Hey there Readers
I’m going to use this opportunity to give some incremental updates and call out some improvements I’ve made to a couple of the main online Nats Data Resources I maintain. Just in case you hadn’t been to these resources in a while.
As always, any suggestions for improvements or errors noticed are always appreciated.
Big Board
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/186nm-v5F-zTCoR2Be7TFYM3e2cZ-gYi2WVqJLEkHdmc/edit?usp=sharing
The Big Board shows our entire system, from MLB to DSL, with players generally in their starting spots at any given time, rotations kept in the order they appear, and bullpen arms kept roughly in their roles. The 2025 Rosters are now frozen for the end of the season, and I’ve created the 2026 Roster and 2026 Release page to start keeping track of player transactions (first one for the new tab was Darren Baker’s requested release).
MLB has recalled all 40-man players, and restored all 7 and 15-day DL players to the active roster, so MLB shows at 40/40 right now. The five 60-day DL guys won’t be returned until the World Series is over; that will correspond with the technical separation of these FAs to be: Bell, Law (who himself is on the 60-day), deJong, Alfaro, 25MLFA Pilkington, and 24MLFA Stubbs, so I don’t imagine we’ll have any DFA’s to return the 60-day DL guys at the onset. However, the exact terms of these MLFA deals can vary, so they actually may be multi-year deals. AAA also cleared up all its DL and Restricted list in late September, but the lower leagues have not, so there’s still a slew of DL and Restricted names on those rosters.
There’s a small number at the top of the Big Board, which keeps track of the total number of players under contract in the four domestic minor leagues. It attempts to keep track of this number to see how it compares to the 165 total system limit, which the team flirted with a couple times this season. That’s the main improvement I’ve added to the Big Board lately, in addition to the color coding of Promotions and Demotions throughout the season. Each player is also a link to their milb.com page (for minor leaguers) or their baseball-reference.com page (if they’re primarily MLBers).
Draft Tracker
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qd5DS9GlmkQOEh_zGhOvlhHK0EegqY1uJB4mLGmRBaY/edit?usp=sharing
I made a relatively large addition to the Draft Tracker this year: I added the “High Level” column to each player. I did this because I have dreams of doing a massive analysis trying to quantify what makes for a “good draft” by looking at the lower rounds to see what expectations are for these players. For example: if you draft a college guy in the 15th, where do you “expect” that player to get to? If they never get out of Low-A, that seems to have “met expectations” for that player, but if they get to AA is that a win?
Anyway, this analysis stalled once I started getting into the 2019 and prior drafts, where we went to 40 rounds instead of the current 20. I’ve been critical of the sport for cutting these 20 rounds (and cutting the entire Short-A level), but must admit it was kind of shocked at how many of our draftees never got out of Short-A. For example; in 2017 we drafted 33 players; here was the high-level breakdown:
- MLB: 5: Romero, Crowe, Tetreault, Cousins, Klobotis, Raquet
- AAA: 3: Freeman, Dunlap, Johnston
- AA: 2: Connell, Troop
- High-A: 4
- Low-A: 10
- Short-A: 6
- FCL: 2
A slew of the Low-A top-outs were in Short-A in the draft year of 2017, got assigned to Low-A to start 2018, and were released directly out of that league. So, the question is, is this a typical distribution expectation for a 40-round draft? Was this generally speaking a good or bad draft (hint: this was an awful draft, even with 6 guys getting to the majors, since 3 of them made the majors for other teams and the other three combined gave us a career -1.0 bWAR).
I initially replaced the Rule5 Eligible column with this high level, thinking that Rule5 eligible was a useless field, but then immediately returned it. Thank god for backups.
My big “value add” to the Draft Tracker generally is to have year-specific Draft worksheets where I keep track of the exact Bonus dollars as they’re announced, which gives us some insight into the negotiations for later-signing guys. I also have schools, commits, social media links, NDFAs, etc. I have done this same analysis for “local draft guys” (i.e. DC/MD/VA players) in the past, but kind of have petered out on tracking local players in general over the past few years. Also of note; the player names are links to milb.com pages/baseball-reference.com pages for convenience as with the Big Board.
IFA Tracker
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ksPorXhEHhtkNAGqxrJWqUFkvioMgoWhBU50uaZstc8/edit?usp=sharing
A couple years ago I had the brilliant notion to create an IFA tracker in the same format as the Draft Tracker, because, well, why not; its an important way we ingest talent and we sign 20+ players a year.
My big value add to the IFA tracker this year was to add in High Level, as I did with the Draft tracker. This analysis led to a pretty obvious observation; a huge majority of these players never get out of the DSL. Like, a massive percentage. Take our 2018 class; we had 38 signees. here’s their highest levels:
- DSL: 16
- FCL: 13
- Low-A: 3
- High-A: 4
- AA: 2
- None higher
Five of these guys are still active, having resigned after their initial 7year stint expired after 2024, but who may be re-hitting MLFA this off-season. One may still pan out; Atencio, who was solid for us as a AA starter in 2025 then missed the entirety of 2025 with injury but who is still just 24. But, will he re-sign? did he already? The Covid year throws all this analysis into doubt.
Nonetheless, this is a lot of players churned through DSL and FCL for very little payoff.
The last time we even got a MLB player out of an IFA draft was in 2019 (Andry Lara), before that 2017 (Ferrer). There were more in 2016 and prior, but I havn’t gone back to do “high level” analysis that far back because it becomes pretty difficult to track down these players at some point: the DSL rosters aren’t nearly as comprehensively kept as the domestic rosters. Also, bonus dollar figures are incredibly tough to come by, even in recent years. For example, I know that our IFA 2025 pool was $6.2M, but I could only account for about $4.9M of bonus dollars being spent. We had 10 signees with no dollar amounts announced; were they all $10k? More? Less? Did we really leave $1.3M of bonus dollars on the table? I certainly hope not.
Nationals Prospects Ranks
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xs9fmb-dctE90hTS3bdozznETS-Oc3GsMuGzRo2faUc/edit?usp=sharing
This is more of a collection of Prospect ranks, but I also publish my own ranks (recently discussed here with my post-season 125 rank). It’s a good place to kind of see the trends of other sites and how they’re ranking our guys. I also do a ton of value add here, putting in starting levels each year, bonus amounts,
There’s now 270 ranks dating back to pre Washington Nationals days. We’ll get a slew of updated ranks over the course of the off-season, with the major pundits mostly publishing in Jan/Feb of next year. I’ll re-do my top 125 at that time, add in the missing 2025 with non-trivial bonus dollars plus the 2026 IFA class, remove MLFAs and other releases we make this coming off-season, and (maybe) will even attempt to do the impossible: rank all 150+ minor leaguers in one spot.
You can see i’ve already highlighted in my recent 125 rank the players who I need to revisit, who might be too high or too low. I’ve also added in placeholders for another 10 players who probably all slot into the 80-90 range (those being the rest of the 2025 class plus some of the higher-bonus dollar 2025 IFAs).
Anyway, happy off-season. Can’t wait to see what the new regime has in mind.
Next big update to these docs will come at the end of the World Series, where all MLB and MLFAs are declared. I’ll try to keep up with the releases and the signings as best that I can, with the caveat that milb.com doesn’t always have the best record keeping.
As far as I can tell, anyone who we drafted in 2019 should become a new 6-year MLFA, and 2018IFAs also should hit MLFA unless they’ve agreed to some extension. We have a slew of 2019 draftees and 2018IFAs on our rosters who probably become new MLFAs on 11/1 or thereabouts.
- AAA: Cluff, Arruda, Solesky, Shuman, Cuevas
- AA: Naranjo, Knowles, Santos, Vasquez, Atencio
- High-A: De La Rosa, Colomenares, Otanez
- Low-A: Rivero