GARCIA - .239 / .275 / .403 (last 7d - .316 / .316 / .368) A bunch of singles
RUIZ - .278 / .328 / .315 w NATS- (.471 / .500 / .529) I know I said don't even start to judge him until this season is over but it's a relief to see him hit a little. Even if there's a .500 BABIP backing him. More important is that 1 K. More worrisome is that 0 BBs (he got hit by a pitch if you were looking at the OBP)
KIEBOOM - .213 / .311 / .333 (.053 / .217 / .053) - Not looking forward to those first 40 games to start next year. But you can hardly sell lower so I don't see what other options the Nats have with this guy at this point.
ADAMS - .288 / .413 / .500 (.000 / .333 / .000)
- still barely playing - only 6 PA in the past week. I do question why Avila needs to play at this point though. Those 6 PAs should be Riley's.
THOMAS - .292 / .384 / .531 (.259 / .355 / .556) - Not as awesome and still striking out way too much, but you'd definitely still take this as a 3/4 OF type.
STEVENSON - .228 / .285 / .327 (.250 / .250 / .250) - Also a victim of playing time. This guy is done here.
THOMPSON -
3.15ERA 1.700WHIP 4.96FIP 10.4H/9 1.4HR/9 5.0BB/9 8.1K/9 - A much better week with no homers or walks. Relief pitching flops around a LOT. A starter starting once will give you 5-6 IP a week. A reliever tops out at 3.
GRAY - 6.15ERA 1.434WHIP 6.75FIP 8.5H/9 2.8HR/9
4.4BB/9 8.7K/9 - Ugly last start. Control is still lost. I'm not sure if he's nipping to avoid the homers but the solo homers were honestly better. He can go deeper in games and also not leave games in trouble.
Patrick MURPHY (26) - picked up released
Blue Jay - not a good week for Murphy, not striking out anyone in 1 1/3 and his guys coming around.
Josh
ROGERS (26) - 2.16ERA, 1.000WHIP, 4.52FIP, 8.8H/9, 1.1HR/9, 2.5BB/9, 5.8K/9. Rogers though - really upped the Ks some how and lowered the BBs. Helps to face MIA and COL. MIA is one of the worst hitting teams in baseball and COL on the road (.215 / .290 / .348) makes them look like Juan Soto's. That being said this is still good (and the bad pitching you've seen is REALLY bad)
8 comments:
Thanks for puling all these together, Harper, but there is a real asymmetry to your takes. Good events get filtered for recency bias and regression to the mean, but bad events get mostly accepted as estimates of true talent.
Lane Thomas has a .900+ OPS in the trailing seven days and overall with the team, and he's workable as a 3/4 OF. That would rank ~15th among qualified batters. Above Trea. Above Mookie. He's "striking out way too much" compared to Soto, maybe, but his strikeout rate with the Nats is 21.2%. Below league average. Below Bryce. Below Votto (who is having a great year despite his worst K% rate ever by a lot -- weird).
My point is that Thomas as he's playing now is a goddamn all-star. If you want to make the case his median 2022 projection should be quite a bit worse, I'd agree with you. In-season Zips is not a believer, with a projected ROS OPS under .700. That would ~120th among 137 qualified hitters. (It's a 50 point improvement over his preseason projection, but it would still leave him as a good 4OF. Given the lag in how projection systems respond to new data, your "workable as a starter but you're not happy about it" projection for next year actually feels about right.)
But then you have to do the same with the underperforming guys. Ruiz and Garcia's bad performances, Kieboom's terrible performance. You can't straight line project that into next year anymore than you can for Thomas. In-season Zips for Ruiz and Garcia have improved slightly since the preseason projections (mostly from their excellent AAA work, probably), and they still look to be 1-2 WAR players next year. Kieboom's in-season projection is right around his preseason one, and he's still looking likely to be a 1+ WAR player. (I think Zips thinks he's getting pretty unlucky with a .264 BABIP and -.030 between wOBA and xwOBA, because he's way underperforming his projections for this year, but the ROS projections have barely moved.)
Automatons shouldn't lean into pessimism any more than into optimism. Trust me, this fan base has plenty of folks defending themselves against disappointment by being continually convinced that we're doomed. We don't need any help on that front from our favorite robot.
(That said, in support of the doom, the pitching and especially the bullpen has been almost comically bad. Like worse than really should be possible for professional baseball players to be. Since the trade deadline our pitching staff has -0.2 WAR by FG -- the whole staff below replacement over 400 innings! Bonkers. And no idea if there's a plausible fix to get us even close to average for next year.)
Short of it is - age and experience matter a lot to me. Age maybe more than anything. If I see something good and you are young I'm more likely to hang onto that. That's why I feel I might even be a little too POSITIVE about Gray right now, who's objetively looked kind of disaster ish. If Ruiz finishes strong I'll probably be very positive on him for 2023.
Kieboom has been uniformly awful for two years (plus a cup of coffee in 2019) and isn't that young anymore. I can't generate excitement for a guy who has shown almost nothng. Thomas - it's all age. Next year he'll be 26/27. Essentially we are seeing his peak which probably includes a fluky power burst. If he were 23 I'd be far more excited.
That makes sense. (And I agree especially on Gray. He's been awful, but pitchers have non-linear progressions and he might still be a really good pitcher by 2023 -- those chances are smaller than they were 30 days ago, though.)
I guess the distinction for me is between exciting and useful. To me exciting tracks with "projectable to 3+ WAR true talent" or something. And I agree that Thomas is not exciting in a way that performance from even a 24 year old would be. This is peak-Thomas on a hot streak, and it's great that he has streaks like this in him, but for every 20 guys in that spot, maybe one becomes Justin Turner and delivers at a comparable level for years.
Likewise, Kieboom's struggles have drastically reduced his chances. Same with Robles. Garcia was always a stretch to become that good. We can still dream on Ruiz, but to me the most likely outcome is that no non-Soto batter on our current roster ever reaches that level.
But 1-3 WAR players are still useful, and can be important contributors to contenders. And that seems the most likely true talent in 2023 for all of these guys (Kieboom, Thomas, Ruiz, Robles, and Garcia). Add in Soto and a 4WAR SS FA, and that's a playoff ready lineup. Not a lineup, but perfectly solid playoff lineup, even if most of them are closer to 1 WAR than 3.
I'm not betting on them becoming exciting. I'm betting on them being good enough that the Lerners could, while staying under the cap, put together a contending team. I could be wrong, and we'll know soon enough, but I just hope the Lerners give the team that chance.
@unknown
I wouldn't call that lineup "playoff ready" without a really good pitching staff. An average MLB player is around 2 WAR. If most of your lineup is below average, you aren't playoff ready, even with Soto and an All Star SS.
Other moves are going to have to be made, and someone is going to have to develop if we really think the Nats are going to compete in 2023
Digging in a bit further, among qualified players (137 total), the average WAR/162 games is 3.29, the average WAR period is 2.75. If you want to look back at 2019 full season data, the average WAR among qualified batters was almost exactly 3 (2.993), and the WAR per 162 was 3.35
So we really need these young guys to be generating 2-3 WAR across ~130 games to have a "playoff ready" lineup, not hovering around 1 WAR
Reality jolts suck. But imagine if the team had swept Baltimore and stayed on the Harper path --- and Rizzo didn't auction everyone off.
At best, we'd be three or four games back, hoping against hope to get a WC spot, knowing that win or lose EVERYBODY will be gone and the cupboard will be bare come November. At least now, we have a few new faces we can talk about, a few players that have some potential for development. Catchers are always in demand.
Hell, Jolly Rogers might be too far past his prime and broken down to bank on as an ace or #2 or #3, but for what Rizzo paid even a best case one year #4 is a bargain. Far more entertaining and aggressive and hungry than $160M Corbin.
@nattydread. I agree with you. Based on comments on WP and other NATS stories elsewhere, the "fanbase" is incredibly upset about the sell-off...whereas I see no downside at all. A relatively young, potentially every-day ML'er always beats old guys on expiring contracts. If you count 1 year of Trea as the only loss (and I do), we have a dozen prospects in return. I would add: fascinated by Josh Rogers...when you are discarded by the Orioles, you really do look like your career is hopelessly doomed. Flash in the pan or not, its definitely fun to watch.
Haroer is tracking 10 players under the rubric "kids." All have potential, some are doing better than others right now, and they are being judged on small sample size, which everyone acknowledges. Taken as a group--and recognizing the likelihood of regresson to the mean for most but not all...here is my thought on likely outcomes. Two or three will wash-up entirely and have no MLB career. Two will regress to low-mean. Two will regress to the mean. Two or three will regress to the high-mean (every-day players, not stars). One all-star. No idea who will be in which category. Thoughts from those who know baseball and statistics better than I do?
@Steven Grossman:
Agreed. I mean--I admit it, in June, I wanted the Nats to buy. But then Schwarber got hurt, Ross got hurt, Gomes got hurt, and half the team forgot how to play, and it became obvious that a sell-off was necessary.
What's remarkable is that despite the immensity of the sale, the only thing Rizzo traded away from beyond 2021 was one year of Turner. He didn't even trade Bell! And he got a bunch of young and young-ish talent, some of which will work out to some extent, and some of which won't.
Right now it looks like the catcher position has been more or less locked down for the future. Thomas has been really good since we got him; though I do worry about his strikeouts and his platoon splits he's certainly earned the right to break camp as next year's CF. Hernandez seems more like "useful bench guy" than a starter, but at least he *is* likely to be useful. The infield guys worry me. The pitching staff desperately worries me; this team is not going to contend unless at least one of Strasburg or Corbin pitches up to their contract.
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