I am out visiting friends and family and I missed a couple of wins! That's like 20% of the wins for the rest of the year!
Lots of good Soto talk in the comments. Let's agree that he's almost certainly not going to re-sign (if he does great on the new ownership). Let's also agree that the haul in the off-season wouldn't be any better... in a raw prospect sense. I think the idea that more teams would be involved in the offseason is true. I also think teams that don't win this year get a bit more desperate (and one team that does win gets very NOT desperate). And personally I think that opens up more of a chance of what I wanted (getting that Top 6ish current prospect or getting two roughly ready SP arms) but in terms of value that a evaluator would say improves a system by X... yeah this haul is probably what they end up with in the off-season.
What we're arguing is do you want Soto - a guaranteed (as much as that is possible) 5-8 WAR a year until 2030, 390 million paid and a system that has to build and sign and free agent from close to nothing OR no Soto with a system that looks ok? It's sort of a question about what team you think the Nats should be? A team that could hit a couple prospects then buy enough of the rest of the pieces or a team that needs to hit several prospects and buy the finishing parts. They WERE the latter but you can look at a lot of the teams trying to do the same and failing fairly regularly as opposed to teams trying to do the former who fail, but at a lesser rate. It's hard.
But it's spilt milk now.
It's a mixed bag deal at the time that can be argued either way. Whether it ends up being a good or bad deal in the end we'll know a few years from now.
Anyway off to drive for 10 hours. See you Thursday
7 comments:
Good luck with the drive, Harper! At least it’s for a vacation. Enjoy.
As for Soto, the problem that I have with most of the criticism about what the team should have done starts with the assumption that Soto would sign a deal. It’s the old economist’s trick: simply assume your conclusion and go from there. But it’s not solely up to the Nats. I don’t blame them at all for making the move now. YMMV
I have no idea where 390 came from. It was late
Cole Henry getting TOC surgery. Have to think he never makes an impact in the majors now. So much for that #8 farm system
I dunno. I was in a discussion on Reddit about this same topic. Everyone says that this ends careers. But most studies seem to indicate that post surgery the return-to-play rate is very high. Like 80%. And of those that return the metrics all return to pre-surgery levels. Things like spin rates, velocity, etc are approx the same. There’s been some noise to show that command might suffer, and there’s generally been a variable increase in ERA. However, most of the folks getting this surgery are in the later stages of their career where you would expect an increase of ERA, and one would command is such a variable thing as mechanics surely are affected due to the nature of the operation. I haven’t seen many cases of young players getting this operation. Could much of the negative publicity surrounding this surgery be due to a few high profile cases and small sample size.
We all know the variability of pitchers and pitching mechanics anyway. I dunno, just looking at the numbers available, I’d be inclined to think that TOS surgery being a career-killer, is a bit overblown. I’m not an expert at all and can in no way, shape, or form claim to be even moderately informed on the topic, but as someone who makes a living examining statistical trends I would conclude that there’s not enough supporting evidence to conclude anything. I see it as kind of a toss up as to whether this surgery is the cause of many of these career fall-offs or if it’s simply noise generated by small sample size. I don’t know a ton about Cole, and I know equally little about TOS, but I would be simply inclined to see this as a wait and see moment.
I view it through the same lens as I view ACL tears or any other long-rehab injury. Although the recovery period for TOS is pretty short. It seems like building back to form is what takes the longest. Again, similar to an ACL tear in football. You can be back in a year. But typically not explosive or effective until about 14-18 months following the surgery. I think I remember reading that TOS is about 4-5 months before throwing anything but long toss. And then it’s building muscle, stretching out, and mechanics work. I THINK. Could be WAY off but I believe that was the timeframe I saw quoted.
Heck, be positive…it affects command? Maybe it’ll FIX his command. Ahahaha
Here’s a good summary article. Not a ton of info out there. But this is the best quick summary I could find:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8327031/
It very well may be a function of high profile small sample sizes, but I think of Harvey, Hughes, Stras (though I guess the jury may still be out on that) and what it did to them.
And looking at that paper you linked, it gets tricky because on average players performed only slightly worse, but the raw stats would be more telling since the WAR average pre-surgery is under 2, which is below league average. I'd prefer to better understand how above average players perform after the surgery. Plus, all the p-values are...very high. So we can't really draw any significant conclusions from the data.
Even with that, the drop in WAR pre- to post-surgery was 0.7, which is substantial, especially when starting at a baseline of like 1.6. And the average ERA increase was almost a run. So TOS clearly does have an impact, it's just not a statistically significant one given the sample size, hence the conclusion that "the majority of metrics were unchanged from prior to surgery" seems a bit dubious
"What we're arguing is do you want Soto - a guaranteed (as much as that is possible) 5-8 WAR a year until 2030, 390 million paid and a system that has to build and sign and free agent from close to nothing OR no Soto with a system that looks ok?"
False argument. Soto wasn't accepting $390M. All signs point to Soto not accepting any deal before he tests the market (at least any deal before a deal matches/exceeds his Max ($43.5M/year) and ARod (best prior deal plus 40%, or about $600M) comps that Boras offered).
So the choice is which Nats team has the best chance to sign Soto in 2025:
- A) The team that is building from an okay (post-trade) farm system with some upside or
- B) The team that has been building from basically nothing (no trade boost to Nats farm system)?
I think the team with the best chance to sign Soto in 2025 is Team A. And even if Team A loses that bidding war, it has a much better foundation to build on. Team B is well and truly hosed for years more if Soto chooses to sign elsewhere.
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