David Huzzard: Would losing benefit the Nationals in the near future?

It is still early in the baseball season and no amount of struggling by the Nationals will change that. There are still just over five months and 140 games left until the end of the season. It is a tiring refrain to hear that it's early, but no matter what happens these games are going to be played. War or work stoppage are the only forces that have ever halted a baseball season before its conclusion, and no matter how poorly the Nationals play, Major League Baseball isn't simply going to allow them to pack up and go home.

With those caveats out of the way, I have to admit a bad thought that has crossed my mind. While the Nationals have to play to a 94-win pace to finish with 90 wins on the season - and that should be doable for a team with enough talent that they were predicted to win 96-plus - I can't help but wonder if they wouldn't be better off losing this season. That might sound crazy, as many experts will say the Nationals' window is closing, but the 2016 Nationals will still have Bryce Harper, Anthony Rendon, Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Gio Gonzalez.

The Nationals already have a top 10 farm system and if they don't improve by the time July rolls around, general manager Mike Rizzo could get an influx of even more talent for Jordan Zimmermann, Ian Desmond, Doug Fister and Denard Span. Michael A. Taylor, before he was sent back to Triple-A, had an .814 OPS, demonstrating that he can handle major league pitching, and current Padres property Trea Turner (the player to be named in the Steven Souza Jr. deal) has gotten off to a good start in the Texas League. As those two are direct replacements to two of the players the Nationals will be losing before the 2016 season, it is good to see them doing well. Imagine the Nationals being able to add even more young, controllable talent to the 2016 roster.

One of the main problems with the 2015 Nationals is they've looked slow in the field and listless at the plate. In other words, they've looked old. The deadline is also a time where teams can drop expensive contracts. Jayson Werth has done well in his time with the Nationals, but he is about to enter what are going to be his most expensive and likely least productive years. If the Nationals could get someone else to take on that, or even half that, contract, they can add the savings to the $47.9 million that will be coming off the books when Desmond, Span, Zimmermann and Fister leave town.

I'm not arguing that the Lerners should pocket all that money; I'm saying that in a free agent class with Justin Upton, Jason Heyward, and David Price, it would be nice to have some money to throw around. The Nationals will have all that whether they turn it around or not, but what they won't have is whatever they could get for Zimmerman, Span, Desmond and Fister at the deadline. Consider how the 2012 Red Sox took a team of overpriced veterans and turned it into the 2013 world champions. A bad season in what was supposed to be a go-for-it year isn't the end of the world. The 2016 Nationals are going to have the same core as the 2015 Nationals. It is the players surrounding that core that are going to be different, and if the struggles continue, the Nationals could have a chance to make that group even better.

The best-case scenario is that the Nationals play better. That they play .580 or even .600 baseball from now until the end of the season and end up with a spot in the playoffs. The 2014 Nationals went 11-15 in May. The April record of the 2015 Nationals won't be much worse than that and that team finished with 96 wins and the best record in the National League. One bad month doesn't doom a season, but one bad season certainly won't doom the franchise - even if it comes in a year that was supposed to be World Series or bust.

David Huzzard blogs about the Nationals at Citizens of Natstown. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidHuzzard. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our regular roster of writers.