full win, or better if he can replicate specifically what he did in Kansas City over the course of a full year.

That’s just three players and we’re already at anywhere from 78-79 wins.

Starting to get the picture?

James Wood, while he’s projected healthily as a 3-win player for 2025, is only projected for 21-22 home runs this year. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who thinks he can’t be at least a 24-25 home run player, swipe more than his projected 18 bags, or drive in more than 77 runs.

We could go through a bunch of other hitters: CJ Abrams, Jacob Young, Josh Bell, and Nathaniel Lowe are all capable of outperforming where their projections checked in (though they all have what I’d consider more reasonable pre-season projection numbers than the names above).

Where the real breakout potential sits is with the pitching staff. The unknowns with this group are also what have put such a ceiling on what projections are comfortably suggesting the Nationals are capable of this year, and with so many young players in the mix, that’s probably fair.

But MacKenzie Gore is the only Nationals starter currently projected for a sub-4 ERA, and no other starter projects to finish below a 4.29 (Mitchell Parker). But we’ve seen enough from Michael Soroka and Jake Irvin (minus a lone rough inning in Sunday’s start against the Mets) to believe either/both are fully capable of posting stronger seasons. Gore, if he can lock in, also has more than enough talent to outperform the 3.86 ERA he’s projected for.

Part of what’s holding back numbers for Soroka and Trevor Williams is that both are only projected to make 15 starts, so health from either (or both) would likely spell another 1-2 wins for the club, even at their currently-modestly projected outputs.

Once the first pitch is thrown on March 28th, these “ifs” obviously become irrelevant. Past performance, exciting Spring Training numbers, and hypotheticals all stop mattering.

But this is the time of year to dream on possibilities, and for the Nationals, the most exciting thing they have going for them is that a major leap forward is possible in 2025 without a single player emerging into true superstardom. Wood doesn’t have to step into his role as the second coming of Aaron Judge. Crews doesn’t have to look like prime Andrew McCutchen. Gore doesn’t have to win a Cy Young award.

If Davey Martinez and his coaching staff can even get his players to play into what they’ve already shown they’re capable of, the numbers suggest that should be enough to get this team to roughly 80-81 wins.

And if something can really click for guys like Wood and Crews, that’s where the “surprise wild card contender”-type 83-86 win type stuff starts to become a possibility. That doesn’t even factor in if names like Brady House, Robert Hassell or Brad Lord come up and contribute, or if even one bullpen arm can contribute at higher than a 0.4 WAR clip.

Of course, there’s also versions of this season where things go south and the club either meets that 75-win Fangraphs projection or downright fails to even live up to those expectations. The reason that projections are so conservative on young players is because there’s so little track record to go off of, meaning the range of outcomes is far higher than with established veterans.

But with the way the Nationals are consistently showing up somewhere in the 24-26 range in preseason power rankings articles, and getting win total projections in the 71-75 range, you’d never know from the narratives that even a little bit of a look under the hood at those projections suggests this team can absolutely break out in a big way.

The horses above them might keep that from ultimately mattering in terms of a sneaky playoff run, but make no mistake: these Nationals can be good as soon as this year.

Sleep on them at your own risk.