Editors Note: Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 Part 5, and our top ten list!

Perhaps the most under-discussed part of the Nats' fall from perennial contender to perennial doormat after the 2019 season was their complete inability to develop, both when they were good and since, the quantity of non-sexy role players needed to sustain good teams throughout the grind of playing 162 games over six months, plus playoffs. Guys get hurt, or become ineffective, or just plain tired, and the sheer number of bodies necessary to get through a full season is extraordinary. Take the Dodgers, who have made the playoffs twelve years in a row. Here's how many players have appeared in a major league game each year beginning with 2013: 50, 50, 55, 55, 52, 53, 47, 40 (COVID year), 63, 52, 61, 62. The Nationals over the same time period? 44, 40, 46, 43, 49, 54, 52, 44 (COVID year), 61, 59, 50, 51.

That's a noticeable difference, right? In aggregate it's a delta of 47, meaning that over a dozen years the Dodgers have used an entire year's worth more of players. Now, there could be any number of reasons for this. Perhaps the Nationals have been better at keeping players healthy (although they famously fired and turned over their entire training staff during this period, so that seems doubtful). Perhaps the organizational embrace of old-school methods for so long led to/encouraged more players playing through nagging injuries. Or perhaps they habitually have had less depth throughout their system, and less comfortable with calling upon those options when a reliever's shoulder was starting to bark, or when a bench bat was dealing with plantar fasciitis, or whatever the case may have been.

Regardless of the reason(s), by 2019, there were only a handful of part-time players of consequence who were fully homegrown products: Michael A. Taylor, Wilmer Difo, Andrew Stevenson, Adrian Sánchez, and Austin Voth (Ryan Zimmerman was a part-time player that year, appearing in just 52 games, but that obviously wasn't the plan going in). The Nats just stopped producing even replacement-level talent and depth for years, and that's what caught up with them when the 2019 core - the "viejos" - got old (and they got old QUICKLY). Why were they utterly combusted in 2021 after Trea Turner jammed his thumb on the triple of his birthday cycle, and a couple of days later, Kyle Schwarber pulled up lame rounding first base?

That's all a long way of saying that while this tier of ten players may not be the most exciting group in the world, with some potential late-inning relievers being the most intriguing of the names, good organizations manage to pump these kinds of players out (and use them at the major league level!) year after year after year. They might win you four or five games throughout a season at most. Still, teams are better off growing a significant number of these types of players in-house rather than continually scrambling to find them in free agency, on the trade market, or the waiver wire.

Tier 4: Quality Role Players

#29 Orlando Ribalta 

Pos: RHRP | 2025 Age: 27 | B/T: R/R | 2024 Level: AA/AAA/MLB | 

MLB Comp: supersized Tyler Clippard?

Acquired: 2019 amateur draft, 12th round/363rd overall

ERA: 2.82 | WHIP: 1.288 | FIP: 1.88/4.57 | IP: 54.2 | K/9: 12.8 | BB/9: 5.3

A huge (6’7”, 245) reliever with an upper-90s fastball and a changeup as his swing-and-miss, Ribalta opened 2024 practically unhittable at AA (2 runs in 18 innings against 32 strikeouts), then got off to the traditional Rochester slow start for pitchers before finding his way (he maintained a double-digit strikeout rate throughout). He then got hit around in a four-game major league cameo, but there’s a capable setup man buried in there. Lest Nationals fans forget, Clippard was a fastball/changeup guy who carried the bullpen for years - it can be done. Ribalta will likely be fighting for one of the last bullpen spots in the spring, and if/when he wins one he has a lot to prove yet at the major league level - specifically his walk rate, which simply has to drop below five per nine - that he can be more than a mop-up man.

#28 Marquis Grissom Jr. 

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