The Nationals, in addition to their 20 rounds of picks, have generally signed a 1-2 Undrafted Free Agents (NDFAs) at the end of each draft. The last few years it’s been just a couple guys per year, but this year they signed a whole slew of them, some frankly promising, and were incredibly active in the days immediately following the draft. Not since 2022 have we seen this many NDFAs come on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This amount of guys is notable, because by and large each additional NDFA means someone has to make way within the organization (either to a dev list, or to the 60-day DL, or to get released altogether). I discussed in a comment on Nationalsprospects.com the below, but it bears repeating and cleaning up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Farm systems under the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement are capped as to the number of players you can have rostered, both by level and overall. By level, the limits are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, 33 rostered players (either active or on the 7-day DL)*5 domestic levels = a total domestic limit of 165 players. Anyone in the following situation does not count against the 165 limit:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I try to keep track of the running totals per team and for the system via XLS macros on the Big Board<\/a>. As of this writing and as of the 2026 Draft I have us at 160 ( it was at 161 earlier this week before the Robert Hassell trade<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, that 161 figure includes 40-man guys who are in the minors, who don\u2019t count against that limit (11 guys in AAA on the 40-man right now before any call-ups post All-Star Break), so we have exactly 149 active players in domestic minors. We just drafted 20 guys, we\u2019re probably going to sign 17-18 of them (which would put us at 167-168, meaning we\u2019d have to shed a couple guys to get under the limit by the end of the month. However, if we have a slew of NDFAs, it’s one in, and one out. So, the more guys we sign, the more room we have to clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, players on 60 day\/full season IL don\u2019t count, nor do restricted list guys. So, it would probably be very easy to move 3 guys to one of these two lists. Just this week Erik Tolman for example moved off of the Developmental list where he\u2019d been sitting for weeks. Hayes in AAA has spent most of the season on that list, pretty typical for backup\/bullpen catcher types. There\u2019s 3 catchers on the High-A roster; one of them can go on the dev list. And, there\u2019s 8 guys on the 7-day DL in Low-A, some of whom who have been there since Mid April, so it seems that making space by moving guys to 60-day will be pretty easy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, at some point we’ll start to see some releases, since we’re adding the below NDFAs<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back to the NDFAs. Let’s run through them; these guys lasted the entire 20 round draft w\/o getting picked, but who can now sign for a $20k bonus figure. I’ll do some stat-analysis and background per what info I can find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We may add a few more NDFAs to this list, if so I’ll update.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note: D1baseball’s NDFA tracker lists a 7th player to us at this time, but the source has him signing with another team. BA’s NDFA tracker has us with these 6 players for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Nationals, in addition to their 20 rounds of picks, have generally signed a 1-2 Undrafted Free Agents (NDFAs) at the end of each draft. The last few years it’s been just a couple guys per year, but this year they signed a whole slew of them, some frankly promising, and were incredibly active in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4324],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-draft","category-prospects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19763"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19768,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19763\/revisions\/19768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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