MLB's most surprising team has reached the .500 mark. Now they're asking: 'why not us?'

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As players sank into their chairs and coaches stood off to the side with their arms across their chests, Butera and president of baseball operations Paul Toboni talked through their priorities and their burgeoning identity. They talked about transparency and attention to detail. They urged aggressive baserunning and smarter swing decisions. They talked about pushing players harder than they had been pushed before, and expecting the same in return. Finally, near the end of his speech, Butera addressed the elephant in the room. He knew that many of his players had spent the winter online. He could tell that they had read stories and social media posts, ones that said it could be a rough few years for this club. The Nationals had, after all, flipped their ace and closer for prospects. They had not won more than 71 games in a season since 2019. One of their most expensive offseason additions was a fancy pitching machine. They did, by definition, what rebuilding teams do. Butera, effectively, called the outside noise hogwash. When he found spare time while raising his newborn daughter, he used it by getting on the phone with the 60-something players who now sat before him. Nearly every single one spent the offseason saying they wanted to be pushed harder. In January, he arrived in West Palm Beach expecting an empty facility. He was instead greeted by Cade Cavalli, Jake Irvin and Mitchell Parker, among others. The next week, Drew Millas, Keibert Ruiz and Nasim Nuñez arrived. Brady House and Robert Hassell III were close behind. Every single person, as far as he could recollect, arrived before they were supposed to. Outsiders, he said, had underestimated their talent and undercut their buy-in. “These guys were sick of hearing about it,” Butera said last week “A lot of these players, too, are in the same boat. A lot of them … might have been a DFA pick up, waiver pickup, smaller trade pieces, they also feel like they have a chip on their shoulders to prove (something) to the teams where they came from.” Following Wednesday’s win over the $370 million Mets, the $96 million Nationals are 25-25. It is the deepest into a season that the Nationals have had a .500 record since 2021. “We’ve lost a lot of games over the last few years, and honestly, we’re tired of it,” outfielder Jacob Young said recently. “We know how much talent is in this room. If a team does dare to come in and sleep on us during a series, you know, put it to them.” Since Butera and Toboni took over, they have stressed that it is more important to see progress throughout the season than it is to focus on their record on, say, May 21. The first day of camp was also the last time Butera brought the subject of outside noise up in front of the whole group. Since then, he’s picked his spots. And his people. Daylen Lile might have read a story like this one last year. To a certain degree, he sought out external influences — or, at least, didn’t actively block them out. But last September, when he was the best hitter in MLB not named Aaron Judge (as a 22-year-old rookie, mind you), he saw a lot of chatter about how he ended 2025 and what it could bring for 2026. “I know how this game is,” Lile said. “You feel like you can be on top of the world at one point, and then at another point you can feel like you’re at the bottom.” He no longer sees it as a healthy habit to seek that out. “I already put enough pressure on myself, because of how I am,” said Lile, whose teammates and coaches back that assertion. “As I’ve gotten older, I feel like I don’t listen as much to what people are saying. It’s more what we believe in as a group, and what we know what we can accomplish. At the end of the day, it’s us going out there and playing and putting in the work.” “That’s our job,” Butera said. “To get through to these guys.” Almost all of them follow other teams and leagues; they understand the perspective and the narratives. They get it, but they hate it. Generally, Young believes that they’re usually in the mindset to prove people wrong when things are going well, and trying to prove the people who are still behind you right when things are going poorly. They’re in the “prove people wrong” portion of the season. Richard Lovelady was designated for assignment nine times in the last two years, including once by the Nats, and is now closing games for them. “It means absolutely everything,” he said. PJ Poulin spent eight years in the minors before his debut, and has been trusted in leverage spots. “It’s definitely a chip on my shoulder,” he said. CJ Abrams struggled in the second half last year and often heard his name in trade rumors. “Stay where your feet are,” he said. “We obviously have to focus on controlling what we can control,” reliever Orlando Ribalta said. “But obviously, we use it as fuel.” Teams that lose 95 games one year are not supposed to start this hot in the next one. The Nationals have not posted a .500 record after 50 games since 2018. Formulas were not kind to this bunch, either. Projection models with names of PECOTA, FanGraphs, BAT, ATC, ZIPS and OOPSY all pegged the Nats as a 63- to 68-win team. The projections were so pessimistic that, to reach the rosiest of them all now, they’d need only to play .384 ball (43-69) for the rest of the season. At the moment, and particularly with one of the best offenses in MLB behind them, it feels unlikely that they would sink that low down the stretch. It was also their record from May 23 through the end of the season last year. That is supposed to put this in some perspective. The Nationals are still more likely than not to sell at the trade deadline. They are one of the youngest teams in MLB and have a handful of key players who have seen their performances deteriorate in the second half before. Their position players have not yet spent a single day on the injured list. They have a better record than the Mets (who have the second-highest payroll in MLB), the Boston Red Sox (who employed Toboni before he took the job in Washington), the Toronto Blue Jays (who made the World Series last year), the Baltimore Orioles (who treated this offseason like they were going to win the World Series this year), the Houston Astros (who seem to play in the World Series every other year) and the Seattle Mariners and Texas Rangers (who acquired former Nats closer José A. Ferrer and ace MacKenzie Gore this winter in buy-now moves, respectively). None of those teams are rebuilding. Not yet, anyway. But they are flailing at a time where the Nationals are not. And while sustained success is never guaranteed, the Nats are tracking in the right direction. Their beleaguered bullpen has started to turn it around. They lead MLB in errors, but have played better as of late. Their offensive game planning is as good as it gets, which has resuscitated the lineup every time it seems to cool down. They even started to win at home, which had weighed on them a bit after a 3-13 start at Nationals Park. “I think they saw the crowd yesterday, the day before, they also appreciate when people are in their corner,” Butera said, referencing back-to-back sellout crowds last Friday and Saturday. “They want to see the crowd. They want people to rally behind us. They want to put on for the city.” The Nationals want, in short, to prove each other right when they’re on the diamond. But for a young, online team, it doesn’t hurt to have Butera’s spring training speech rattling around in the back of their minds when they need a little extra juice. “The word ‘rebuild’ is kind of stupid because it kind of looks over us,” Young said. “Somebody surprises someone every year. Why not us?” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms