Nats are trying to go for it again behind an elite rotation

The Nationals' opening day starter against the Mets is 36 and entering his 14th big league season. The pitcher who will start the season's second game is 32 and needed wrist surgery last summer after throwing only five innings.

The club's No. 3 starter is 31 but coming off a career-worst season in which he had the highest WHIP in the majors. And the guy who was just signed to serve as the No. 4 starter is 37 on the heels of back-to-back rough seasons.

This is the rotation general manager Mike Rizzo is asking to shoulder the weight of his ballclub's hopes in 2021. It's risky. And it's also the best chance the Nats have at winning their second World Series title in three years.

Look, the only way the Nationals are reassuming their prior status as contenders in the National League East and ultimately in the postseason is via an elite rotation. That's been Rizzo's modus operandi for a long time, and that point has been made repeatedly here and elsewhere.

And when you've got Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin under contract for one more season together, you do whatever you reasonably can to supplement that previously elite rotation with another quality arm.

Trevor Bauer wasn't reasonable. The Nats already have three starters on nine-figure contracts, two of them in excess of $200 million. No, the move here was to acquire a veteran with a track record who would come on a short-term deal, preferably one year.

That's why Jon Lester made so much sense all along. No, he's probably not going to be elite Jon Lester anymore (though as recently as 2018 he went 18-6 with a 3.32 ERA and finished ninth in Cy Young Award voting). But he doesn't need to be that guy, not on this team, not in this rotation.

What do the Nationals need Lester to be? They need him to be the 2019 version of Aníbal Sánchez (perhaps minus that ugly April and early May). They need him to take the ball every fifth day and give them a chance to win.

Lester is as durable as they get. He made at least 31 starts and totaled at least 171 innings every season from 2008-19. And if you extrapolate his 2020 numbers over a full, 162-game season, they work out to 32 starts and 165 innings.

He gave up zero or one run in six of his 12 starts last year. His other six starts were pretty ragged, and that is something he'll need to address with Jim Hickey, his pitching coach in Chicago in 2018 and now his pitching coach in D.C.

Hickey, who previously coached Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Roy Oswalt in Houston, David Price, Blake Snell and Chris Archer in Tampa Bay and Lester, Yu Darvish and Cole Hamels in Chicago, now must help an equally talented rotation rediscover its peak form.

It's impossible to know today if it'll work. Maybe Scherzer and Lester really just don't have it in them anymore. Maybe Strasburg's injury will have lingering effects. Maybe Corbin's struggles last season weren't an anomaly.

But maybe it does work. Maybe a normal spring training and full season makes the difference for Scherzer and Corbin. Maybe Strasburg returns fresh and picks up right where he left off in October 2019. And maybe Lester is reinvigorated pitching for a new club, embracing his last best chance to win a fourth World Series title with his third different team.

Make no mistake: That's what the Nationals are thinking today. Rizzo said earlier this winter that ownership had instructed him to construct a "championship-caliber roster," and his acquisitions to date suggest he's attempting to do just that with whatever resources he has available to him.

Sure, they could've spent big bucks on big names like Bauer, George Springer or J.T. Realmuto. That would put them in an even better position to win. But those moves were never realistic. This team already was going to have a top-10 payroll in 2021, maybe even top-five. They weren't going to make a run at being No. 1 in that department.

The additions of Lester, Josh Bell and Kyle Schwarber - plus a few more secondary moves that still need to be made - didn't break the bank but they still suggest an organization that is trying to win right now.

The Nationals' planned path to success this year now appears plain as day: Get great starting pitching every night and hope a revamped lineup mashes its way to enough runs to win most of those games.

It may work. It may go down in flames. But the Nats are going for it in 2021.