TRADES!
Trades are the bane of the continued success of any team more than anything. They directly move out good young players in favor of other things. Trades deplete your youth trading wins now for wins later in a gamble to reach loftier heights. These gambles often don't pay off but eventually it's hard to avoid making them. That's because the goal is not to win a bunch of games. It's to win all the games, or at least all the ones you need to finish the season as champion.
The Nats' early trades (pre-2009) were unimpressive mostly* because they didn't have much to deal. Both the minor leagues and the majors had limited talent. A lot of the deals were challenge trades to try to see if the major league talent they had could be turned into slightly better talent. Langerhans for Morse? Milledge and Hanrahan for Burnett and Morgan? Sure, why not?
The Nats started making refresh deals really in 2009. Unless you are sending out high quality players (note : The Nats didn't have many high quality players) these type of deals are really about quantity. You are going to get back various levels of lottery tickets so you try to make as many as you can expecting a couple useful players while hoping to luck into something special. Joe Beimel, Nick Johnson, Ronnie Belliard were all sent out the door in 2009, but the limited returns they could fetch didn't turn into much. 2010 was a different story as Matt Capps brought back a stunningly high level prospect in Wilson Ramos and Cristian Guzman brought back Tanner Roark who'd later surprise. More trades mostly dealing nothing and getting nothing happened after that but then we got a surprise.
The Nats made a deal to send out a bunch of talent from a system just getting together. In return they'd get a talented major league player. Gio Gonzalez was brought in for Derek Norris, Tommy Milone, AJ Cole, and Brad Peacock. Norris and Cole were among the Nats best prospects, and Milone and Peacock were Top 20 prospects in a deep system full of major league talent if not major league stars. All would end up doing something in the majors. But the trade was appropriate. The Nats could let Cole go if they got back a multi-year starter like Gio. Norris wasn't needed anymore after that trade brought in Ramos. It was a well thought out trade by both sides.
At this point the Nats started to win and the question was whether they would make those deals we talked about to start. They did, but not just those deals and not in a panic. High level guys like Alex Meyer and Robbie Ray went out to fulfill needs but also the Nats used off years like 2013 and talent gluts to deal out guys to refresh the system. An example that worked out as well as any such deal could was be the deal that brought in Trea Turner and Joe Ross for Steven Souza.
2014 and 2015 passed with the Nats in contention and being very very minor deadline buyers. Things had gone as well as one could expect for over 5+ years. Some good guys went out, some good guys came in. It wasn't much coming in, the Nats first had little talent, then were mostly buyers, but it was enough to supplement the draft choices and international signings.
In 2015 though we did get a warning sign that the organization wasn't perfect. Jerry Blevins was sent out for Matt den Dekker. The trade itself wasn't terribly impactful, but it was a bad deal with the general consensus being the Nats giving more than they got. Worse was seemingly the reason behind it, that Blevins would be traded for going to arbitration and making Rizzo mad. Staying ahead on trades is hard enough when you are being objective. That the Nats org could make a bad deal based on emotion was a troubling sign.
Heading toward what looked like the closing of the window, in 2016 they pushed a little harder and sent out four guys at the deadline, nothing too impactful, but it was their biggest trading of prospects yet. Then in the offseason came the deal that would start the fall of the system. Out went Dunning, Giolito, and Lopez for Eaton. It was an understandable deal on paper but the Nats vastly missed on the scouting of their own players. Dunning and Giolito have both become mid rotation starters with at least flashes of something more. Lopez has been a usable arm. That's way too much to give up for Eaton. The Nats bet that Cole and Fedde and Ross and maybe Voth would be as good or better but they were ultimately not. Eaton would of course help win a series but ultimately fail to live up to the Nats hopes for him in part thanks to dreaded injuries.
The system wasn't done but you'd now sent out a sizable chunk of talent. A desperate run in 2017 would send out more. Neuse, Luzardo, Treinen, and a couple other guys would go out as the Nats rebuilt their pen. The system kept dropping.
The kicker ended up being the fire sale in 2018. Possibly fueled by Rizzo's annoyance at certain players, the Nats traded a couple of their major league caliber relievers. They got back one middling prospect and cash. As the team faltered they eventually also sent out key players like Daniel Murphy and Gio and others. The return? Next to nothing. In the end a half dozen major league players would go out and half a dozen minor leaguers would come in but it made hardly a dent in even the Nats modest Top 20 prospects.
Trading is hard but for 6 years the Nats did a very good job of it. That's not to say the didn't lose some good players. They did. And it's not to say they got in all winners. They didn't. But at the end of the day, looking at any long stretch of time, the Nats always seemed to come out a little ahead. That's all you could ask for. As the Nats reached the end of their window though they got more concerned with winning now and that spurred on more and bigger deals. Here it is imperative you know what you are dealing and the Nats targetted the wrong starting pitchers to deal and keep with precision. It was a big failure of self-scouting. When a chance came to correct it, with a potential sell-off in 2018, the Nats didn't go all in, made a couple deals for possibly the wrong reasons, and came away with little. There was an attempt at a correction later but with less time left in the season the returns were smaller and again the Nats scouting couldn't bring back anything. A lot of players went out, a lot of the wrong players went out, and little came back. It was a pretty terrible 20 month run of organizational destruction.
But trades for a good team don't usually build you up and while they can account for a lot of the taking of talent away, you can't blame them too much for the lack of talent in. They are only supplemental in that regard. So when in 2021 you are looking at a barren system and it's been several years since you were big time buyers the fault lies somewhere else. Monday we'll look at that - draft and int'l signing failures.
*Alfonso Soriano deal excluded
15 comments:
Nice write up overall. I didn’t know that Soriano was acquired via trade. It should be noted what the Nats didn’t do with Soriano: trade him. Though it seemed foolish at the time, one of the draft picks they got for him was Jordan Zimmermann. But maybe that’s more fitting in the upcoming draft post.
I don’t think the Blevins drama or Kintzler/Kelley drama is all that big a deal. I doubt the trades for Eaton and for Doolittle and Madson were done on an emotional basis, even if they resulted in negative net value (though Luzardo got demoted to AAA and then traded)
Agreed that the Eaton trade was bad from a value perspective, but it was also a good trade from a value perspective! Because Eaton helped the Nats get a title. No guarantee they win without him. Same thing with Doolittle.
Agree that they got next to nothing on the 2018 deals for Murphy and Gio, but I don’t think the market value for either player was very high. I think they mainly moved them to clear salary.
All in all, I’m happy with Rizzo’s approach. Some tactical mistakes here and there, but fairly sound strategy. He was deserving of his extension
I think the Kintzler and Kelley trade aways were emotional. Both in the "want to win trying to shake team up" sense and the "Im mad Grrrrr" sense. Obviously not a huge deal but you know maybe non-emotional they get SOMETHING from that and the Blevins deal. And for the rest of the sell-off it's just the totality of getting nothing. Yes it's hard but you'd expect something back. A 2-year middling reliever, a guy who is 3 years is a bench rider. Something.
About the Eaton trade this is all about why they stink now, not if they should have done the deals. Particularly for the Eaton trade there's a thought - could they have included someone else instead of Dunning or Giolito? Usually these aren't set in stone (though Giolito might have been a demand) Almost any arm in the system would have worked out better.
I'd still give Rizzo the benefit of the doubt. His post this time dealings have returned to the old ways. Got Gomes and Hudson haven't given away much. Trades this sell off look to bear several major league players (talent to be decided). I think it was just a bad period that started with trying to win in a closing window creating some tough sells and snowballed on him with that underachieving 2018 team.
Yeah, 2018 was pretty brutal. A buddy and I were sitting a few rows in front of Rizzo at a game in August, hollering at him to fire Davey after he left McGowin in too long (hey, that sounds familiar!) Losing Bryce that winter, after not having traded him at the deadline, felt like the end. I wonder how we'd look back on that decade if they hadn't won it all the next year.
What a fascinating--and really, a first-rate--meditation. And like all such meditations (two more to come!), it provokes a stream of questions and (re)evaluations.
The principal one (to me, anyway) is the proverbial elephant in the room: Mike Rizzo.
Unlike @G Cracka X, I do think Rizzo's emotional infusion into the Blevins and (especially) Kintzler mini-tempests was a big deal for what it revealed about Rizzo. True, any impatience and frustration with the team's inability to win the big one was understandable. But to make it personal and wield his authority like a club suggested a creeping arrogance that never bodes well for constructing a team that requires a cool, dispassionate, objective eye to make it successful.
Rizzo signed an extension in the spring of 2018 (until 2020) and his sense of frustration as the season progressed was almost palpable. (How much was Lerner-generated frustration is crucial; since I don't know, I'm willing to concede that Rizzo may have felt coerced by Lerner pressure into doing something he otherwise wouldn't have done.)
The admittedly unexpected (and fluky) convergence of magic in 2019 was the last exertion of an exhausted organization. Rizzo got an extension to 2023 and this blog's comments screamed "In Rizzo We Trust" louder than ever. The plethora of Rizzo-Is-The-Smartest-GM-In-Baseball stories were actually a warning klaxon. One got the impression that Rizzo himself came to believe he was the smartest GM in baseball.
The 2020 Covid season camouflaged, somewhat, what the organization had been reduced to. 2021 merely confirmed it. The biggest Rizzo question--to me, anyway--is whether Rizzo even stays until 2023. If he can't manage (an unprecedented) rapid rebuild into a contender, he'll be seeking greener pastures.
By then it'll be someone else's mess to fix.
There aren't many greener pastures. This is a pretty big market with a owner who spends. I think a little arrogance isn't bad and in this case will motivate Rizzo to fix his own mess; mostly because he's said he can.
The biggest fault I find with Rizzo's tenure so far was to not start the rebuild last year. But had it been me, I probably would have started it when we were sucking at the start of 2019 and I would have cost us all a championship. I know nothing...
@Jon Quimby I remember the blog post on this site after the 19-31 start in 2019. Davey’s getting fired was a given. The debate in the comment section was basically: reload or rebuild? Honestly, your instinct to rebuild was a sensible one. Imagine how much the Nats could have fetched by trading Scherzer at that point? I mean, essentially none of us really believed they could even make the playoffs at that point. Even when the Nats were likely to win a wild card spot, I think many fans were lukewarm since the Wild Card game itself is a coin toss and even if they win, how in the world can they do much of anything in the playoffs with a historically bad bullpen?
11 teams have a higher payroll than the Nats. Lotsa green pastures.
2019 was a great year to rebuild, I thought at the time. If they had rebuilt then, would that have been it for Rizzo or did the team's overall win rate give him some latitude? Does Rizzo trade from anger or culture? I think he was thought his manager could lose the club house (whatever that means) and traded to prevent that. He certainly didn't trade for on-field reasons, but that doesn't mean it was emotional.
No mention at all of Papelbon? Ouch!
Harper, thanks for the Talking Heads reference. Very apt.
Re: Papelbon. I find it kind of funny that probably the key element of the trade for the Washington Strangler was the psyche of a player and oddly not the psyche of the guy who, well, won himself the nickname of the "Washington Strangler" by trying to choke out Bryce. Papelbon pitched well after we got him, but Drew Storen utterly and absolutely melted down. Now, obviously trying to diagnose a baseball player's psychology from the stands is...not ideal...but the sequence of events did nothing to dispel the idea that Storen had some issues going on, especially because he'd been great up to that point that season and was never right again.
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