To Toboni, the Nats' future is bright -- and not worth compromising

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Rebuilding a Major League team takes time. We often hear about so-called “five-year plans” when a club embarks on such a project, but just how soon a team can contend after tearing things down to the studs is an inexact science.

Paul Toboni, who took over as Nationals president of baseball operations last September, isn’t putting any such timelines on his club. Six months into the job, the 36-year-old executive believes the arrow is pointed in the right direction.

“I think we have a lot of the pieces that will be in place for the next Nationals run,” Toboni said, "whenever that might be.”

Playing in a National League East with the big-spending Mets, the talent-loaded Phillies and the perpetually contending Braves, the upcoming season figures to be a learning experience for the Nationals.

First-year manager Blake Butera -- at 33, he’s younger than some of his players -- knows that outside expectations for his club are low, but inside the clubhouse there is a mission in place that won’t be measured by wins and losses over the next six months.

“The big thing is just kind of setting the tone of how we're going to operate,’ Butera said. “Talking to [players] in the offseason, the common theme was, ‘We need to get better; we're not finished products.’ They all feel like there's another gear they can get to and that they haven't even scratched the surface of what they're capable of doing. It's our job as a staff to help them become the best versions of themselves; that's the culture we're building.”

Last season, the Nationals saw five of their top 12 prospects graduate to the Majors, dropping them from 13th to 23rd in MLB Pipeline’s organization ranking from preseason to midseason. Interim general manager Mike DeBartolo drafted five players (including No. 1 overall pick Eli Willits) and traded for four others last summer who are now in the club’s Top 30, while Toboni added seven more prospects in offseason trades, bringing the total of new names on the list to 16.

It’s easy to point to Willits (No. 1 Nats prospect), Harry Ford (No. 3) or Gavin Fien (No. 5) and project them to be part of the team’s future, but Toboni is looking far deeper than that. Daylen Lile was barely on the radar a year ago, yet he was the only Nationals player to receive NL Rookie of the Year votes in 2025, finishing fifth.

“You're not totally sure who's going to ‘pop,’ whether it’s adding three or four or five miles per hour, or a new breaking ball that really helps a player turn the corner, but my guess is that we'll look up at some period in the future and say, ‘Wow, this guy has become a really interesting piece for us,’” Toboni said. “When we're on that run, we're going to look back with the benefit of hindsight, thinking to ourselves, ‘Wow, in the moment, we weren’t totally sure that this guy was going to be ‘guy’ for us.”

James Wood and Dylan Crews are the foundation of the young core, while players like Lile, Brady House and Robert Hassell III could join that list after getting their feet wet at the big league level last season.

Their experiences last year have helped that group begin to dream of the possibilities ahead, whether those good times begin this season or sometime in the coming years.

“This core is really holding each other accountable and holding everybody to that standard,” Crews said. “We’ve been coming up through the Minor Leagues together, and I feel like we are going to jell into something special here. It could be this year, it could be in a year or two, whatever it is. It’s been very selfless, very egoless here; everybody here is really bought in and ready to get to work.”

CJ Abrams, the talented 25-year-old shortstop, could either be part of the future foundation or the next player on his way out the door. An All-Star in 2024, Abrams has three years of club control left before free agency, and while his age fits the mold of whatever timeline the Nats may be on, trading him for prospects might be in play at some point -- especially with Willits eventually headed for Washington to play shortstop.

Toboni had a similar quandary with MacKenzie Gore, who was under control for two more seasons when Washington sent the All-Star pitcher to Texas for five prospects this offseason.

“There are decision points along the way,” Toboni said. “If MacKenzie would have had a great first half and we dealt him at the Deadline or after the year, what is the expected return at those different points in time? How we think about it is -- and this may sound a little bit bland and boring -- we want to just make what we think are really good decisions.”

The previous administration made the decision to trade Juan Soto to the Padres at the 2022 Trade Deadline, bringing back a package that included Abrams, Wood, Gore, Hassell and Jarlin Susana, the Nats’ current No. 4 prospect. Soto had two-plus years remaining prior to free agency, but service time won’t be the lone determining factor for Toboni when considering potential trades.

“It’s part of creating long-term organizational health, but that doesn't mean that we're just looking to trade a guy every single [time] he gets to four-plus years or five-plus years,” Toboni said. “Every once in a blue moon you can come across a return like the Juan Soto return and you really knock it out of the park and that's really great thing, but those don't come about every year, two years or even five years.”

Having watched from afar as other clubs go through the rebuilding process -- some successful, some seemingly eternal -- Toboni is hoping to experience this process only once, building a sustainable winner for years to come. He has put staff in place at all levels of the organization that share the same vision, an infrastructure he believes is equally important to the players on the field.

“I'm a very strong believer that you win with the people that you have inside the building,” Toboni said. “When a pitcher pops a year from now or a hitter really takes off in our system, it's not easy for people on the outside to follow the line of how it happened. When you're on the inside, you start to realize, ‘There's actually some really good systematic elements in place that are allowing this to happen.’”

Toboni’s philosophy when it comes to team building is to be disciplined and rigid regarding your vision, while remaining flexible on the details of achieving it. Don’t allow emotion to overtake strategic discipline, which can be easier said than done at times.

Trust the process. It’s become an overused cliché in sports, but the tenet of the saying is the only way for somebody in Toboni’s position to operate. Yes, he’s as focused on the 2026 season and getting everything out of his ballclub as he can be, but like his 29 counterparts, the focus can’t be single-minded.

“Hopefully we achieve whatever potential we have in 2026, but if our goal is to make this the envy of the sport and having a consistent winner year in and year out, I have to have a really good understanding of how these pieces are going to fall into place in 2027, 2028 and 2029,” Toboni said. “It would be no different if I was leading a club that was one of the favorites to win the World Series this year. My guess is that person leading that baseball operations group is doing the same thing; it's a huge part of our jobs.

“If we were just focused on winning this coming year and not focused on anything beyond that, we're probably mortgaging the whole future for the present, which I'm not sure a lot of organizations would do right now.”