The Washington Nationals made a sudden and alarming roster move on Friday, optioning 23-year-old all-star shortstop C.J. Abrams to their Triple-A team in Rochester. If the Nationals were good—if they were overstocked with primo young hitting talent, like, say, the Baltimore Orioles—it would be possible to slide this move by as an unfortunate consequence of roster crunch. And, indeed, the Orioles also optioned a talented youngster on the same day, sending hulking 22-year-old infielder and reigning organizational Minor League Player of the Year Coby Mayo back to Norfolk, effectively ending his season. Good teams can have reasons for making painful late-season roster moves that are, if not entirely wholesome, at least coherent within the context of a competitive enterprise. This is not that.
The Nationals are not good, and there's no one anywhere in the organization to slide all that comfortably into Abrams's spot in the field or in the lineup. Abrams's demotion is a disciplinary measure: As first reported by Cody Delmendo of CHGO Sports and later confirmed by Jesse Rogers of ESPN, Abrams was seen living it up at a Chicago casino until 8:00 a.m. Friday morning, and then had to suit up for a 2:00 p.m. game against the Cubs that same afternoon. After the game—Abrams went 0-for-3 with a walk in the leadoff spot, in a 3–1 loss—Nationals coach Davey Martinez pulled Abrams into a long and emotional meeting and informed him that his season was over. The Nationals haven't exactly ratted Abrams out, but everything in their tone and demeanor confirms the scoop.
"We had our moments," said a very somber Martinez, after Friday's defeat. "We sat here and we wept together. But as I always say, it’s about taking care of the person first and not the player. And I’m going to do everything I can to help him. I love the kid. He’s a good kid. He’s going to be back." Technically Abrams is now a member of the Red Wings, but as Rochester's 2024 campaign has already concluded, Abrams will instead spend the final week of the season down in Florida, taking batting practice, licking his wounds, and feeling like absolute hell.
Poverty, they say, affords moral clarity. If the Nationals were a better baseball team—if they were one of the approximately 900 teams still fighting for a wild card—probably they would not have demoted their leadoff hitter and shortstop all the way to Siberia with eight games left in the regular season, no matter how outraged they may feel about his hysterically ill-timed all-nighter. It's been a downer of a summer in Washington, notwithstanding a few high-profile call-ups and one or two modest veteran-flipping deadline successes. The Nationals are more or less content to miss the playoffs for a fifth straight season, but they'd hoped for a more dramatic improvement on last year's 71-win campaign; distracting noises they've made about soon loosening up the Lerner family's garrote-tight purse strings were all predicated upon this squad outlining more decisively than it has where specifically it could use a few veteran reinforcements. Team president Mike Rizzo wants to put big check marks at all but a couple of spots before hunting around for more than free agency's table scraps, but a hateful and sloppy second half has failed to provide any real clarity at all. Even James damn Wood has found his way into a mild funk.
And Abrams, individually, has sucked. He was outrageously good through the first month of the season, then recovered from a May slump with a monstrous June. He was still riding reasonably high at the break, but from that point through to his demotion Friday he's been awful, batting .203 and producing a .586 OPS across 204 plate appearances. Martinez has had to move him around the lineup and rest him against lefties, despite having no other obvious leadoff hitters or anything even approaching a serious backup. It was a solid two months of really alarmingly punchless baseball, accented by increasingly slumped and discouraged body language, and the haunted, far-away eyes of a person who perhaps no longer believes all that firmly that he'll eventually find his way to higher ground. Had Abrams not given Rizzo and Martinez a rock-solid non-baseball pretext for shipping him to West Palm Beach, the same move made several weeks earlier would've scanned as humanitarian, if not in Abrams's best interest then at least in the best interests of the few sad bozos still committed to watching this team on television.
Even with all of that, the Nationals probably would not have exiled Abrams if they were still in the hunt. Nasim Nuñez, with all due respect, is not taking the Nationals anywhere that they would not also find themselves being led by a demoralized, sleep-deprived, hungover, and gambling-crazed Abrams. But giving the interim job to Nuñez, a 2024 Rule 5 pickup who almost certainly will not make the club in 2025, allows the Nationals to stake out and hold a certain standard of professional performance, which is probably not without value with so young a roster.
This is a maneuver the Nationals have tried before, with some limited and perhaps fluky success: Late in the 2023 season, Rizzo and Martinez optioned young second baseman Luis Garcia Jr. back to Rochester, for reasons that were not entirely about on-field performance. Garcia, like Abrams a year later, was slumping, and the Nationals wanted to send a sobering message about professionalism. Garcia's demotion came in August, with enough time on the schedule for him to make a September return to the big club, having been chastened by the professional humiliation. Perhaps the Nationals draw a line from that tough-love demotion to Garcia's breakthrough 2024 season, and hope now to teach Abrams the same lesson. Of course, the Nationals also tried this in 2021 with a 24-year-old Victor Robles, optioning him back to Rochester in late August; all that appeared to have accomplished was the absolute destruction of the player's confidence, which he never seemed to regain until after he'd been hauled off the scrap heap three years later by the Seattle Mariners.
All of those incidents have in common that they featured talented young Nationals players trying to stay motivated in the hateful end stages of seasons that the team all but forfeited to a multi-year rebuilding project. Being a bad outfit, stripping away your own winning incentive, might help to stiffen an organization's spine about professional standards and accountability, but it also creates the conditions—frustration, hopelessness, despair—where day to day motivation too often requires kicks in the pants of the sort delivered in the showers of the Durham Bulls. C.J. Abrams should not spend an entire evening partying in a casino, really ever, but especially not when his team has a game the following afternoon. More broadly, it's appropriate to expect people who are paid to do a thing for a living to take that thing seriously, and to assiduously handle their professional responsibilities. But the Nationals could probably help themselves and their young players deal with these miserable late-summer doldrums by diving head first into fewer of them.
