Nationals Baseball: Off-Season Position Discussion : Third Base

Wednesday, November 03, 2021

Off-Season Position Discussion : Third Base

 A foul cursed position! A pox on thee! Out! Out! 

The Nats third base was manned to start mostly by Starlin Castro.  As a player it was odd to watch the fans react to him.  Over two abbreviated seasons he basically did exactly what you'd expect him to do, fill in the roll and fill it averagely, but Nats fans acted like he was the worst player on the field. I think this might have to do with the Nats usual luck bringing in FAs only to watch them have better than expected years. An on-target year? Get out of here.  Castro the person was garbage though and got thrown out of the league basically when it was found he was hitting or otherwise being violent toward his partner. So no tears shed for him. 

When he got kicked out it was the perfect opportunity to see Carter Kieboom get an extended bit of playing time. A nearly untouchable prospect after 2019 primed to replace Rendon crashed and burned over the next season and a half.  He spent 2020's minor league less season up with the Nats and didn't do anything, hitting well below average and impressing no one in the field. 2021 was somehow worse as he struggled back in AAA and continued to look lost in the majors. Not only at the plate but in the field and maybe on the basepaths too? The Nats didn't need Kieboom to break out but it did need to feel like he could handle the position going forward and they didn't get that. It remains a question mark.

For completeness sake - Harrison played here and there as well.

Presumed Plan : Kieboom and doom. Kieboom starts the season at third and they get a pretty solid back-up jack of all trades that will cover for him and likely Garcia and maybe elsewhere.

Reasons for Presumed Plan : The Nats made their Kieboom bed a few years ago and now they have to lie in it. His trade value has plummeted because he's looked so bad so there's no sense in dealing him. There's no one in the minors nipping at his heels so there's no thoughts of internally replacing him. He's too young (24 for 5/6 of next season) to throw in the towel on him. There doesn't seem to be much point in dropping him back down to AAA given the poor results last time. So you try again. Stick him at third. Give him until Memorial Day. See what happens. 

Because he very well might play very poorly, it's important the Nats get a decent back-up and the league is going to be lousy with them. Leury Garcia, Donovan Solano, Josh Harrison redux, Eduardo Escobar, Wilmer Flores maybe, Jonathan Villar, to name a few.  There will also be a spate of guys you can get for nothing who'd probably be ok enough if you get shut out. There's really no excuse not to end up with someone decent at the plate, in the field, or both. Given Kieboom and Garcia both could be limited to 120-130 games if you want, you can probably fit this guy into 100 games no sweat. Especially if you stick him at first or OF or DH. It's worth getting a decent bat even if everything comes up Nats. 

There are name FAs out there - Kyle Seager and Kris Bryant specifically at third. Semien or another SS type if you want to get cute and shift them. Bryant as a commenter noted is of particular interest because he has played a lot of positions and can fit in to a lot of Nats position holes. But I think that makes him of particular interest to a couple better teams, probably closer to his home which puts the Nats in a tough position to get him. Seager is probably available and at this point in his career the D and homers guy is probably ripe for a short term deal for a team he could both help now and could flip him later. KC might be ideal here.

My Take : Yikes.

If you want to brightside this Carter has gotten better at the plate every season from "Is this guy an actual baseball player?" to "well at least he's working the plate" to "bad last man on the bench".  I guess another season could get him to "below average". That's not so say 2021 was entirely awful.  He had a couple of good weeks - one soon after he came up and one in mid-August not long after. That left him at a respectable .259 / .356 / .424 line about 30 games into his season. But he made terrible contact after that - he's a soft hitter and not fast enough to take advantage of that - and hit terrible the rest of the way. 

The BABIP and hit stats suggest some sort of bad luck was involved. Maybe that resolves and he's simply below average next year. That's not that bad and shows a progression at the plate. But given his defensive and baserunning issues it'd still be a guy you wouldn't want to play.  And given his age and experience you couldn't keep assuming more improvement is coming. These issues also showed up in 2020 so the question is not only can this kid hit enough but can he get his head on straight.  It's two full years since we have seen anything but awful play from him. 

The Nats don't have to play him. They can commit to a FA here. But given their need for pitching help (that was the real issue last year), likely huge hole at SS with lots of solutions, and possible upcoming issue in CF this drops in priority because playing Kieboom is an answer. Not one likely to succeed but one you can reason yourself into.  

The Nats play him. If he succeeds, great. If he fails this poorly again in 2022, then you can let him go. If he hits a little better improves a little better in general then... well then they have a problem. Because you'd have to figure out if that was close to his ceiling, make a guess, and move on that. If you are wrong you might lose a cheap position player through the key "convince Soto" years you don't have to think about. If you are wrong the other way you hitch your wagon to someone who hurts your team. Let's hope he succeeds and if not he fails miserably. 

The short here is there is an answer here, the Nats have other problems, and it would probably serve them well to make 100% sure that Kieboom is not the guy. Kieboom starts and probably flops as a guy not quite good at anything except maybe taking a walk.

14 comments:

DezoPenguin said...

Ouch.

Yeah. Internally, it's Kieboom or bust. There's nothing else unless the FO thinks Garcia has the arm to move to 3B. Worse yet, the "veteran backup" plan probably isn't going to get the E.Escobar/Harrison type, who are good enough to seek a job somewhere whether at one position or a super-utility type. Can we see a reunion with Asdrubal Cabrera on the horizon?

Kris Bryant, as noted, is the only other option that genuinely makes sense. Unfortunately, that means committing to A.Escobar at SS (there's no way in the world the Nats are signing two star position players; frankly it's not more than a coin flip that they're going to sign one). On the other hand, Escobar has been a quality major league player more recently than Kieboom has, so there's that.

But ultimately, 3B is lined up to be a serious problem without reasonable answers, and if it's not that way it's going to be because of luck.

Nattydread said...

Suppose we had signed Rendon to a massive contract? That would have been another albatross. Rizzo made the right move there, moving on, but it was the wrong prospect to bet on.

So, yes. The position is cursed.

We need an out-of-the-box random signing of an unknown from the DR.

Harper said...

ND - can't assume same injuries... but probably would have been bad so far. Still you wouldn't hate the chances of a Rendon bounceback

ocw5000 said...

Vet backup will be someone in the realm of Mercer, Harrison, Jed Lowrie, Charlie Culberson, Brad Miller, Ehire Adrianza for around 1y/1M

Anonymous said...

Time to change the ol' blog tagline, it seems. There's a new full-season champion in town.

Harper said...

Yeah I'm gonna get to that. Also I'm like the 4th most popular now. Dropping like a rock

DezoPenguin said...

Too much unvarnished, robotic truth to stay at the top, unfortunately.

SM said...

As you continue your team tour d'horizon (as the French say), the clouds keep getting darker and more menacing. You haven't even evaluated the outfield yet (2/3 of it, anyway), never mind the pitching. Or should that be "pitching" in quotation marks?

As you lay down successive positional evaluations, it becomes clearer just how dilapidated this organization has become. I'm sure this off-season will provide a better sense of what direction the Nats are taking. But what on earth is the front office hoping to achieve next season--or the one after--with this hot mess? It feels like a total breakdown without admitting it's a breakdown.

Harper said...

SM - I'd say the 2022 goal is evaluate Garcia, Kieboom, Ruiz, Gray, Robles, Cavalli, etc. with eyes toward 2023. How many of these are usable ML starters in 2023 and beyond? Same in different ways for Strasburg and Corbin. From there decide what the plan is. If enough look ok you can try to step it up in 2023/4 with the eventual goal of resigning Soto and being a real contender in maybe 2024-2025. If enough don't you are selling off Bell and Ross, probably Robles, try to unload Corbin, with the hopes things come together for 2025 in a way that includes Soto heavily in the planning.

It's a very typical Nats minor league organization - top heavy but shallow. When they had a young team with lots of control that was fine, they even used the 2015 slip to get enough depth they could sell for parts the next couple of years (but empty out the team). They are hoping to get to there (young team lots of control) again. But that was a lot of fortuitous timing guys not coming up a year earlier or developing a year later. This time it's mostly 4-5 of the guys I named hitting near top of expectations and probably 1-2 surprises coming about in the next year or two to make it happen.


SM said...

Well, thank you, Harper, even though you've just convinced me the Nats are closer to the abyss than ever.

Nattydread said...

@SM. An abyss we inhabited and got to know well for 10 years.

Climbed out on in-house development of Zimmerman, Strasburg, Harper, Rendon with some clever trades and intelligent FA signings.

Soto can't replace that core alone, but Ruiz, Gray and Cavalli make a good core to build around. What happens with Strasburg and Corbin is key.

Cautiously Pessimistic said...

The offense is fine. Not great, but fine. I'm still increasingly worried about the pitching and look forward to Harper's take on that. It needs...a lot

DezoPenguin said...

@Cautiously:

Yeah, I think it's easy to overlook that the Hernandez-Thomas-Soto-Kieboom-Escobar-Garcia-Bell-Ruiz/Adams offense actually performed quite well, putting up a 104 wRC+ as a team from August onwards, actually better than the overall season performance. While some of that was due to unexpected performance (Escobar, as Harper has already discussed, and we really don't know whether Thomas is this guy or not), plenty was not (Kieboom sucked and Garcia was pretty weak so they weren't propping anything up, Ruiz is supposed to be this good, Hernandez and Bell were about right, and Soto is Soto). It's easy to see a path to the offense being genuinely good at least for next year--Garcia breaks out, we sign one quality bat, Thomas proves to be at least a 110 wRC+ true talent. I'd rather go into the year with fewer question marks than last year and more stability for the future, but honestly, we weren't losing games post-deadline because of the offense, despite changing six players out of what had previously been the lineup (the trades of Turner, Schwarber, Harrison, and Gomes, plus Robles getting sent to the minors and Castro getting sent as far away as possible).

The pitching...is not so easily fixable. The starting rotation is a giant question mark, and the large contracts of Strasburg and Corbin mean that the question marks aren't readily replaceable. As for the bullpen...only the highly variable nature of relievers gives me any hope, as this has been an institutional flaw throughout Rizzo's entire run.

Ollie said...

At this point I think I'd take Kory Casto over Kieboom. Sign Bryant or a 1 year FA bounce option, please.