The Nationals finished the season by demoting the leadoff hitter who was in the casino until 8:00 p.m.
The Washington Nationals made a sudden and surprising roster move Friday, adding 23-year-old All-Star shortstop C.J. Abrams to their Triple-A team in Rochester. If the Nationals were any good — if they had primo young hitting talent, like the Baltimore Orioles — it would be possible to slip the move in as an unfortunate result of a roster crunch. And, in fact, the Orioles also added a talented young player that same day, sending down 22-year-old infielder and reigning organizational Minor League Player of the Year Koby Mayo. Back to NorfolkThat effectively ended his season. Good teams can have reasons to make painful roster changes at the end of the season that, if not entirely healthy, are at least consistent within the context of a competitive enterprise. This isn’t it.
The Nationals are not good, and there is no one anywhere in the organization who can easily replace Abrams in the field or in the lineup. Abrams’ demotion is a disciplinary measure: as stated earlier reported by Cody Delmendo of CHGO Sports and later Confirmed by ESPN’s Jesse RogersAbrams was seen hanging out at a Chicago casino until 8:00 a.m. Friday, and then had to get ready for a game against the Cubs at 2:00 that afternoon. After the game – Abrams lost 3-1, going 0-for-3 with a walk in the leadoff spot – Nationals coach Davey Martinez called Abrams into a long and emotional meeting and told him his season was over. The Nationals have not said exactly what Abrams said, but everything from their tone and demeanor confirms the news.
“We had our moments,” Martinez said sombrely. after friday’s loss“We sat here and cried together. But like I always say, it’s about taking care of the person first, not the player. And I’m going to do everything I can to help him. I love that kid. He’s a good kid. He’s going to come back.” Technically Abrams is now a member of the Red Wings, but with Rochester’s 2024 campaign already over, Abrams will spend the final week of the season in Florida, taking batting practice, licking his wounds and feeling like absolute hell.
They say poverty provides moral clarity. If the Nationals were a better baseball team — if they were one of the nearly 900 teams still contending for the wild card — they probably wouldn’t have shipped their leadoff hitter and shortstop off to Siberia with eight games remaining in the regular season, no matter how angry they were about his insanely mistimed all-nighter. This summer in Washington has been a disappointment, despite a few high-profile call-ups and one or two minor veteran-flipping deadline successes. The Nationals are more or less satisfied with missing the playoffs for the fifth consecutive season, but they had hoped for a more dramatic improvement over last year’s 71-win campaign; the disquieting noises they’ve made about the Lerner family’s garrote-tight purse strings being loosened too soon were all based on this team contouring more decisively in places where it particularly needs some veteran reinforcement. Team president Mike Rizzo wants to put big check marks on all but a couple of spots before looking for more than the table scraps of free agency, but a disorientating and perfunctory second half has failed to provide any real clarity at all. Even James Dam Wood has found his way into a mild funk.
And Abrams, individually, has been a dud. He was extremely good for the first month of the season, then recovered from a May slump to have a horrific June. He was still pretty good at the break, but from that point until his demotion on Friday He has been terribleBatting .203 and producing a .586 OPS in 204 plate appearances. Martinez had to move him around the lineup and rest him against left-handers, despite having no other obvious leadoff hitter or anything even close to a serious backup. It was truly two months of dangerously punchless baseball, including increasingly hunched and discouraged body language and the haunted, far-off-looking eyes of a man who perhaps no longer fully believed he would eventually find his way to higher ground. Had Abrams not given a convincing non-baseball excuse for sending Rizzo and Martinez to West Palm Beach, the same move made several weeks earlier would have been considered humanitarian
Despite all that, the Nationals probably wouldn’t have fired Abrams if they were still in the race. Nasim Nunez, with all due respect, isn’t going to lead the Nationals anywhere that they won’t find themselves led by a demoralized, sleep-deprived, hangover and gambling-addicted Abrams. But giving the interim job to Nunez, a 2024 Rule 5 pickup who almost certainly won’t be on the club in 2025, allows the Nationals to try and maintain a certain standard of professional performance that probably isn’t worthless with such a young roster.
It’s a maneuver the Nationals have tried before, with some limited and perhaps accidental success: At the end of the 2023 season, Rizzo and Martinez selected young second baseman Luis Garcia Jr. Back to RochesterFor reasons that weren’t entirely about performance on the field. Like Abrams a year later, Garcia was in poor form and the Nationals wanted to send a serious message about professionalism. Garcia’s demotion came in August, when he had plenty of time to return to the big club in September, after being plagued by professional humiliation. Perhaps the Nationals draw a line from that tough-love demotion to Garcia’s successful 2024 season, and now hope to teach Abrams the same lesson. Of course, the Nationals tried to do the same with 24-year-old Victor Robles in 2021, sending him back to Rochester at the end of AugustThis appeared to completely destroy the player’s confidence, which he never regained until he was pulled out of the dustbin three years later. by the Seattle Mariners,
One thing all of these incidents have in common is that they involved talented young Nationals players trying to stay motivated in the abject final stretch of a season that the team nearly lost for what was to become a multi-year rebuilding project. Being a bad organization, stripped of your own winning incentives, can help stiffen the organization’s spine about professional standards and accountability, but it also creates conditions — frustration, disappointment, despair — where day-to-day motivation often requires that kind of kick in the pants In the shower C.J. Abrams of the Durham Bulls should not spend an entire evening partying at a casino, never really, but especially not when his team has a game the next afternoon. More broadly, it’s reasonable to expect that people who are paid to do something for a living take that job seriously and perform their professional responsibilities diligently. But the Nationals could probably help themselves, and their young players, to deal with these miserable late-summer doldrums by plunging head-first into fewer of them.