2025 was, for all intents and purposes, a pretty bad year for the Washington Nationals. Expectations weren’t especially high, with most fans expecting a win total in the 70s and a few holding out with playoff
hopes, but the team wasn’t able to achieve even that, finishing 66-96 and resulting in the firing of Manager Davey Martinez, with the ballclub since 2018, and General Manager Mike Rizzo, with the club since 2006. 2025 also saw the debut of Juan Soto, one of the icons of the Nationals franchise, as a New York Met, marking the first of 15 years as a division rival of the Nats.
While the results of the 2025 Nationals season were not pretty, the events that took place during it may have made it one of the most important seasons in the franchise’s history. The same way we look at 2005, 2012, and 2019 as critical junctures in the Nats’ history, we may one day speak about 2025 the same way. Let’s take a look at all the important events that took place this year for the Nats, and where 2025 ranks in terms of importance among years in Nationals history.
July 6th: Manager Davey Martinez and GM Mike Rizzo are fired
The first, and perhaps the most major, event that took place in what was looking like a forgettable 2025 Nationals season was the firing of Mike Rizzo and Davey Martinez on July 6th, after a 4-6 loss to the Boston Red Sox, which dropped the Nats to 37-53 on the year. Fans were aware that Rizzo and Martinez’s contract options were due to be picked up that month, but with the deadline to pick up the option unknown, and the Lerners family’s general unwillingness to do anything to the team on the baseball side, many fans, myself included, were caught off guard by the decision.
While the decision was long-awaited and necessary in order to catch the Nationals back up to the rest of the league in terms of analytical thinking, its timing came as a shock to many, as the Nationals were one week away from making the first overall pick in the 2025 MLB Draft. With Rizzo, who rumor has it was all aboard the Kade Anderson train and was not going to be dissuaded from him, out of the picture, the new interim Mike Bebartolo and the remaining front office had the freedom to make the pick they wanted to.
July 13th: Eli Willits is selected with the first overall pick
There was much speculation about whether the firing of Mike Rizzo would change the Nationals’ plans with the first overall pick, or if the plan was pretty much set in stone long before his removal. Leading up to the draft, Ethan Holliday, a shortstop out of Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Kade Anderson, a left-handed pitcher from LSU, dominated the talk about the Nationals’ selection, but outside options such as Eli Willits, Liam Doyle, and Jamie Arnold garnered speculation as well after Rizzo’s firing.
In the end, the talent, tools, and athleticism of Eli Willits won over the Nationals’ war room, who later said Willits was always the plan for them at 1.1. The choice by Debartolo and his staff to take a young, toolsy middle infielder like Willits over the big and famous tools of prospects like Holliday and Anderson was as strong an indicator of the new chapter the Nationals were beginning to write in their history. With the savings from selecting Willits first overall, the Nats also had one of their deepest drafts in memory, taking multiple prospects with the potential to be building blocks of the franchise in future years.
2nd Half 2025: The Daylen Lile Breakout
July was an exciting time for the Nationals, with the firing of their longtime manager and GM, having the first overall pick in the draft, and a hectic trade deadline which saw 6 Nationals sent to new homes. August and September, however, were rather unremarkable, as the team was well on its way to its 6th consecutive season under .500. One storyline that kept fans hooked, however, was the emergence of outfielder Daylen Lile in his return to the big leagues.
Lile made his big league debut in May, but was sent back down to Rochester in early June. He returned to the big leagues in mid-June, during the infamous 11-game losing streak, and from there, proved why he was going to play a big part in the Nationals’ future. In the second half of 2025, Lile posted a 162 wRC+, the 8th best among all hitters in baseball. In September, he posted a ridiculous 230 wRC+, the 2nd best in baseball, behind only AL MVP Aaron Judge. Lile finished the 2025 campaign with a 132 wRC+ and 1.4 fWAR over 91 games, good for a 5th-place finish in NL Rookie of the Year voting. Not much went right for the Nationals in 2025, but the breakout of Daylen Lile is one that went really, really right for them.
September 24th: Paul Toboni is hired as the new President of Baseball Operations
Ownership knew that they could not sit on their hands and wait too long when it came to the decision of who would be calling the shots on the baseball side of operations for the organization, and before the 2025 regular season even ended, they went out and got a new president of baseball operations in Paul Toboni. The 35-year-old Toboni had been an assistant GM for the Red Sox for years and was one of the most respected young minds in the game of baseball. Toboni also came from a rigorous analytical background, marking a sharp change in philosophy from the old school style organization Mike Rizzo was running.
It will be years until we know the true impact Toboni will have on this organization, but based on everything he’s done so far, from filling out his front office and the coaching staff with other young, brilliant baseball minds, to savvy offseason acquisitions such as Harry Ford and Luis Perales, I expect we will look with great joy on the decision in 2025 to have him lead this club/
Where does it rank in terms of the most important years in Nationals history?
When we sit back one day and discuss the most important years in Nationals history, I expect 2025 to be one of those years we talk about near the very top of the list. 2019 will always be the benchmark, one practically no non-championship Nats team can ever touch, and 2012 was critical in changing the culture and perspective around the ballclub, but outside of those two, there may not be a more impactful year in the ballclub’s history than 2025.
Others had their moments, such as 2005 marking the return of baseball to DC, the opening of Nationals Park in 2008, the arrival of Max Scherzer and Bryce Harper’s MVP in 2015, and the Juan Soto trade in 2022, but in terms of years that had moments which will shape this franchise forever, 2025 may just have them all beat.
We are just 2 days away from the beginning of 2026, and thus the beginning of a new year in Nationals history. While the expectation on the field is another middling season, where the young guns get their big league reps and the coaching staff goes through growing pains, that doesn’t mean it’s how the year will play out, as we learned from the 2025 ballclub. In the same way the 2025 season was not what we expected, sometimes in bad ways, I hope for the same thing in 2026, but perhaps with a few more surprises on the good side.
