WASHINGTON (AP) — The Washington Nationals are set to hire Boston Red Sox senior vice president and assistant general manager Paul Toboni to run their baseball operations department, a person with knowledge of the move told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because Toboni's move to the Nationals had not been announced.
Toboni, 35, was with the Red Sox for a decade, starting there as an intern in 2015, then moving up through their scouting department
until becoming an assistant GM in November 2023. He had been expected to be a candidate for the general manager job in Boston under chief baseball officer Craig Breslow.
In Washington, Toboni takes over a club that is in the final days of its sixth consecutive losing season since winning the 2019 World Series.
The Nationals fired general manager Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez in July. At the time, senior VP and assistant GM Mike DeBartolo took over for Rizzo on an interim basis, while bench coach Miguel Cairo was picked as the interim manager.
It was not immediately clear whether Toboni would keep DeBartolo in the front office or perhaps hire a new person to hold the title of general manager.
Rizzo had been GM since 2009 and added the title of president of baseball operations in 2013.
Clearly, the search for a new manager is high on the to-do list, in addition to the massive undertaking of overhauling a roster that Rizzo deconstructed by trading away Juan Soto, Max Scherzer, Trea Turner and others. Those deals added young building blocks such as outfielder James Wood, left-hander MacKenzie Gore and shortstop C.J. Abrams, but there is a lot of work to be done.
A 4-3 victory over the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday put the Nationals' 2025 record at 65-94 with three games remaining, all against the Chicago White Sox, one of only two teams in the major leagues with a lower winning percentage than Washington's .409.
No matter what happens in that final series, the Nationals will finish in last place in the NL East for the fifth time in the past six years; they were fourth in 2024.
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