For new Nats draftees, the road to Fredericksburg has been uniquely different (2024)

Draft season has officially descended upon Major League Baseball as the All-Star Game in Arlington, Texas, approaches.

Sunday night marks the first round of the MLB First-Year Player Draft and this season, the Washington Nationals have the 10th overall selection, looking for yet another piece to help in this post-World Series title rebuild.

“It’s an exciting time because usually around August, these guys come here,” Fredericksburg Nationals manager Jake Lowery said. “We don’t really know anything until it actually happens, but it is a cool time.”

Lowery has seen some of the brightest stars in the Washington Nationals system come through his office over the past three seasons. Recent first-round picks Dylan Crews (2023) and Brady House (2021) stopped in Fredericksburg and have worked their way up the system to Triple-A Rochester.

Others have seen slower growth, players like Elijah Green, now in his third season with Fredericksburg.

“It’s an eye-opening experience,” Lowery said. “… For us as a staff, it’s getting to know the guys personally, getting to know their skillset, what makes them tick, and also just introducing the game to them, what things are going to happen throughout the season, throughout a series. It’s getting them used to the routines and daily schedule.”

Lowery is often the first of what Washington hopes will be many managers in a player’s career, and a first impression is important. At the same time, every player’s individual journey is different, just like his draft process.

“On draft night, honestly, I didn’t think I was going,” FredNats right-handed pitcher Mason Denaburg said. “Once it hit like 20-30, I was like ‘Alright, I’m just going to go to college’ and then the Nats called at 27 and I couldn’t turn it down.”

Denaburg was a first-round selection in 2018 right out of high school. Injuries, control issues and the 2020 minor-league COVID shutdown have made his stay in Fredericksburg longer than expected.

As a high schooler, professional baseball was new to him, but he learned on the fly and attributed a big part of his growth to getting Tommy John surgery in 2021 alongside current Nationals pitcher Jake Irvin.

“I had a good group of guys that I got drafted with,” Denaburg said. “... They became my close friends. At the time, I was young and I didn’t really know how things worked, but I learned from them. That helped me most, having a guy you could lean on throughout the whole thing.”

Then, there’s the college draftees, players like Crews, who soared through Single-A, playing just 14 games with the FredNats last season.

Joining him in last year’s draft class was Marcus Brown, a fifth-round pick out of Oklahoma State, one of the premier college baseball programs in the country.

“I actually didn’t meet with the Nationals at all,” Brown said. “I just filled out a five-question survey. Sometimes, it works like that to where you maybe meet with 20 teams and none of those 20 are even talking to you on draft day. … It was a really cool moment. To be able to share that with my family in my living room was pretty awesome.”

Through past experiences from teammates and help from his agency, PSI Sports, Brown had a great understanding of what to expect once he joined Washington’s system.

He’s bounced between Low-A Fredericksburg and High-A Wilmington over the past year, still getting his bearings as he traverses through the pro ball landscape.

Soon, a number of new faces will start their own journey for the Nats in a few weeks and before the end of this season. Some of those new faces will find themselves intertwined with Denaburg, Brown and the rest of the FredNats roster.

“It was a lot of fun being able to celebrate after that because the most nerve-wracking part is when you’re still on the board,” Brown said. “… It’s just learning to acclimate to playing baseball every single day, learning to deal with some failures and make tweaks.”