The Nats had a long-term plan at catcher. Ruiz's performance over the past couple years have called that plan into serious question. After being signed long-term Ruiz put up one of the worst statistical defensive years we've seen at C in a while (for whatever that is worth) and this year he was well below average at the plate. Does anything now change because of it?
Presumed Plan :
Ruiz with Millas and/or Adams as back-up.
Reasoning behind Presumed Plan :
Ruiz has that contract. He'll get every opportunity to bounce back and starting 2025 as the presumed #1 catcther might just be "every opportunity".
Adams and Millas are who is here and ready. If you aren't going to replace Ruiz this is what you go with. But they each have issues so you can't rely on a single one.
Adams is seen as a poor fielder. Previously it was thought he could platoon well with Ruiz bc he mashed lefties, but Adams crashed against them this year. If he's not a good fielder and not a good hitter against the pitchers Ruiz stuggles against, what is his use case?
Drew Millas hit well in the minors again - this time in AAA, but that didn't translate into major league success. It was only a month so you can't really say anything for sure but as a 27 year old with no real prospect status it helps if you prove things right quickly.
Makes sense in this case that you start with Ruiz at C, if he falters you swap in Millas for an extended look (Ruiz down to AAA to get right?) and Adams sticks around as a back-up / 3rd option depending on what's being done with these guys.
My Take :
There's a lot of ways forward. You can just commit to Ruiz. He starts. He plays. You deal with it for at least a couple more years. If this is the case I'd jettison Adams and Millas and bring in a veteran catcher who can work with Ruiz on... well everything.
You can follow the presumed plan hoping to hit on Ruiz or Millas in 2025 so you don't need to make a move (and then making a move in the off-season if you didn't hit on either, they both failed badly, and the Nats are closing in on contention)
Or you can make that move now. You might be able to get Alejandro Kirk (FA after 2026) for something or maybe Wilson Contreras if St Louis is rebuilding (gotta eat a lot of $ though). If you don't want to trade because the return isn't great, there isn't really a good FA catcher this year. Higashioka who will be 35, d'Arnaud who's always an injury gamble, Danny Jansen is you want to take a gamble on this was an off -year. If you think a rental might be cheaper the best one next year is Realmuto who isn't going to be traded and certainly not inter-division.
I think the Nats have enough issues left to solve and are not quite in contention so they can let this go one more year. Whether that means way 1 or 2 is up to how you feel about Keibert and Drew. I lean toward 1 just because the guy can make contact, and I like guys that make contact. I feel like you can make that work. I think last year's D was an aberration and while he may not be good he isn't immediately an issue that needs to be replaced. I also like the fact he's younger so him getting better seems more reasonable to me than Drew. I don't see the point of moving from hoping things pan out with this better once prospect to hoping things pan out with this older non-prospect. If Millas wants the job, he'll get ABs. To me, he'll need to force the issue if he wants a trial.
15 comments:
Interestingly, Ruiz’s defense was significantly better this season. Not GOOD, mind you, but improved enough to go from “horrifically awful” to pretty much average. He makes a decent number of plays and his framing has improved to just slightly below average. His pop time still stinks, but despite that his CS% (20%) is close to league average (21%). If he could hit like last season and his defense holds here, he’d be a perfectly cromulent catcher and his contract would be a bargain.
Mostly agree with Harper's takes here. One complication, though, is that both Adams and Ruiz are out of options. So Ruiz isn't going to get a AAA stint to work on stuff, even if it would help, and Adams may hold on to C2 just because there's literally no depth beyond him and Millas. Maybe Maxwell Romero would be next up? Yikes. I'm not convinced Adams would get claimed, but I could see Rizzo choosing not to risk it if he can't lock up a plausible C3 option via MLFA.
And I want to second John C's framing as well -- Ruiz has had 3 years in DC. In two of them, he hit fine. In two of them, he fielded fine. And if/when he's fine on both sides of the ball, he's a 1.5 WAR catcher who is a bargain at $6M a year. For 2025, I think we just hope that he puts it together. Next offseason, we can reevaluate.
I do try to get Ruiz a bit more rest, though. Maybe 100 games, and 60 for Millas. And no more of squeezing his bat in as DH. Even in his better years, his bat is below league average. Surely someone else on the bench should be taking those PAs.
Hits like 2023 + fields like 2024 = perfectly acceptable receiver at a small value
Fields like 2023 + hits like 2024 = worst catcher in baseball
Yes - with no options Ruiz would be set here.
One thing I didn't mention was Bazzell who looked good last year. Ok just a couple months but hey maybe he'll be a phenom
Mostly agree here, except that I'm ready to cut bait on Adams. He doesn't field well, wasn't expected/predicted to field well, and doesn't hit well enough to let you overlook that. Ruiz has flashed on both offense and defense (just not at once) and Millas has been a decent fielder, which he was expected to be. I'm not sure about bringing in a veteran backup, but an actual catching coach to work with Ruiz might be a thought.
Otherwise, like Harper says, not only do the Nats have more serious problems, but there's a lack of meaningful solutions on the market at C, making "stick with what they have; spend resources elsewhere" the best solution.
I'm waiting for Harper's analysis of the corner infielders and starting ToR pitching, where the real problems are. I'm also interested in the utility infielder position, where the Nationals' problems are good ones to have. Nuñez and Vargas are both MLB-level backup SS: Nuñez at a superlative level defensively. Can Tena play SS well enough to serve as backup?
@Harper - I was able to look into the YoY correlations for OAA, and it tells exactly the story I was hoping for.
Just so we're on the same page, I didn't do anything complicated or smart. I corrected for nothing - so positioning, park factors, rule changes etc, whatever was included in the underlying stats is included here. The data set I pulled was the obvious one. 2016 was the oldest year of Statcast data in FG, so I grabbed season level totals for the last nine years using their "as an OF" filter, with a 250 inning minimum. I then joined it to itself to create the season pairs and converted everything that to rate stats. Those rate stats are the ones I pulled YoY correlations for.
Even in the first pull, OAA didn't come across that badly. Over the whole dataset the correlation was 0.59. That's not amazing, but it's only a few points worse than what I've seen in articles for SLG and OBP. DRS (0.35) and UZR (0.26) fared much worse and fielding percentage is a joke (0.11). If you require 750 innings per season, these numbers all improve. OAA to 0.71, DRS to 0.51 and UZR to 0.37, though obviously the number of season pairs falls significantly, which introduces another possible type of noise.
I then wanted to consider the hypothesis that there's been improvement, so I isolated the 2018/19 and the 2023/24 season pairs and reran all OAA correlations. 2023/24 correlations were a fair bit stronger, with 0.70 with the 250 innings minimum and 0.78 with 750. The 2018/19 ones were 0.56 and 0.60 respectively.
Finally, I broke out Statcast Arm value and Range value (per 1350 innings) and found that the Arm component has had a pretty consistent correlations (0.26 in the multiyear dataset, 0.25 for 2023/24). The improvement (and the source of OAA's high marks) has been the Range component, which had correlations that tracked very close to the overall OAA in each of the comparisons.
I think the bottom line is pretty clear. Young's defense is real. There's always some level of regression risk from "the best in the world" to more generically elite, but that would be true even if the carrying skill was something extremely reliable like not striking out. We don't have regress our expectations all that much further on Young because the skill in question is OF range. It should probably be thought of as about as reliable as power. (Though obviously it has a lower impact on the game. Which is why Judge is the MVP and Young is an above average regular.)
It also means that I'm no longer buying in to a "small sample size" excuse on Wood's defense. I'm open to him having been bad for fluky or fixable reasons, but given his stark statcast range data and how well it agreed with the eye test, I no longer give any credence to the idea that he just looked bad because of randomness. His defense was bad in true talent and, if he can't get better, he should play another position.
Solid work!
The bottom line is actually that the fielding data is more consistent. A measure that's not consistent with itself is pretty troubling either indicating that the measure is flawed or the underlying value it's trying to measure is so variable to make looking at it pointless.
That being said the data appears to be more PRECISE, from there the question becomes how ACCURATE the data is. Probably we'd need to check correlations across measures not assuming any one is perfect but they all can't be poor measures. We'd also have to check on how age plays a role (impt for Wood)
From what you state above the strongest case going forward would be with OAA. My one worry would be measure noted only one person above 14 OAA from 2021-2023 and that was 15 last year. This year Young hits 20 and two others hit 16. That seems odd.
But that doesn't take away from the idea that Young's defense looks real. Just settles it in as "one of the best CF in baseball" instead of "OMG this guy makes Willie Mays look like Lane Thomas!"
OK I'm sold, or at least better said - I'm fine moving forward with the idea that Young is one of the top fielding CF in baseball. At 24 then it's probably worth seeing if he can hit in 2025 while the Nats fix the corner/DH situation.
As for Wood - If Crews is good (and he looks it) and Young is elite. Then they can do a lot to cover for Wood being bad. At least initially.
Thanks, Harper. And that's an excellent point about robustness being a necessary but not sufficient condition to buy in on a stat. And I do want to make sure I reiterate that I'm only advocating a change to our intuition around defensive stats for OF Range as measured by OAA. The correlations for arm value, via DRS or OAA, were low enough that I think skepticism around single season totals is still warranted. And while I didn't look at IF data, I would strongly expect the literal bounces of the ball to introduce a ton of extra variance.
And I definitely agree that Young and Crews are well equipped to cover for Wood, if necessary. But unless/until our 1B and DH bats are actually good and even worse defenders, I'm not sure why you'd ask them too. I mean, I'm not saying I'd move Wood immediately (unless Soto wants that spot) - he's young and inexperienced in left and has the physical tools, maybe he'll improve - but I don't think we should go so far as to expect improvement and I hope Rizzo is developing alternative plans in case he's better suited to 1B or DH.
This wasn't SMS's point but is there any thought or data to point toward having a taller 1B? Wouldn't that (theoretically) increase the chances of fielding wayward throws? Obviously there are a ton more factors that going into being a good 1B. For example, if you have soft hands, are good with short hops, or if you are a TWO-TIME GOLD-GLOVE FINALIST in RF, which is a real thing that has now happened twice for reasons that remain mysterious.
Gold Gloves are the true pieces of metal of baseball. It makes zero sense to claim Soto is anything but a below average defensive player, 14th percentile in OAA, 48th in Arm Strength, 34th in spring speed. He's just not good at all
How much blame should the Nationals' coaching and player development staff get for Ruiz's failure to meet his potential? And who? The hitting coaches? Catching instructors? Davey?
Impossible to say without seeing Ruiz go somewhere else. They did SOMETHING because he shouldn't regress this much IMO. My guess is the hitting coach / philosophy shares some blame.
Short - Soto actually might have deserved the finalist spot.
Longer - The Gold Gloves now take into account stats so it's fairer. That said Top 3 is arbitrary being that there are inning limits that cut off some players, and votes are still involved. Is Juan Soto one of the best 3 RF in the AL? No. Is he one of the best 3 RF that qualified in the AL? Maybe! But that tells you more about RF fielding in the AL (stinks!) than Juan Soto (maybe he worked and got to average)
and again - average for a RF in the AL
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