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 second-time 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.

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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.

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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 Baltimore 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 to 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. Regardless of whether they re-sign Bryce Harper, they will have plenty of financial flexibility and should not necessarily be desperate for every dollar entering this winter. A few veteran Nationals players and members of the baseball industry not affiliated with the organization wondered about the timing of the sell-off — mainly the Adams and Murphy deals — for that reason. If the team weren’t going to slide under the competitive balance tax threshold anyway, and it has plenty of payroll to spare next year, why deal 10 days before a deadline when the roster is still talented enough to compete?

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“Those moves, painful like all the moves at this time of year, they do a few things for us. They obviously give us some minor league talent that some of our scouts liked to kind of replenish our minor league system. Give us some financial flexibility to utilize those dollars in 2019, and also gives us a chance to see some of our young future pitchers that are going to take their place and perform in their spot,” Rizzo said Wednesday, while explaining all the deals, not just those involving Murphy and Adams. Nationals Manager Dave Martinez reiterated a similar argument.

The Nationals can now see their less-experienced players play more regularly. Wilmer Difo is a defensive upgrade over Murphy. Ryan Zimmerman is healthy, and Matt Adams was struggling at the time of the deal. They didn’t need him like they did early in the season. Madson wasn’t having his best year, and the Nationals had plenty of young pitchers to test in what they considered a lost season. Gonzalez was struggling, clearly in need of a fresh start, not providing the kind of innings this team wanted — doing exactly what a younger pitcher could do while providing a glimpse at the future. All of those arguments are true to the players involved, even as they don’t seem to justify the deals entirely. They do not need to justify them entirely.

Financial flexibility was the impetus behind these deals, and the Nationals increased theirs with the sell-off. But they did not offload enough to get under the competitive balance tax threshold, which would have increased that flexibility far more.

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