In the midst of a fun World Series, I took a quick peek at the Transactions pages for both the Major League team and the Farm system of the Nats today… not one transaction for the entire month, anywhere in the system. I suppose this isn’t too much of a surprise, given our new GM and the wholesale shakeup of the entire front office, but it is a little curious since smart GMs often use this period to try to sneak players off the 40-man to try to stash them back in the minors before the wave of MLFAs are declared right after the World Series ends.
Note: you can get quick links to Transaction pages, all the resources I maintain, and a slew of other baseball related links at my “Nats Quick Links Page” which I basically use as a bookmark manager for Nats and Baseball stuff at this point.
So, with very little to talk about, we’ve been quiet. Seaver King has come back down to earth; he’s now “only” slashing .354/.456/.583 in the AFL. Fun fact; the Scottsdale AFL team also has a player with both DC and personal ties; one Nick Morabito. Morabito is the son of Brian Morabito, who is the exact same age as I am, and who was a Little League legend growing up in the Vienna/McLean/Reston circles. You know you’re good when, in the 1980s pre social media you were a “known name” to rival little leagues. Brian ended up going to JMU (as I did) and played baseball all four years at JMU before heading back to the DC area to live. His eldest son Nick went to Gonzaga, and was a 2nd round pick, and has been moving up the chain, playing the entire 2025 season at AA Birmingham.
Anyway. once the WS ends, we’ll get all our MLB FAs declared (there’s only a few left: Bell, Law, deJong, and maybe a couple of these mid-season guys added), plus a slew of MLFAs who will have aged out of the system (all 2019 draftees and 2018 IFAs who weren’t older than 18). We don’t have too many of these guys left in the minors, but should include the likes of Cluff, Arruda, Shuman, Knowles, and Cuevas maybe (he was a prep draftee so he may have another year). 2018 IFAs include guys like Atencio, De La Rosa, Colomenares, Vasquez, Otanez, and Rivero. There’s a few more 19D/18IFAs on the roster who we acquired via MLFA already (Santos, Solesky, Narajo) who might be MLFAs again … or maybe they signed multi-year MLFA deals. Or perhaps they’ve already reupped for 2026; this is where tracking the Big Board sometimes gets a little murky. We also have all our 25MLFAs who may or may not be coming back, some of whom played pretty well this year (Schnell).
So, it’ll certainly be interesting when Baseball America lists their declared MLFAs in a few days. We’ll do the requisite XLS work online and then make the inevitable observations about what it means for (especially) the AAA roster, which looks to get gutted of a ton of org guys/MLFAs/4-A types.
So, we’ll be back in November with some of our favorite off-season things to write about: Rule-5 protection, non-tender analysis (both usually in the Mid-November timeframe). The other two main things to talk about in November are Awards Season and Qualifying Offers. Here’s the 2024 off-season Key Dates column for last year that helps drive this year’s schedule.