There is a very specific kind of pain that comes with rooting for a team that just let Juan Soto walk. You spend the rest of your baseball life flinching every time a young star on your roster has a good month, because you already know how the movie ends. PFT is currently living inside that movie.
PFT laying out the best-case Nats scenario, which still ends with them dumping CJ Abrams.
The kicker is that the Nats actually have a path to being frisky. Dylan Crews ripped up Triple-A and looks like a real big-league bat, and Abrams is the exact kind of dynamic shortstop you build around. A normal team sees that and locks in the core. The Nats are not a normal team — they are a for-sale team, and for-sale teams do not hand out 8-year extensions.
PFT spelling out the cheapness theory and tying it directly back to the Soto trade.
Because were trying to sell the team and instead of signing guys to long term deals before the new CBA (which is the smart move) were being very cheap and probably gona end up losing abrams. Same reason we lost Soto
The Soto wound never really closed in DC, and you can hear it in every Nats take PFT has fired off for the last 2 years. That deal was the moment the franchise quietly admitted it was punting the next window, and now Soto is out there doing Soto things in pinstripes while the Lerners shop the team.
The kind of swing the Nats traded away and now get to watch on the road.
So here is the grim math PFT is doing in real time: if Crews keeps mashing, the Nats might actually sniff the wild card. If they sniff the wild card, ownership has even less incentive to spend, because the product is selling itself. And if anyone on the roster gets too good — too expensive — before the new CBA, they get flipped at the deadline for prospects nobody outside MLB Pipeline can name. Abrams is next on the conveyor belt. He'd just like everyone to know he called it.
PFT putting a visual on the mood of being a Nats fan in the year 2026.
