The burners of the hot stove have been simmering across baseball since Kyle Tucker’s signing, and on Thursday, the Washington Nationals added their ingredients to the pot, trading two years of MacKenzie Gore’s services to the Texas Rangers for a five-player prospect package (Ben Clemens wrote about Gore’s fit with the Rangers here). This marks the second significant trade of the Paul Toboni era in Washington (Harry Ford for Jose A. Ferrer was the other) as he and the new members of the front office look to put their fingerprints on the org. The deal includes Texas’ 2025 first rounder Gavin Fien, injured former top pitching prospect Alejandro Rosario, 2025 rookie-level breakout bat Devin Fitz-Gerald, 23-year-old 1B/RF masher Abimelec Ortiz, and 20-year-old outfielder Yeremy Cabrera.
In contrast with yesterday’s Freddy Peralta trade, the Gore return is about a combination of depth and potential ceiling, rather than the proximity and more concrete upside of the two-player Peralta package. Reasonable minds could consider any of Fien, Rosario, or Fitz-Gerald as the headliner of this deal. Each of those guys has the physical talent to be an everyday big leaguer, though each also comes with a measure of uncertainty too great to consider any of them a Top 100 prospect right now. I’ll walk you through the players who are joining Washington’s farm system, then we’ll take a step back and examine the state of the organization’s direction under new leadership.
There are folks in baseball who love Fien, the 12th overall pick in last year’s draft who signed for nearly $5 million to eschew a commitment to the University of Texas. Fien swings hard, he has impressive power for his age, and he was one of the top performers on the high school showcase circuit, with a 1.045 OPS in events tracked by Synergy Sports from 2023 to 2024. The scouts and clubs who liked Fien the most before the draft considered him a mid-first round prospect, and one of the best couple of high school hitters in the class. I was (and am) personally a fair bit lower on Fien, and had him ranked 34th. The length and awkward look of his swing gave me pre-draft pause about his ability to match pro velocity, and I think Fien’s infield actions will at least force him to third base, if not to right field (where his arm would be weapon). The combination of strikeout risk and a corner fit, at least in my eyes, relegated him more to the comp round despite his power. His look in pro ball after the draft — a 10-game sample at Low-A Hickory plus Instructional League activity in Arizona — reinforced these notions. This is the player in the deal where you’re likely to get the widest range of opinions, and my personal take happens to be on the lower end of that continuum.
Before he got hurt, the opposite was true of Rosario, who I thought had become one of the best couple of pitching prospects in baseball in 2024. But that was before he blew out and things got (and remain) complicated. A very famous prospect since his high school underclass days, Rosario’s mid-to-upper-90s fastball used to miss frustratingly few bats because of its shape. He ran an ERA over 7.00 during both his sophomore and junior years at the University of Miami despite sitting 95-96 mph with a plus slider and splitter. The Rangers quickly overhauled Rosario’s delivery, most notably his arm slot, which became much more vertical than when he was an amateur. It totally changed the way his fastball played without sacrificing his arm strength or the quality of either secondary pitch, and it also improved his command, as his line to the plate became much more direct and comfortable-looking than when he was in college. In a 2024 split evenly between Low- and High-A, he posted a 36.9% strikeout rate, a 3.7% (!) walk rate, and a 2.24 ERA across 88.1 innings.
Not long after the 2025 Top 100 list came out (Rosario was ranked 39th), the Rangers announced that he would need elbow surgery, though the exact timing of his injury was left vague. Months later it was reported that Rosario still hadn’t had surgery, with Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News saying the Rangers and Rosario were “working through some unrelated issues.” Industry sources indicated to me at the time that he had a separate, non-baseball medical concern that had to be resolved before his elbow could be addressed. On Thursday while discussing the trade, Toboni said that Rosario will finally undergo Tommy John surgery in the next few weeks. Assuming a standard recovery from this point forward, he’ll be back in early 2027 having missed two whole seasons. The time off obviously creates a great degree of uncertainty about how Rosario will look when he returns, and the mysterious (and understandably private) nature of the issues that contributed to the delay in his TJ are even more difficult to account for when you’re trying to line him up on a prospect list. But his look and performance in 2024 — mid-90s heat and three plus pitches including a potentially elite splitter — reads a lot like Trey Yesavage’s scouting report. This is the player in the deal who I think has the highest individual ceiling. This year would have been Rosario’s 40-man platform season, and he’s a name to file away for the next Rule 5 Draft if the Nationals choose not to roster him after the season.
The third rather exciting player in this trade is Fitz-Gerald, a switch-hitting shortstop who was signed away from a North Carolina State commitment with a $900,000 bonus in 2024. He crushed the complex in Arizona for six weeks in 2025 and earned a promotion to Low-A Hickory, where he hurt his shoulder diving for a ball after just 10 games. Fitz-Gerald’s true skill as a contact hitter probably isn’t as stellar as his small sample contact rate from 2025 — an excellent 81% overall, 88% in the zone, both way better than his high school showcase marks — but he has above-average bat speed and swings with dangerous loft from both sides of the plate. He’s only 5-foot-10, but he’s a pretty physical guy with visually exciting athleticism and bat speed, and his swing is already geared to hit for power, especially from the left side.
Because of the nature of his swing, Fitz-Gerald will likely be vulnerable to elevated pitches as he climbs. He has some feel for getting his hands to those spots, but he hasn’t faced anything close to big league velocity; he might be thriving because he’s a compact, short-levered guy rather than because of actual feel to hit. There’s some volatility there, but Fitz-Gerald definitely looked more like a late first round talent last year than a late third rounder, where a $900,000 bonus is the slot amount. Switch-hitters with this kind of pop from both sides of the plate don’t exactly grow on trees — not even in Florida. This is a potential switch-hitting regular at second or third base who shares a lot of similarities with Jed Lowrie.
Although Fien, Rosario, and Fitz-Gerald are the most talented players in the deal, Ortiz is the one most likely to make a big league impact soon. The 23-year-old Puerto Rican 1B/RF is coming off a rebound season during which he slashed .257/.356/.479 and hit 25 dingers split between Double- and Triple-A. Though he won’t single-handedly alter the fortunes of the franchise, Ortiz should soon be decent role player who can hit in the five- or six- hole against righties. The path to playing time is clearer at Ortiz’s native first base than in right field (where his range is stretched thin), though it might take another trade (of Luis García Jr.) to really clear the runway for him.
Finally, Cabrera is a smaller, hard-swinging outfielder who signed for $10,000 in 2022 and had two big rookie ball power-hitting seasons in 2023 and 2024 before he came back down to Earth in 2025 at Low-A Hickory. Cabrera is able to generate impressive raw power for his size, and his swing was geared for extreme launch in 2023 and 2024 before things toned down some last year. The effort Cabrera swings with frequently leaves him vulnerable to spin. But the guy can play center field. He hauls ass into the gaps with reckless abandon and is comfortable at the catch point. He’s got a shot to play a role as a whiff-prone, plus-gloved part-time outfielder in a few years.
The bulk of this return is likely to mature three-ish years from now, especially the more talented prospects who could make a sizable impact on the big league club. Even Rosario, whose stuff could play in a relief capacity the moment he returns, is more likely to be brought along slowly and built back up as a starter over multiple seasons so the Nationals can try to maximize his individual outcome.
While the Ferrer-for-Ford trade was more about the very near future, this deal signals a long-term rebuild strategy that involves moving a lot of the current big league roster over the next little while. Though the Nationals’ core at the end of the Mike Rizzo era featured a handful of exciting young players — Gore, CJ Abrams, James Wood, and some of their recent high draft picks — who could feasibly be part of the team’s next competitive roster if kept around, it appears that the new regime doesn’t believe they’ll be able to re-sign those guys, and/or doesn’t think they’ll be able to build a better roster around them quickly enough to contend before the bulk of that group can leave in free agency. Gore’s name was bandied about during last year’s trade deadline, as was Abrams’. Abrams is under contract through the 2028 season and might be the next big shoe to drop here, though the Nationals needn’t be in a rush to move him unless they’re blown away. Teams that have recently successfully ignited long-term rebuilds have often done so with trades like this, where they’re getting three-plus guys back in exchange for one player. Here the Nationals were able to pry away five pretty good prospects.
* This article was originally published here
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