Despite sell-off Nats won’t avoid luxury tax

As the Washington Nationals sold off veteran piece after veteran piece in a few waves of unofficial surrender, they did not do so in a way that clarified their grander plan. They traded one veteran reliever at the non-waiver trade deadline, two veteran position players in mid-August and two more at the waiver deadline in August. Why the delay until mid-August? Why not everyone in mid-August? Why not wait to sell all those pieces until the last possible day, just in case the team got hot and suddenly found itself back in the postseason race?

One theory, never stated by any Nationals personnel but supported by the strange timing, is that the front office was operating to try to shed enough payroll to slide under the competitive balance tax threshold for this season. Because the Nationals crossed that threshold for the first time last season, they would owe 30 percent on this year’s overages as secondtime offenders.

More importantly, since those overages would be relatively minimal, teams over the competitive balance threshold get a fourth-round pick when players reject their qualifying offers and sign elsewhere. Teams under the threshold get picks after the first round. The Nationals have a rather significant free-agent-to-be who might reject their qualifying offer in Bryce Harper and therefore have every incentive to try to improve the pick they could get in return — particularly given their propensity for drafting big leaguers in the first few rounds under general manager Mike Rizzo’s watch. By selling a few players 10 days before that last- day- of-August waiver deadline, the Nationals shed a little more in salary dollars than they might have if they traded them 10 days later. One could imagine a team calculating the number to the dollar and realizing that every day mattered.

But Wednesday, in his first conversation with reporters since the Nationals dealt Ryan Madson and Gio Gonzalez, Rizzo debunked that theory.

“We’ve always had the sense that those deals we’ve made and the deals that we could’ve made were not going to get us under the luxury tax,” Rizzo said.

In other words, the Nationals’ story is they never planned the sell-off around the competitive balance tax. People familiar with the details of the Nationals’ payroll situation confirmed Wednesday that the team this year will eclipse the threshold of $197 million. A quick glance at their payroll on any variety of sites would reveal a number around $180 million. But “actual payroll,” used for the purpose of calculating who owes the competitive balance tax, includes medical benefits that were around $13 million last year, plus the average annual value of contracts — not the actual value paid this year. The Nationals have deferred money on several contracts, including big ones like those of Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg. Their actual payroll is more than $197 million, and trading Brandon Kintzler, Shawn Kelley, Matt Adams, Daniel Murphy, Madson and Gonzalez did not change that.

One could wonder, then, why the Nationals sold at all. The players they got in return are largely low-level minor leaguers who have yet to hit “prospect” status, which doesn’t mean they won’t evolve into big leaguers. Tanner Roark, for example, came to the Nationals when they offloaded Christian Guzman to the Texas Rangers years ago. He was found by Nationals scouts that, for the most part, also were those scouting the returns for this year’s deals. But the Nationals did not make the classic deadline deals for big prospect returns, like the one the Orioles made when they traded Manny Machado or the vaunted one that brought Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs from the New York Yankees in 2016. These deals were not about the talent.

So what were they about? A natural answer is that the deals still saved them more than $12 million on this year’s payroll. They will pay less in overage tax. They will save millions. To those who are not spending millions of dollars, the mere saving of money does not seem like a very good reason. To those spending it, the saving of $12 million - roughly what the Nationals will pay Anthony Rendon this season — matters a great deal. That money can go toward paying the overage tax or to paying a player, or two, this winter. The Nationals have holes to fill and do not want to eclipse the threshold for a third straight season.

“We would like to be below the luxury tax type of team,” Rizzo said, “but the ownership has given us the resources to build championship-caliber, quality teams throughout and I believe they will continue to do so.”

The Nationals have $80 million sliding off their payroll this winter, much of which was being paid to free agents that have now been jettisoned.