This article goes into the budget. Rizzo says Lerners will give him the money "if it makes sense."
the http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/as-winter-meetings-begin-nationals-general-manager-mike-rizzo-open-to-upgrading-roster/2013/11/12/f2d901e2-4bdd-11e3-be6b-d3d28122e6d4_story.html
Nice and ambiguous. Kilgore speculates that the team was at about $125MM between scheduled increases, likely arbitration, and filling out the roster with minimum wage guys to replace Tracy and Haren. MLBTR projects Fister to get $6.9MM this year, so that bumps the projected payroll to over $130MM right now, with no other moves.
We know the luxury tax threshold is $189MM. You can assume they have a chunk of that budgeted for signing Harper or his replacement, probably Desmond and Ramos, and some of their pitchers. Figure they try to get by on the cheap with Span and then Goodwin or some other system product, and maybe view Skole as the 1st baseman of the future. Those would be the spots they might have future cost savings planned. I don't see this market supporting a $200MM team, but I could see the Lerners maybe going a little higher than Detroit given our market is better and deep pockets for an aging owner.
Without getting into the spitting contest of whether I have the "slightest clue" regarding future payroll, I think it's safe to assume that we have a Detroit/Angels type upper limit - maybe $150 million or so. Right now we're around $130 million. Once LaRoche and Soriano come off the books we'll have $40 million or so annually to devote to long-term salary increases for Zimmermann, Strasburg and Desmond, as well as the "becoming more expensive all the time" nature of the other young guys on the roster. I don't include Harper because I assume we can basically pay for him out of the money we save when Werth comes off the books.
Within spitting distance, that's a pretty accurate representation of what we're facing, I think. So if you want Cano, you have to assume we have more like a $175 million budget in the future, or that we're going to make some tough choices.
I'm okay with arguing over whether or not Cano might give us a better chance at a World Series even if we drop a couple other guys - I disagree but that's a valid argument. It's ridiculous to not think these things (signing Cano v. signing other players on the roster currently) affect one another. Guys don't leave contending ballclubs for market value. If you split the $200 million for Cano evenly between Zimmermann and Desmond at 6/$100 million apiece, it's overwhelmingly likely they'll sign those deals.
So I don't understand the charge of a false choice.
