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Washington Nationals news & notes: Leftover Trade Deadline talk; Lane Thomas love + more

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Washington Nationals news & notes: Leftover Trade Deadline talk; Lane Thomas love + more


LEFTOVER TRADE DEADLINE BITS:

Davey Martinez was in his second year on the bench when Washington won it all in 2019, but since then (or since 2021/2022, really), he’s overseen the reboot/rebuild in D.C., guiding the Nationals through an at-times difficult process as they traded away players on expiring deals who helped in ‘19, and some others with a few years of control remaining (Trea Turner & Juan Soto) who were part of that team.

Again this year, the club made moves which make sense in context of trying to build up the next championship-caliber club in the nation’s capital, but it hasn’t really made it any easier to watch all the talent departing, even if they’ve turned those players into a stockpile of real high-end prospects, and, in addition to what they’ve added in the draft, they have what they think is the core of the next contender.

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Photo by Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

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“Those were really tough,” he said of the past four deadlines, but especially the first few when members of the ‘19 team were traded. “But that group of guys, we did something really special. We won a championship together. My hope is that with the guys we got in here, the core kids we got in here, and some added help, we can do something again like that.

“I really think that the direction we’re going in we’ll have a chance to win another World Series.”

The possibility of the club buying at next year’s trade deadline after all the selling, has both the manager and GM and President of Baseball Operations Mike Rizzo excited about what the future holds.

“Yeah it will be amazing, it really will,” the seventh-year manager said after this year’s deadline passed. “The key is if we start doing that [buying vs selling], it means at the end of the year we’re really going to play for something. I don’t really feel like right now we’re out of anything by any means, we’re close…”

“It’s more fun,” Rizzo said of eventually being buyers again. “I know that much.

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“It’s way more fun grabbing All-Star players than it is giving away All-Star players, so in that regard it will be a lot more fun, but this is challenging, and this is a tough time for players, and we recognize that, and we think it’s a necessary time, and I think that this organization, this front office did a remarkable job and has always done a remarkable job at the trade deadline, and I think this year was no different.”

Washington Nationals and the Cincinnati Reds at Nationals Park

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Closer Kyle Finnegan was the subject of plenty of rumors going into the trade deadline, but he wasn’t dealt in the end, and he said he was happy to stay, having joined the club back in 2020 and carved out a role for himself during the reboot years.

He said he hopes he’s here for the good times too.

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“Just like seeing this thing through. You can see it starting to come together, and the young talent that we have is exciting to watch every night,” Finnegan said.

“And to be out there pitching in front of these guys and have them behind you, it’s special.

“Just to have a jersey in this league is something that I don’t take for granted.”

ALL-AMERICAN BOY:

As he explained it, a day after he traded Lane Thomas to the Cleveland Guardians in return for a prospect package which included lefty Alex Clemmey, 19, infielder José Tena, 23, and 19-year-old infielder Rafael Ramirez Jr., Nationals’ GM (and President of Baseball Ops) Mike Rizzo told reporters he made the deal because Washington got what they thought was fair market value for the 28-year-old outfielder.

“That was the reason we pulled the trigger,” Rizzo said. “When you can headline it with the upside 19-year-old Clemme, and Tena, and Ramirez, [Jr.], I think that was — the surplus value of those guys and the impact that they could have, and the upside that they all have, I thought was a good return for a really good player in Lane Thomas.”

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A day after the deadline, Rizzo talked with 106.7 the FAN in D.C.’s Sports Junkies about their decision to trade Thomas, with a year and a half of team control remaining, after helping to build him up after acquiring him at the deadline in 2021 (straight up for Jon Lester).

MLB: AUG 02 Orioles at Guardians

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Photo by Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

“Lane’s a terrific player for us,” Rizzo told the Junkies. “Last year he was All-Star quality for us, and probably should have made the team. This year, dominating lefties again, and playing good outfield. He’s got a cannon for an arm, he’s stealing bases. A leader in the clubhouse and he’s just an all-around American boy, he’s just a great kid. And did a lot of good things for the organization and we’ll miss him.”

“He’s one of my quiet leaders out there. It’s tough. We have a good relationship. Players love him,” manager Davey Martinez said after losing his right fielder.

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“He’s really good player. Cleveland’s going to get a really good player. I wish him all the best.”

Moving on without Thomas, Martinez said, would be a little weird, especially for the young players on the club, for whom Thomas was a mentor.

“It’s going to be a little — I won’t say difficult, but weird without him, because he was that veteran guy for those guys.”

Rizzo and Co. in the Nationals’ front office saw an opportunity to deal Thomas at his peak value, addressing what they saw as organizational needs in the process.

“When you think about the trade deadline, you think about what you have at the big league level, where your deficiencies are in the minor league level, and what you need to do to become a championship-caliber club,” the GM explained.

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Baltimore Orioles v Cleveland Guardians

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“And we saw Lane probably being at his apex of his trade value,” Rizzo continued.

“More trade value this year for Lane Thomas than there was last year for some reason, even with there being more control last year.

“We had a market value in our minds for what we would do Lane for and bounced around a lot of teams and there was a lot of interest and lot of action with him with the contenders. And you package in the fact that we’ve got some outfielders that are close to the big leagues that will impact the team in the very near future we thought that it was a deal that we couldn’t pass up at this time.”

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LAST NIGHT’S GAME HIGHLIGHTS – BREWERS 8; NATIONALS 3:





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Denis Shapovalov defaulted in Washington D.C. for swearing at spectator

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A lengthy discussion between Shapovalov, the chair umpire, Shelton and the supervisor ensued. The chair umpire told the supervisor that Shapovalov said a spectator provoked him, but that he didn’t know what was said.

“I heard it,” insisted Shelton.

Then the chair umpire communicated to the supervisor what Shapovalov said in return.

“I would let it go,” said Paul Annacone on Tennis Channel during the broadcast, emphasizing the subjectivity of the call.

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But the supervisor did not. Despite the juncture of the match, with Shapovalov down three match points, Shelton was given the match when the Canadian was defaulted.

“The rules are what they are,” said TC’s Brett Haber, “and it’s a slippery slope if you let someone get away with it, how you control it the next time.”

After speaking directly with the supervisor, the 25-year-old remained at the baseline, incredulous at the outcome.



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With a fire burning just miles away, residents of a Washington town dig in

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With a fire burning just miles away, residents of a Washington town dig in


Sentiments like these are common during high-stress wildfires throughout the rural West. As large, intense wildfires and evacuations become more common, some residents are growing tired of uprooting their lives and are growing inured to the risk — or more confident in their own abilities to manage it themselves. 

That means some people are determined to stay in their homes even when authorities say they ought to leave, particularly when there are rifts in trust between communities and those managing wildfires and emergency response.

“Especially in rural communities, we’ve started seeing a lot more folks decide to stay and defend,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon who studies evacuation decisions. “There’s a lot of mistrust going on there.”

As fire behavior grows intense because of climate change and overgrown forests, doubts can fester in rural communities as fire managers operate more conservatively than in the past.

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“People were used to seeing fires attacked in different ways decades ago and now there’s a different reality,” Stasiewicz said. “Now, we’re seeing fires act more radically, make their own weather and be more unpredictable.”

This dynamic is playing out in rural communities elsewhere.

Some Northern California residents whose homes are threatened by the Park Fire — now more than 397,000 acres and the fourth-largest in state history as of Friday morning — have similarly decided not to evacuate, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. One couple told the Chronicle that they’d soured on evacuating after they had to wait 10 days to return home after the 2018 Camp Fire.

Some 94 large fires are burning across the West, which more than 29,000 wildland firefighters are working to suppress, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Of those blazes, 28 have active evacuation orders.

“When it gets like this, it’s all hands on deck, and they’re running out of resources,” said Brad Bramlett, a public information officer assigned to the Pioneer Fire.

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The Pacific Northwest, in particular, is reeling this summer as some 51 major fires burn in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. A hotter and drier-than-normal spring and summer primed the landscape to burn.

As of Friday morning, the Stehekin area was under a red flag warning for dangerous fire weather, according to the National Weather Service. The Pioneer fire had grown to more than 33,700 acres and was about 12% contained.

In most years, the fire season would only have just begun.


Stehekin’s full-time population is about 85, and its residents take small-town living to the extreme. The community famously resisted telephone service into the early 2000s.

Surrounded by glaciated peaks and the clear waters of Lake Chelan, the town swells in population during the summer, as tourists take 2.5-hour ferry rides to access trailheads in North Cascades National Park that begin in Stehekin.

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The Pioneer Fire began on June 8 and has been slowly creeping north. It’s burning in some of the most challenging terrain firefighters must deal with in the U.S., with steep slopes, rocky outcrops and few trails.

“As soon as I heard about it, it was, ‘OK, here we go,’” Courtney said. “We all know how dry and early spring has been. It felt like the fire season was going to be accelerated.”

Stehekin residents have been planning and preparing, Courtney said, removing brush near homes, constructing a floating dock in the harbor and holding community meetings.

Tourists were forced away on July 25, when emergency officials raised the evacuation level to 2 of 3.

Meanwhile, firefighters have flooded into Stehekin. More than 640 fire personnel are working the fire, though not all are based in the town. Johnston said she and her staff of six have served about 200 meals a day to crews.

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On Sunday, emergency officials asked everyone in the town to leave.

Magnussen said emergency management officials can’t guarantee any kind of help, particularly if the boat dock — “the only way out,” as he described it — burns.

“When they choose to stay, they’re doing so at their own risk,” he said.

Courtney said she recognizes that but worries that leaving Stehekin now could mean she won’t be able to return for weeks, if not longer. She feels her self-reliant community, which is filled with people who have boats and are used to working the land, is prepared to fend off fire, for now.

Some previous close calls have also hardened her demeanor toward fire. Courtney witnessed the 2015 Wolverine Fire, which burned more than 60,000 acres near Stehekin, and last month, she joined family and friends a few miles “down lake” to save her uncle’s property after firefighters had left.

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“My tolerance has gone up,” she said.

Stasiewicz said that based on her own focus groups, surveys and interviews, sentiments like Courtney’s are becoming more common in rural communities. Evacuation often carries a stiff financial cost, she said, and some rural residents worry their properties won’t be prioritized.

“We can sometimes see rural communities lose compared to more developed areas. There is this mentality, ‘Maybe we do have to take care of ourselves,’” Stasiewicz said.



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Harris events: Not your father’s campaign rallies (or Biden’s)

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Harris events: Not your father’s campaign rallies (or Biden’s)


There were hip gyrations from the stage. The playlist included “Girls in the Hood,” “Mamushi,” “Savage,” and “Body.” The candidate quoted Quavo.

A Joe Biden rally this was not.

If there was ever any indication of the head-snapping transition that Democrats have gone through, it was the one that occurred on Tuesday night in Atlanta when 10,000 people danced and cheered to Megan Thee Stallion before Vice President Harris took the stage for a campaign rally to the strains of Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” Biden forecast this kind of a change four years ago when he talked about a bridge to a new generation, but that transformation didn’t take place until the past two weeks when he officially relinquished his grip on the party.

In Atlanta, the baton was fully passed to Kamala Harris. This was now her party. Her campaign. Her playlist.

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In fact, Joe Biden never came up.

From the music to the outfits — and, most tellingly, the crowd size — it was clearer than ever that the shift to a new Democratic generation was complete.

By and large, it is the same campaign aides who were putting on Biden events that are now in charge of Harris ones. But the types of crowds interested in attending Harris events — and the musicians willing to perform at them — are very different. The new playlist, even if controlled by the same staffers who curated Biden’s soundtrack (a mix including Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love,” Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” and Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom”), has a certain Harris flair, and is put together based on her personal input.

Campaign aides say they are still thinking about how Harris events will be different, and they are determined to not only do large-scale rallies but want to put her in smaller settings as well. The coming days will provide more of a test case as Harris picks a running mate and launches a seven-state tour that will probably include a range of venues.

Harris is attempting to harness the surge in organic enthusiasm to display a show of force around her campaign launch. Aides want to do so in ways that are not only helpful to the vice president’s case but also work to get under Trump’s skin (The Trump campaign has scheduled a rally on Saturday in the same Atlanta arena that Harris filled on Tuesday).

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The crowds to date in the Harris for president campaign are simply more energized. They’re bigger and louder. And it is a different tapestry than the Democratic Party has presented to a general electorate since at least 2016.

Biden is the candidate who works rope lines and owns small rooms, but has never been known as the one who can fill large arenas. Filling a middle school gymnasium, as he did last month, was reason for boasting, and success for him is the amount of time he spends on a rope line after the event rather than the number of total supporters who attend it. And four years ago, during the height of a global pandemic, the closest the president came to having large rallies was events where cars gathered, at a social distance, and honked their horns.

Harris, at least in the opening weeks of her candidacy, is drawing the kind of energy and excitement that Barack Obama drew in 2008 or that Donald Trump brought in 2016.

While Democrats have long had strong ties to the entertainment industry — attracting actors as donors and musicians as opening acts — the octogenarian who spent half a century as a politician and rarely dips into pop culture was not a source for inspiration. Biden’s prized possession is a car built in 1967 (a Corvette Stingray) and his favorite movie was made in 1981 (“Chariots of Fire”)

Biden often quotes Abraham Lincoln or Irish poets in his speeches. On Tuesday night, Harris was quoting hip-hop artists in hers.

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“Trump … Does not walk the walk,” she said. “Or as my friend Quavo would say: He does not walk it like he talks it.”

Biden often says the Black community was among those that “brung me to the dance.” But he most definitely did not have the playlist, or energy — or the dance — that came from Atlanta.

The rally marked a debut of sorts for Megan on C-SPAN, which streamed the event live. She took the stage amid flashing strobe lights, and was dressed in a blue pantsuit, a white shirt with exposed midriff, and a blue tie. She riffed on one of Harris’s strongest campaign planks: abortion rights.

“Our future president — let’s get this done, Atlanta,” she told the cheering crowd. “We’re about to make history with the first female president. The first Black female president. Let’s get this done, honey.”

As she sang her song “Body” she told the crowd: “Now, I know my ladies in the crowd love their bodies — and if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for.”

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Harris’s remarks were stylistically different from Biden’s, with her own cadence and without verbal digressions and the storytelling that Biden often relishes. But at the core, many of her policy aims did not significantly diverge from the ones that Biden promotes.

“Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said. “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

She talked about the need to tame inflation, and she spoke in sharp tones about immigration.

“He tanked — tanked — the bipartisan deal because he thought it would help him win an election,” Harris said. “Which goes to show, Donald Trump does not care about border security. He only cares about himself. I will bring back the border security bill, and I will sign it into law and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like.”

She mocked Trump’s policy positions — called some of the things from him and his running mate “just plain weird” — and poked fun at her GOP rival for not fully committing to a debate. While Biden also often mentions Trump, she seemed to take more glee in poking at her new rival.

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“Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider, to meet me on the debate stage,” she said, looking into the cameras. “Because as the saying goes, ‘If you got something to say, say it to my face.’”

Harris also echoed what has been a signature line in her brief time as a candidate, as she recalled her time as a prosecutor taking on “predators who abused women; fraudsters who ripped off consumers; cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”

“So hear me when I say,” she added, pausing for effect. “I know Donald Trump’s type.”

In Atlanta and elsewhere, there are calls-and-response. There is a rollicking feeling that often doesn’t exist amid polite applause at Biden’s events. When Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) on Tuesday night chided Trump for being “too scared to debate Vice President Harris,” the crowd began chanting, “Too scared! Too scared!”

When Harris referenced Trump’s legal problems and guilty verdicts, the crowd yelled, “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

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Biden has acknowledged his milquetoast taste.

“Isn’t it really dull when you have a president known for two things: Ray-Ban sunglasses and chocolate chip ice cream?” he said last month during a gathering in Harrisburg, Pa., as he sought to inject life into his reelection campaign.

Two weeks later, he was out of the race. And now he’s hoping to propel to victory a president known for things far less dull.



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