Washington Nationals 2025 Season

THE LEAD

Yesterday MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced that players on the permanently ineligible list who are deceased have now been reinstated, which applies to seventeen players but really just two of interest - Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, who presumably will now be eligible for Veterans’ Committee ballots with the Hall of Fame. There are three such committees: the Contemporary Era Player committee (1980-present), which will vote this December; the Contemporary Era/Managers-Executives-Umpires committee, which will vote next December; and the Classic Era committee (pre-1980), which will vote in December 2027. Rose could come under consideration for any of the three (he played 1963-86 and managed 1984-89, when then-commissioner A. Bart Giamatti banned him from the game), whereas Jackson obviously falls solely under the Classic Era committee’s jurisdiction (Rose will probably have to wait for that one as well, since his greatest impact on the field came before 1980).

I don’t like this move. First and foremost, the timing and optics of this (coming so shortly after Manfred met with Donald Trump, who has publicly called for Rose to be put in the Hall of Fame, including immediately after Rose’s recent death) make it look like Manfred is bending the knee and not making this decision of his own authority. Second, gambling on the sport you play is THE unforgivable sin - I would regard it as far worse than using PEDs - because introducing the possibility of throwing games undermines the entire idea of competition. There is a reason why every sport saves its most draconian punishments for gambling (in MLB and the NBA a first offense can earn a player a lifetime ban from any association with the league), and why the sports books are perhaps even more vigilant about policing suspicious activity than the leagues (that was how former Toronto Raptor Jontay Porter was caught). And third, Rose is plenty problematic even aside from the gambling (about which he lied and changed his story constantly); he had a relationship with a 14-year-old girl in the 1970s, when he was in his 30s. Sure, you may say, but the leagues are all in bed with the gambling outfits now. To which I say they are, but gambling on the sport which you play has been expressly and clearly forbidden - there are prominent signs to this effect in every single major and minor league clubhouse - by MLB for over a century, and by every other professional sport for almost as long.

I am somewhat less concerned with the electoral prospects of Jackson - perhaps one of the five or ten greatest hitters that ever lived with his .356/.423/.517, 170 OPS+ career line - whom no one alive saw as a major leaguer (he played sandlot and semi-pro ball for twenty years after getting kicked out of MLB after his age-32 season). There are conflicting reports about how much the illiterate Jackson knew about the whole Black Sox scheme; he refused the bribes twice, and was represented by team counsel in the Black Sox trial, a massive conflict of interest (he couldn’t afford his own lawyer in large part because Chicago owner Charles Comiskey - a notorious cheapskate even before the scandal - owed him two years of back pay by that point). Jackson also has no direct descendants, let alone any who would remember him well (he died in 1951), as opposed to Rose, who only recently passed and remains the favorite childhood player for probably tens of thousands of people who are very much alive. Anyway, the whole situation is gross, and the optics make it look more like a chance for MLB to appease the current inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than anything else. In theory, I don’t mind putting a plaque of Rose in now that he’s dead. But in practice it gets messy - although a committee would still have to elect him first.

 Washington Nationals 2025 Season

Game Recap

CJ Abrams homered on a high fastball on the first pitch of the game…and the Nationals’ bats mostly went silent from there in an eventual 5-2 loss that also featured plenty of bad defense (not the kind that showed up as errors in the scorebook, but bad defense nonetheless), running the current losing streak to seven. Yet again the Nats allowed an opposing starter to cruise deep into the game, as Spencer Schwellenbach completed seven innings on 97 pitches, only having to do any real work in the fourth inning when he threw 28 of those. Washington managed only four hits after the CJ bomb - all singles, and had a potential ninth inning rally snuffed out by a pretty egregious called third strike by plate ump Austin Jones on Dylan Crews. Nats starter Michael Soroka, meanwhile, hit a massive wall in the fourth inning after a 31-pitch frame of his own drove his total north of 80, tied the game for Atlanta, and got him an early shower. Brad Lord was then victimized by poor infield defense in consecutive innings (Amed Rosario can fake it well enough at second base but has absolutely no business ever playing third - he is just a brutal watch over there), giving up a run in each inning and getting stuck with the loss.

 STORY TYPE

García To Paternity List

Rosario was playing third base in the first place because José Tena was playing second, all because earlier in the day Luis García Jr. was placed on the paternity list (I would bet on him returning Friday), with Trey Lipscomb getting called up from Rochester to take his place. Defense does matter, and if Davey Martinez (who, incidentally, appeared to be mentally checked out when Crews was rung up to end the game - not a great look) doesn’t want to have the noodle bats of both Jacob Young and Nasim Nuñez in the lineup together, the better alignment would be to flip Tena and Rosario. After being atrocious in 2024, Tena is vastly improved at the hot corner this season, whereas Rosario is a butcher there but competent in the middle infield. It is entirely reasonable to surmise that Lord would have posted a couple of zeros on the scoreboard had those two been at each other’s position instead of the ones that Davey wrote them in on the lineup card.

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 WHAT WE THINK THE NATIONALS FRONT OFFICE IS READING

Speed Reads

📌 More On Jackson/Rose Reinstatement (ESPN)

📌 Should the Pirates Trade Skenes? (Yahoo!)

📌 Rosenthal on Reinstatement (The Athletic)