On July 7 — an otherwise unremarkable day for the Washington Nationals, who lost an unremarkable game to the Houston Astros in the middle of a mostly unremarkable summer at Nationals Park — something remarkable happened in the minor leagues.
In stadiums in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, four hitters from the Harrisburg Senators and Fredericksburg Nationals — the Nats’ Double-A and Single-A affiliates, respectively — all bashed home runs. The significance: With those four homers, Washington’s six minor league teams, collectively, had surpassed the total of 409 homers hit by those same affiliates in 2025.
And it was barely past the midpoint of the 2026 baseball calendar.
As the Nationals limp to the finish line of the MLB season, all but assured of a seventh-straight finish in either fourth or fifth place, fans of the team would be well advised to avert their eyes from Nationals Park and train them on the minor leagues, where remarkable things continue to happen.
Trending
Sign up for The Washington Sun Metro newsletter for essential coverage of the D.C. region.
It is there that the organization’s transformation from a largely old-school operation under former president of baseball operations Mike Rizzo to a largely new-school model under successor Paul Toboni is most visible, with the new regime leaning heavily into advanced analytics and new technologies geared toward succeeding in a sport increasingly distilled to a clash of power-pitching versus power-hitting.
To wit: With roughly two weeks left in the minor league season, the collective home run total for the Nats’ six affiliates is up to 681 (through Sept. 8), a staggering increase of nearly 67% over 2025’s total. The system-wide slugging percentage has similarly risen from .349 to .410. All six Nats’ affiliates have seen a jump in their home run totals year over year.
On the pitching side, according to data at Prospect Savant, Nats’ prospects have pushed the farm system’s collective strikeout rate (the percentage of all plate appearances ending in a strikeout) from 21.7 in 2025 (28th out of 30 farm systems) to 24.1 in 2026 (seventh). And the system’s collective ERA of 4.58 is the best of any MLB franchise.
And what about the bottom line, which is to say: wins and losses? Collectively, the Nationals’ four-highest affiliates (Single-A Fredericksburg, high Single-A Wilmington, Double-A Harrisburg and Triple-A Rochester) have a winning percentage of .560 this season (through Sept. 8), up from .452 in 2025, with Rochester (up from .401 to .606, year over year) responsible for much of that improvement.
“It’s completely independent of what the previous regime did or did not do,” Toboni, 36, said when asked about the link between the massive organizational overhaul and the sudden turnaround of the farm system. The Rizzo regime, he said, “did a bunch of awesome things. Obviously, there’s a bunch of players on our roster that came from them. For us, it’s a completely separate conversation … For us, it’s: ‘Let’s tether ourselves to what the evidence says contributes to winning and do our best to actually help our people get there.’”
The rest of the industry is certainly taking note. In its 2026 midseason farm-system rankings, released in mid-August, MLB Pipeline had the Nationals ranked sixth out of all 30 organizations, up from 17th at the start of the season and 23rd at midseason 2025. Similar double-digit jumps were seen in rankings compiled by Baseball America, ESPN and Fangraphs.
There are caveats begging to be noted here: First, a majority of players in the Nats’ farm system, including most of its highest-rated prospects, were acquired by the Rizzo regime, before he was fired last July. Also, teams such as the Nationals that are undergoing a rebuild — which typically result in veterans-for-prospects trades and high draft picks — almost always see a rise in their farm-system rankings.
But the sheer speed and acuteness of the Nationals’ rise in those rankings, in the first year of a new regime whose overarching philosophy represents an organizational sea change, makes it impossible to ignore those links. At his introductory press conference last October, Toboni vowed to turn the Nats into a “scouting and player development monster,” and less than a year in (thanks in part to trades of veterans Jose A. Ferrer, MacKenzie Gore, Luis García Jr. and Foster Griffin), he appears to be well on his way.
“To rise 17 spots in a calendar year, or 11 spots from the beginning of the year — that is highly unusual,” said MLB Pipeline senior writer Jim Callis, who has been evaluating prospects for various publications for 38 years. “You talk to anybody in the game, and [they would say] the Nats have modernized in a lot of ways. They’ve introduced a lot of technology and data. I don’t mean to make it sound like they were in the dark ages under Rizzo — because Mike was really good there for a long time, which people sometimes forget — but I do think [Toboni and his staff] have modernized a lot of things, and they’ve seen some players make huge steps forward.”
Speaking the Same Language
Some of the changes under the Toboni regime are easy to document. Whereas the front office and player-development staffs under Rizzo (who was 63 when he was fired) were full of longtime scouts and grizzled baseball lifers, Toboni has tapped the collegiate ranks and new-school, data-driven facilities (as well as other MLB organizations) in search of innovators. Of particular note: At least four of Toboni’s hires, including Nationals pitching coach Simon Mathews, spent time at Driveline Baseball, the groundbreaking, Seattle-based lab.
“We wanted to bring in people who were data-informed — not data-driven on every decision — and then we built out training environments that helped players get better,” said assistant general manager Devin Pearson. “We didn’t say, ‘We need to bring in X number of people from Driveline’ or whatever. It was more: ‘Do we all speak the same language and believe in the same things in terms of what good training looks like.”
The Nationals also acquired — at a reported cost of $15,000 to $20,000 per month apiece, with three-year-minimum leases — three high-tech Trajekt Arc pitching machines that use video, data and robotics to replicate the image, velocity, pitch-shape and arm slot of any pitcher in baseball, allowing hitters to take virtual BP against each night’s opposing starter. The team was believed to have been the last MLB franchise without at least one Trajekt machine.
“It’s like night and day,” Nationals outfielder Daylen Lile said of the analytics bent of the new regime. (That’s a more charitable characterization than what he said to Sirius MLB Network Radio during spring training: “We’re not in the dark ages anymore.”)
The investment in player development doesn’t stop at technology. The Lerner family, who have owned the Nationals since 2006, also green-lighted a massive expansion of minor league staffing under Toboni. The field staff at Triple-A Rochester, for example, has doubled in size from 2025, with the addition of assistant hitting and pitching coaches, a quality control coach, a defensive coach, an extra strength coach, an extra trainer and a technician to operate the Trajekt machine. Meanwhile, Rochester manager Matt LeCroy, a longtime Rizzo lieutenant, was kept on following a lengthy meeting with Toboni.
“From the beginning it was all about everybody buying in. Paul told you up-front: If you weren’t in, you would probably be out,” said LeCroy, who has been part of the Nationals organization, off and on, since 2006. LeCroy’s Red Wings have surged from 59-88 last year to 83-54 so far in 2026. “It’s been amazing to see this thing grow so fast and to see all this change. I’ve learned so much this year,” he said.
A Clear Vision
Beyond some of the obvious factors, other aspects of the new regime’s special sauce are harder to get at. Toboni and his lieutenants are understandably cautious with what they reveal about their methods and strategies.
“What it boils down to is having a really clear vision of what you want to achieve and a staff that is incredibly aligned, and then doing a really good job of communicating to the players what the greatest opportunities are for them to get better,” Toboni said. “I think maybe it was a lot for the players [to absorb] early on, but now I think they’ve felt the cadence and understand the process well enough to realize: ‘OK, I need to strike out more batters. OK, to do that I’ve got to refine my breaking ball. OK, in this bullpen session, I need my slider to have this much horizontal movement and this much vertical.’”
Twenty-three-year-old shortstop prospect Seaver King is perhaps the Toboni player-development machine’s biggest success story, a microcosm of the organization’s collective rise. In 2025, his first full year of pro ball, King, the 10th overall pick in the 2024 draft, hit just .244 with a .631 OPS, six homers in 551 plate appearances, and a strikeouts-to-walks ratio of more than four-to-one across two levels of the minors.
In his first meeting with the Nats’ new player-development staff, King was astonished to hear a detailed, advanced-metrics-heavy rundown of his assets and liabilities and a specific plan for improvement — focused on lowering his chase rate (swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone) and raising his launch angle. Defensively, he needed tweaks to his arm slot and footwork. It was almost as if they knew him better as a player than he did himself.
“It was a matter of being told, ‘Hey, this is what we think is going to make you successful,’ and then buying into it,” King said. “And the message has stayed consistent at every level: ‘We don’t want you to chase . We want you to hit the ball hard in the air.’... I’ve always hit the ball hard, but I’ve gotten away with hitting it on the ground and getting hits with my speed. But now I know, if I hit the ball at 12 [degrees of launch angle] instead of six, I could have 10 to 12 more doubles than I did last year.”
It’s not as if launch angle were a foreign concept under the old regime, King said. “We heard about it: ‘Hey, we’d like you to hit the ball in the air,’” he said. “But there was never [any guidance] like, ‘Here’s how we can train for it.’”
This season, which King has split between Double-A and Triple-A, his batting average (through Sept. 8) is more than 60 points (to .306) and his OPS more nearly 280 points (to .909), while his strikeouts-to-walks ratio has been cut in half to just above two-to-one. His chase rate of 33.4 this season (per Prospect Savant) is still high — the big-league average this year is 30.5 — but it’s a considerable improvement over 2025’s mark of 36.0.
“The process has changed,” King said. “What makes me good is when I hit the ball hard and hit it in the air. If I can hit it in the air, extra-base hits will come. RBIs will come. Leaning into that and focusing on that in [batting practice] has been great, and obviously the results speak for themselves.”
As impressive as it was for the Nationals to top their collective minor league home run total from 2025 on July 7 of this year, King got there some five weeks sooner: On May 30, he hit his seventh homer of the year, beating his 2025 total in just 44 games. He is a near-lock to be on the Nationals’ roster by next Opening Day.
Author
