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Paul Toboni, president of baseball operations for the Washington Nationals, kept using the same word. Threading. As in the needle. As in the impossible seam a front office has to sew when its team is better than its plan.

The Nationals spent the trade deadline pulling two of their most popular players out of a clubhouse that’s overachieved all summer — Luis García Jr. to the Yankees on Sunday, then All-Star left-hander Foster Griffin to Cleveland on Monday — while refusing every offer for the one player the city has adopted as its own, CJ Abrams.

That’s not buying. It’s not selling. It’s the thing Toboni kept circling back to when he met the media Monday from Philadelphia: “trying to thread the needle.”

If you read the previous column in this space Friday, you knew the fork was coming. The question was whether they believed in this year enough to keep the players who made it fun or trusted the plan enough to cash them in. By Monday’s 6 p.m. deadline, they’d answered: cash them in, but only the rentals.

The foundation and the house

Toboni’s defense of that choice is worth hearing in full, because it’s the clearest articulation yet of how this front office thinks. Asked how he squares believing in this team with trading its best pitcher, he reached for a metaphor about building a home.

“If we pass up those opportunities to create this really strong foundation … we’ll be moving into the house without the foundation being totally strong,” he said. “And it might turn out, two or three years down the line, we might have to move out of the house because the foundation is cracking.”

That’s the whole philosophy in one image. Griffin, 31, and a free agent this winter, was a rental — a wonderful, , but still a rental. García, controllable only through 2027 and top three in the National League in slugging as of Monday night, was an appreciating asset the Nationals could sell at his peak.

Nationals have indeed traded Foster Griffin to Guardians. The four players they’re receiving, per source: AA LHP Josh Hartle (CLE’s No. 25 prospect), AAA LHP Will Dion, AA RHP Kendeglys Virguez and AA OF Nick Mitchell. (First reported by and )

— Mark Zuckerman (@MarkZuckerman)

Across the returns for Foster Griffin, Christian Franklin, Luis García Jr. and Curtis Mead, the Nationals have netted nine pitchers at this year’s trade deadline.

— Spencer Nusbaum (@spencernusbaum_)

Both returns were substantial: four players for Griffin, four more for García — part of a deadline that netted nine pitchers across four deals, following the earlier MacKenzie Gore and Curtis Mead trades. A front office that valued this season over the next three would have kept them and chased October — even after falling on the wrong end of a tough four-game series sweep in Atlanta over the weekend. Toboni valued the foundation.

The part that wasn’t cold

Here’s what complicates the tidy “asset optimization” read: Toboni didn’t pretend trading García was easy. In fact, it visibly cost him something.

He talked about being in the Dominican Republic last month and seeing photos of a 16-year-old García at the academy, “a smile from ear to ear … flying around the field.” Toboni talked about what the longest-tenured National means to a room.

“Everyone that comes into contact with someone like Luis,” he said, “he’s got a chance to make someone’s day just by greeting them and smiling and laughing, and we’re going to miss that.”

You can be skeptical of a front office’s motives and still take that at face value. Toboni framed the whole deadline as his brain and his heart at odds — the brain insisting on a stable foundation, the heart believing in the guys who built this surprise. The tell that he means it is that he didn’t resolve the tension. He let it sit there, unresolved, in front of a room of reporters.

The line he wouldn’t cross

Which brings us to CJ Abrams, and the clearest statement of intent Toboni made all day.

“If we wanted to trade CJ, we surely could have traded CJ,” he said. Teams called and the offers were real. But Toboni told Abrams before the team left for Atlanta that there was “less than a 10% chance” he’d be moved — and explained why in terms that had nothing to do with WAR or control years.

Abrams, he said, is what makes kids in D.C. fans of the Nationals. And that matters especially to a franchise still only 21 years old, still competing to win over a region that followed the Orioles faithfully for decades before baseball came back to D.C.

Toboni tied it back to his introductory news conference, when he talked about the importance of a city rallying around a team.

“What he means to the city,” Toboni said, “adds up to more than just what he’s producing out on the field.”

So the sell-off had a ceiling, and the ceiling was the player the franchise is building its identity around. Griffin and García were assets. Abrams, as explained by longtime baseball writer Thom Loverro on Friday, has a better chance to stay and be a cornerstone in Washington than the local kid, James Wood.

And though Toboni didn’t rule out an Abrams trade — “we’re just going to hold a really high bar for him,” he said — the Nats’ top baseball executive did exactly what a team that’s ahead of schedule, not desperate, is supposed to do.

What it means

Strip away the emotion and the deadline told you where the Nationals actually are. They’re a team that’s close enough to matter, not close enough to mortgage anything. They didn’t quit on 2026 — Toboni pointedly refused to, saying he wouldn’t “put a cap on what this team can achieve” and wouldn’t be surprised if the group exceeded expectations again. But they didn’t bet the future on it either.

The reckoning that never came Friday still hasn’t come. The extension questions on Abrams — and whether ownership will ever fund one — wait for an offseason that a looming labor fight may swallow whole. Monday only answered the small question: buy or sell. Toboni’s answer was both, and neither, and the needle he keeps talking about is still very much in his hand.

But for once, the Nationals made baseball decisions instead of budget excuses. And at least on Monday, they looked like an organization that knows the difference between a rental and a reason to believe.

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