Washington Nationals

From Montreal to the Navy Yard

The club began life as the Montreal Expos, one of four teams added in the 1969 expansion, and spent three and a half decades in Quebec with a single division title to show for it, in the strike-split season of 1981. By 2001 the franchise was on the contraction list. Major League Baseball took it over and, on 3 December 2004, approved a move to Washington, a city that had been without a big-league team since the second Senators left in 1971. The Nationals played their first season in 2005 at RFK Stadium, a multi-purpose bowl on the eastern edge of the city, and stayed there for three years.

The Lerner family bought the club from the league in 2006 and has owned it since. Ted Lerner died before the 2023 season; his son Mark has been principal owner since 2018. The family put the team on the market in April 2022, then told the Washington Post in February 2024 that they had decided not to sell after all, with a long-running dispute over MASN television rights fees with the Baltimore Orioles cited as one reason the process kept stalling.

Nationals Park opened in the Navy Yard in March 2008 at a construction cost of about $693 million. It seats 41,373. The Washington Monument and the Capitol dome are visible from the upper deck on the first-base side, cherry trees stand beyond the left-field seats, and a submarine dive horn sounds after every home run and win. The Navy Yard–Ballpark station on the Green Line is one block from the centre-field gate.

The years that count

The Nationals won the NL East in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017 and lost in the Division Series each time, a run of October failures that came to define the Bryce Harper and Max Scherzer era. The breakthrough came in 2019 as a wild card. Washington beat the Houston Astros in seven games in a World Series in which the visiting team won every game, the only time that has happened. Stephen Strasburg was named series MVP. The club has retired two numbers: Ryan Zimmerman's 11 and Jackie Robinson's 42.

What followed was a teardown. The shortened 2020 season ended at 26-34. In 2021 the club traded Scherzer and Trea Turner and finished 65-97. In 2022 it moved Juan Soto and lost 107 games, the worst record in the majors. Two seasons of 71-91 under Dave Martinez followed, with the young players acquired in those trades, among them CJ Abrams and James Wood, beginning to arrive.

Clearing the decks

The reckoning came on 6 July 2025, when the Lerners dismissed both Martinez, the manager who had won the 2019 title, and Mike Rizzo, the general manager who had built it. Miguel Cairo saw out the year as interim manager and the team finished 66-96. In the autumn of 2025 the club hired Paul Toboni, then the youngest president of baseball operations in the game, and on 31 October named Blake Butera as manager. At 33 he was the youngest manager in the majors since the Minnesota Twins appointed Frank Quilici in 1972. Anirudh Kilambi was hired as general manager on 18 December 2025 and Jason Sinnarajah as president of business operations on 6 January 2026.

The coaching staff was rebuilt in the same image. Its average age dropped from 51 in 2025 to roughly 36. Hitting coach Matt Borgschulte has spoken of the trust the new group has tried to build with the players, and the club has invested in Trajekt pitching machines and more detailed preparation systems under Toboni.

The winter's headline transaction was the departure of left-hander MacKenzie Gore, sent to the Texas Rangers on 22 January 2026 in a five-player deal. The pitching signings were modest: Foster Griffin on a $5.5 million contract in December, Miles Mikolas for $2.25 million on 11 February and Zack Littell for $3 million on 10 March. The 2026 season is also the first in which the club's games are distributed through MLB Local Media under the Nationals.TV name, ending the MASN arrangement that had complicated the ownership picture for years.

A season that started with a bang

The Nationals went 14-9 in Grapefruit League play, the third-best spring record, and opened the regular season on 26 March at Wrigley Field with a 10-4 win over the Cubs. The ten runs were the most the franchise has scored on Opening Day. Cade Cavalli made his first Opening Day start, Brad Lord took the win in relief and Jacob Young homered. Butera's reaction was measured: there were still 161 games to go, he said, but winning the first one was better than he had imagined.

The home opener on 3 April was a different story. The Los Angeles Dodgers won 13-6. Abrams gave the crowd a three-run homer early, then Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Kyle Tucker and Freddie Freeman all went deep, and Mikolas was charged with 11 runs on 11 hits in four and a third innings. Joey Wiemer set a record by reaching base in his first ten plate appearances of the season, Wood was named NL Player of the Week on 13 April, Brady House hit his first career grand slam against the Mets on 29 April and Abrams added one against Minnesota on 6 May.

By 27 May the Nationals led the majors with 304 runs scored, with six regulars posting a wRC+ above league average. Butera told reporters that this was who the team was. The standings did not quite agree. The club sat at 26-27 in late May, and the pitching, rather than the lineup, decided most of the summer.

Where things stand in September

The game notes for the 4 September fixture at Dodger Stadium put the Nationals at 67-75, a road record of 34-35, at the end of a stretch of 16 games in 16 days. The lineup was still producing. Abrams had 29 home runs and 94 runs batted in, Wood had 30 home runs, Andrés Chaparro had an OPS above 1.000 since the All-Star break, Young was hitting.315 over his previous 23 games and Daylen Lile was on a run of.391 with five home runs across 13 games. The starting rotation had also turned a corner, posting a 2.23 ERA over the 12 games from 19 August, the best in the majors in that span. That night, though, rookie left-hander Jackson Kent, carrying a 5.59 ERA, drew Blake Snell.

The Dodgers series went badly. The record shown on the CBS Sports schedule page on 8 September was 67-79, fourth in the NL East, with the club at the back end of a six-game road trip on the west coast. A wild card was never realistic this year. The measure of the season is that the offence Butera inherited has been one of the best in the league, that Wood and Abrams have both cleared 30 and 29 home runs at 23 and 25 years old, and that the rotation has looked competent since mid-August. Whether the youngest management group in baseball can add the pitching to match is the winter's question.

The home stand to come

Three home series remain. The Los Angeles Angels visit from 11 to 13 September, with a Montreal Expos replica jersey giveaway on the Saturday, 12 September, a nod to the franchise's first life. A college night with George Mason University follows on 16 September, and the New York Mets come on 25 September with a Nationals football jersey giveaway and a Catholic University college night. The club's promotional calendar this year ran to six bobblehead nights for the first 20,000 through the gates, the last of them a James Wood figure against Miami on 29 August, and 23 theme nights including Japanese Heritage Day, Korean Heritage Night, Star Wars Day and Pride Night OUT. No fireworks nights or post-game concerts appear on the 2026 calendar.