Nationals’ Paul Toboni taking wait-and-see approach to trade deadline

BOSTON — Paul Toboni couldn’t even get a pregame jog in without having familiar faces interrupt to chat.

Before Monday’s game, the Nationals’ president of baseball operations was dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, jogging around the outfield before inevitably being stopped by a former Red Sox colleague.

Toboni returned to Fenway Park for the first time since taking the helm in Washington. He spent nearly 11 years in Boston, finishing his tenure as assistant general manager overseeing one of the game’s best farm systems. While his former team is trudging through a disappointing season that has chief baseball officer Craig Breslow fielding questions about selling off veterans, Toboni is still unsure whether he’ll buy or sell at the Aug. 3 trade deadline.

“I don’t know what we’re gonna be thinking a month from now,” he said. “So the same mindset remains, we’re just gonna keep going over the course of the next month and change, see where we’re at and go from there.”

The Nationals have outperformed expectations, entering Monday at 43-42 after winning a weekend series over the Orioles. This team was projected to lose 100 games, yet the group has become one of the more surprising teams in baseball behind a fun and athletic offense.

Their surprising start has also made it easy to discern the weak points of the roster: the rotation and bullpen.

The Nationals entered Monday with the third-highest bullpen ERA (5.02) — and saw left-handers Mitchell Parker (elbow inflammation) and Richard Lovelady (triceps strain) get placed on the 15-day injured list — and 16th-higest for the starters (4.34 ERA). As explosive as the offense has been the majority of the season, the pitching has been just as unstable. Does the lineup’s proficiency affect how Toboni will approach the trade deadline?

“I know we’re not killing it right now, but we’re a game above .500, and they’ve obviously been a huge driver of that,” he said. “So it doesn’t change the calculus, but it sets it a little bit, so to speak, because we’re now thinking through what a scenario could look like if we are buying, whereas I don’t think that was the expectation of the public coming into the year, right?

“We’re just going to play it by ear, and then hopefully the offense continues to perform, and we can continue to be competitive, stack wins on top of each other and go from there.”

The Nationals are two games back of a wild-card spot, but there also aren’t many obvious sellers in the National League. The Mets kick-started the trade season by dealing veteran left-hander David Peterson to the Cubs, but that was more due to the Cubs being waylaid by pitching injuries than the trade signaling the start of a fire sale in Queens.

The San Francisco Giants have woefully underperformed, but their bullpen doesn’t have many arms worth targeting. Toboni said that because there are still multiple teams reasonably in the wild-card hunt, executing a trade for bullpen help this early might prove to be difficult.

“Not to say it’s impossible, but we’re in this window where I think teams, there are a lot of teams that are still trying to see if they can put themselves in position to go for it, and usually that means they’re less inclined to make deals,” he said.

It’s clear that Toboni’s keeping his cards close to the vest with around five weeks to go until the trade deadline. Resilience has been a calling card for the team, particularly after suffering three heartbreaking losses against the Phillies. The Nationals haven’t lost more than five games in a row nor won more than four consecutive games. They’ve avoided lengthy losing streaks, but have yet to go on a sustained stretch to truly enter the wild-card picture.

But fans are clamoring for more bullpen help to at least give the team a chance over the second half of the season, even if it’s just a minor upgrade to avoid more late-game collapses. Toboni said that the pitching staff needs to do a better job of getting ahead and putting guys away with two strikes.

As constructed, the pitching staff doesn’t have a track record of striking out hitters, so it’s fair to wonder how much reiterating count leverage will help them get major-league hitters out.

Over the ensuing days, Toboni will see the Nationals face homegrown Red Sox pitchers Connelly Early and Payton Tolle, a reminder of the scouting acumen that allowed him to break into the game. His goal after taking the Nationals’ job was to “create a scouting and developing monster.” So far, the returns have been promising in the minors, but most of their top prospects are still far away from impacting the major-league team, where fan interest has returned after being dormant for several years.

Toboni finds himself in a weird spot ahead of his first trade deadline as the head decision-maker. The fan base is antsy for upgrades to supplement the lineup. They want to see reinforcements at the major league level, and Toboni wants to keep seeing the team play well. But it’s his job to weigh if it’s worth subtracting from the future in the interest of the present. He’ll get a clearer picture as July progresses.

“I came into the year thinking that the best thing we could do for the future Nationals teams is really help our current players develop,” Toboni said. “The thought is if James Wood takes a huge step forward, CJ Abrams takes a huge step forward, Dylan [Crews], and so on and so forth, it’s going to help us win a ton of games in 2026, but also we’re going to go into 2027 and 2028 with better teams.

“That’s really been where our focus has been. A lot of these players have had awesome years, and it’s a testament to the work that they’ve put in. We’re just going to continue to push them and support them in that regard, and I think it’ll mean good things for future Nationals teams.”