Last Friday, the Nationals released a pair of new jerseys, and also announced they will be retiring the popular City Connect jerseys at the end of the 2024 season. Additionally, the all-red jersey with the Curly W logo will not be a part of this season’s rotation.

While neither new ensemble is particularly inspiring, I spent the last few days chewing on why they bothered me so much. After all, they’re just jerseys, and alternates at that. It’s unlikely that either sticks around for longer than a few seasons tops.

Ultimately, I landed on this: the jerseys are part of a bigger problem - the Nationals’ lack of identity at all levels over the last five years. From on-field decisions to the front office approach, indecision and lack of identity has now even reached the team’s visual look.

The lack of direction goes all the way back to the 2021 season (if not before). The Nationals left some net value on the table in the Max Scherzer/Trea Turner trade to pursue Josiah Gray and Keibert Ruiz because of their big-league proximity. It seemingly signaling a desire for a quick turnaround built around Juan Soto. But the following offseason only yielded Nelson Cruz, giving Davey Martinez an underwhelming roster if the goal was to compete in any real way.

The Lerner family then announced it was exploring a sale of the team during the 2021-2022 offseason. And while some reports that Ted Leonsis/David Rubenstein and Michael Kim-led groups expressed interest (and, in the case of Leonsis, an offer) over the last two years, it’s remained unclear how serious the family is about moving the team, seemingly due to rifts between managing principal owner Mark Lerner (who seemingly wants to keep the team) and the rest of the family.

To this day, it’s unclear what ownership’s intentions are; was the announcement a ploy to expedite a resolution on the MASN situation? Was it just cover for the team to take some years off from luxury tax-level payrolls as the family sizes up its post-COVID financial situation? And what does that mean for the future of the team? Will spending ramp back up as the team gets more competitive and Patrick Corbin’s deal comes off the books, or is this what the next era of Nationals baseball will look like so long as the team is Lerner-owned?

Now let’s move into the summer of 2022. Even amidst a pending sale, the Nationals offered Juan Soto a $440-million extension in the weeks leading up to the trade deadline. After an anemic offseason, it was a sign of life from ownership - a clear indicator that money was still there when the Lerners determined it appropriate to use.

Since trading Soto, however, the most expensive player the team has been tied to was Jeimer Candelario, who signed a 3-year, $45-million deal with the Reds this offseason. The return of deep-pocketed ownership was short-lived.

Even if the intention in extending Soto was to put a marketable asset in place and boost the team’s sale value, the lack of spending is confusing. Several other opportunities to do the same have presented themselves over the last two seasons, and all signs and reporting have suggested the Nationals have not even sniffed around said opportunities.

Would Japanese stars like Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, and Jung Hoo Lee not have bolstered international interest in (and the valuation of) the Nationals? Would signing Aaron Judge before last season not have had at least as strong a value-add to the franchise as Soto? The organization should be commended for its efforts to extend Soto, but the way those evidently-available dollars have since dried up in the aftermath has, again, sent a confusing message to the fan base.

2023 then started to produce some exciting results from key pieces in the Juan Soto trade. MacKenzie Gore, though inconsistent, had several starts that showcased his ace-level upside. And CJ Abrams quickly established himself as one of the most exciting players to watch in this new group. After a rough start to the 2023 season, he won over Nats fans everywhere with a strong second half filed with homers, stolen bases, and bat flips.

But even as they push CJ as one of the faces of the rebuild, he gets reprimanded by recently-extended manager Davey Martinez for the “antics.”

The Nationals social media account is celebrating Abrams’ success and swag, all while his manager is telling him to cut the crap. What’s the message to the fan base? Are we allowed to enjoy the Nationals being a fun team? Or does the organization want fans to desire a roster that “plays the game the right way” (read: old school)?

An old school vs. new school/“then vs. now” tension is at the heart of much of the team’s other mixed messaging.

As you walk around Nationals Park, much of the concourse has “baseball history” imagery that isn’t tied to the Nationals organization. Is this still the same franchise that arrived in 2005 with no history of its own? Are we really needing to rely on generic baseball history to fill white space? Or is this about drawing less attention to the accomplishments by the slew of stars that the team has let walk out the door in the last five years, because we probably shouldn’t remind people of that any more than is already obvious…

A lack of storytelling ability and a consistent inability to retain key stars has made much of the last decade of dominance feel as if it never happened. With so many key contributors to those runs still active in the league (and in some cases, active in the division), celebrating that success feels like living in the past, but the team has failed to this point to give fans something to new move onto.

The jerseys, as follow-up’s to an already-different look on the oft-used City Connect jerseys from 2023, are a clear statement of a desire to move in a new direction and a new chapter post-2019. That’s good!

And yet, 2019-era fixtures Gerardo Parra and Sean Doolittle have both been added to the big-league coaching staff since the start of the offseason. Other faces from the team have been brought back each offseason ranging from Anibal Sanchez to Matt Adams. And 2019 is the consistent trump card used as proof the franchise can become a force once again, particularly with Davey Martinez at the helm.

And more than any design gripes, this is perhaps the most frustrating part of the new jerseys: regardless of what one thinks of any specific jersey the Nationals will wear in 2024, the collection as a whole doesn’t have any sense of identity or theme. When you think of the Yankees, you think pinstripes. The Dodgers have the clean home whites with the blue script.

With the Nationals, it was theoretically the Curly W. Are they wanting to change that? It’s hard to tell.

Is the team looking to silence the “Walgreens!!” crowd once and for all and move toward embracing one of the reintroduced logos as its primary logo? Is the Curly W here to stay, with these new additions simply looking to add some variety? Or are the Nationals resorting to a directionless “choose your own adventure” buffet without any central branding that ties it all together? The latter feels most consistent with where the team has been in the aftermath of the 2019 World Series run.

As they enter their 20th season, the Nationals are still a relatively young franchise. It’s normal that they’re still trying to build some sense of long-term identity. The Tampa Bay Rays altered their name nine years into things; the Marlins’ general aesthetic has drastically altered since they joined the league in the 1990s; these things take some time.

But as the team enters its third decade, the task of team leadership will not just be restoring a winning product - it will be establishing an identity and reputation for this team that goes beyond a single core group from the 2010s, beyond a single title in 2019, beyond the indecision of the last five years, and beyond a mismatch of conflicting visuals that give the team a lack of central branding.