LOVERRO: Nationals have talent in pipeline. Now they need an owner willing to spend

The Washington Nationals appear to have had a pretty good harvest in the 2023 Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft.

They didn’t get this year’s version of Stephen Strasburg, as LSU pitching star Paul Skenes went No. 1 to the Pittsburgh Pirates. But they did get this generation’s version of Bryce Harper by selecting his teammate in stud center fielder Dylan Crews with the second pick.

“We would’ve certainly liked to have our choice of all the players; it takes out all the uncertainty of what the team in front of you is going to do,” Mike Rizzo, general manager and president of baseball operations, told reporters. “But we’re tickled pink to have Dylan Crews as a National. He’s going to be one of the guys that are going be front-and-center of the next wave of championship caliber players here, and we’re looking forward to getting him in a Nats uniform.”

They should be tickled pink. Crews, 21, batted .426 with 18 homers, 70 RBIs and a .567 on-base percentage. He was named the 45th winner of the Golden Spikes Award for the top amateur baseball player in the country.

“He’s won every award that you can possibly win,” Rizzo said. “He’s been the best player on the best team in the country. And I think when you talk to him and watch him, this is only the beginning. He’s got bigger and better plans than just winning the national championship at LSU.”

Ironically, part of those plans is to be the next Bryce Harper. “He (Harper) just has an ability to impact both sides of the baseball,” Crews told reporters. “I’m going to work hard to just be like Bryce Harper. That’s somebody who I looked up to. I’m just going to work to be like him.”

Along those lines, the wayward adopted son of the Lerner family just happens to be Dylan Crews’ agent. Yes, that’s right, Scott Boras represents Crews and the family’s favorite agent will likely want more money than the $8.9985 million slot bonus designated for the No. 2 pick and is probably already mapping out Crews’ free agency campaign seven years down the line.

But, barring any true complication, the deal with Crews will get made, and he will be part of a suddenly impressive pool of position players in the Nationals organization, thanks to the assets Rizzo brought from the Nationals sale of its star players, ending with Juan Soto last year. In that pool are James Woods and Brady House, both of whom were part of the Futures All-Star Game this week, plus Robert Hassell III, who came with Woods in the Soto trade. I would like to add last year’s Nationals top pick, Elijah Green, but he is struggling right now in Class A with a .218 average.

They hope to add to that list of quality young position players with their second selection in the draft — the 40th pick, the first one in the second round — University of Miami third baseman Yohandy Morales.

Several members of the Nationals organization told me before the draft that they felt a lot of pressure on this pick. “We have to get this one right,” was the message from several club officials.

Kris Kline, assistant general manager and vice president of scouting operations, believes they did just that. “We were pretty happy to get him at 40,” Kline told reporters. “We actually had him ranked higher than 20, so it worked out pretty good.”

Morales, 21, is a big man, at 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds who batted .408 for Miami with 20 home runs and 70 RBIs. His father, Andy Morales, played for the Cuban national team and was in the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox systems.

Their selections generated excitement among Nationals fans, and rightfully so. But let us not forget that none of these young men have spent one inning as a major league player. There is optimism about the young players on the major league roster like All-Star pitcher Josiah Gray and shortstop C.J. Abrams, but much of the enthusiasm for the Nationals, despite a 36-54 record, is about players most of us have never seen.

This is how fans in Pittsburgh and Kansas City live every season — watching some succeed, some fail and then leave their low-payroll teams for free agency elsewhere. This is where the Nationals owners have to step up — supplement these young players with money spent on free agents to put a championship contender on the field.

It’s conceivable, with young pitchers like Cade Cavalli, coming back from Tommy John surgery, and Jackson Rutledge, their 2019 top pick, joining Gray and MacKenzie Gore, that a roster supplemented with some actual payroll spending (not the $80 million the Lerners put on the field this season) could be much more competitive next year.

But who will those owners be? The Lerners, who may still be trying to sell the team, or new owners who would have just spent more than $2 billion to buy the team? The rebuild will be a small-town failure without big-city spending from ownership to supplement it.

You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.