Can the Washington Nationals Make Playoffs in 2025 Despite Stacked NL East?
The Washington Nationals have a lot of work to do if they want to return to the postseason in 2025, and the rest of the National League East will make it difficult.
While the American League East gets a lot of the credit for being baseball's toughest division, with 27 of the last 50 World Series matchups featuring a team from that division, the National League East has shown to be one of the deepest divisions in all of Major League Baseball across the last few seasons.
Every team except for Washington has made the postseason within the last two years, with the Miami Marlins entering as a Wild Card and the trio of the Atlanta Braves, New York Mets, and Philadelphia Phillies all in the postseason this year.
Two of the last six World Series entrants have been from the NL East, as well, with Atlanta winning the whole thing in 2021 and Philadelphia dropping it to the Houston Astros in 2022. The Phillies dropping their NLCS trip last year to the Arizona Diamondbacks extended a divisional NLCS streak of five seasons, dating back to Washington's victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in 2019. That streak will continue this season, as one of the Phillies and Mets are guaranteed to advance to the Championship Series this week - New York currently leads that series two games to one.
The problem is, it's hard to see where either of those three teams take a step back: The Braves qualified for the postseason despite significant injuries, becoming the first team in the modern era to play in October despite losing three Opening Day starters for the final 25 games of the regular season. Philadelphia's core is locked up in Kyle Schwarber, Trea Turner, and Bryce Harper on offense and Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola on the mound. At the same time, New York has cornerstone Francisco Lindor surrounded by young talent like Francisco Alvarez and Mark Vientos.
If Washington wants to improve on this season's 71-91 record in hopes of grabbing a Wild Card spot, there are a few clear areas of improvement. The Nationals went just 25-27 in their divisional matchups, winning the season series over the Braves for the first time since 2017. They struggled against the Phillies and Mets, however, going just 6-20 and being outscored by 69 runs against the pair of divisional leaders.
The next area of improvement is in power production. Washington's 135 homers were 2nd-worst in baseball, only two ahead of the Chicago White Sox and twelve behind the next-closest team, the Tampa Bay Rays. While the team's slugging was .375, 'only' 5th-worst in baseball, the divisional opponents above the Nationals were all in the league's top ten in that respect.
The final area is more consistency from the starting pitching. Washington's 50 quality starts were the second-worst in the division, ahead of only the injury-riddled Miami rotation, which put up only 29 outings of six innings with three runs or less this year.
Thankfully, the team appears to have light at the end of the tunnel with significant payroll money being available this offseason for needed improvements.
