Teams rebuild all the time. If you aren't blessed with an owner willing to spend your team cycles through times when they spend more and times when they spend less based on the talent they have. What you don't do is rebuild from a rebuild. This is what the Nats are doing and it means one simple thing :
The Nats screwed up.
So the question is where and when and like many things that are wrong it's not just one moment, but a series of bad decisions and bad luck that lead them to this point.
1) The Nats had a stretch of very bad drafts.
The Nats were never really known as a strong development team and their drafts were first pumped by the can't misses of Strasburg and Bryce, then by Rizzo's "all or nothing" strategy paying off with guys like Rendon and Giolito. But the strategy of all or nothing in a place like the draft usually gives you nothing and the Nats had very thin drafts and in the quest for a title that thin layer of talent from 2013-2016, Nick Pivetta, Dane Dunning, Jesus Luzardo, was the needed trade fodder.
Still one decent player a year can hold a org up. But the 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019 drafts were all terrible ones for the Nats. The 2018 one especially stands out with their first 3 picks and 6 of their first 7 never reaching the majors. Leaving the Nats with the emptiest of coffers when time came to rebuild
2) The Nats bet on the wrong horses / don't develop well.
You don't trade ALL your best talent and the Nats did keep guys around they liked. They ended up holding on to Austin Voth, Erick Fedde, Carter Kieboom, Seth Romero - guys that amounted to very little -while dealing guys that did something. How much of that is talent and how much development? Who was asked for and who did the Nats say were off-limits? We'll never know but they basically rolled snake eyes on the high draft picks kept around.
3) The Nats got "unlucky" with the Strasburg signing
In hindsight the way to go was to let both the oft-injured Strasburg and Rendon go and bet on keeping Trea and Max. That's hindsight. In the moment the Nats felt (and the fans wanted) them to keep one or both of these champions. The Nats bet on Strasburg and lost. Of course if they bet on Rendon they would have likely lost too. Not much they could have done here but once you sign him he's one of your tent poles for the next half-decade.
4) The Nats misread the COVID season.
A team not committed to just spending should always be prepared to rebuild as sports are fickle beasts and guys that hit .300 today might hit 250 tomorrow. The Nats though got caught flat-footed. Post Championship the Nats were looking to compete still. They had just signed Corbin and backed it up with a signing of Strasburg long term. You could see the wheels turning on how the next team would shape up. Would it involve Max and Trea? Soto? Where would guys like Kieboom, Robles, Voth, and Luis Garcia fit in?
Then 2020 happened and Stras barely pitched and Corbin was bad and Fedde wasn't progressing and Voth seemed outmatched and Robles regressed and Kieboom looked like he was dropped on a baseball field from an alien planet. Without Rendon the line-up wasn't good enough to carry the team. Surely this was just the weirdness of the COVID season. So the Nats didn't see a pitching staff that simply didn't exist anymore and didn't rebuild right then and there. Instead waiting a year and seeing what 2021 would bring
5) The Nats blew the Max/Trea trade along with several others in 2021
Halfway through 2021 and obviously not a real contender anymore because the staff was basically just Max, the Nats decide to pull the trigger on the Max/Trea trade. They sent them off to the Dodgers to get the core of the next great Nats team, potentially built around Juan Soto (but likely not). In came a ton of minor leaguers headlined by two of the Dodgers top prospects in Keibert Ruiz and Josiah Gray.
They were legit prospects but two mid Top 100, older for prospects, guys who were more likely to be contributors than stars. Still we don't know what the Nats were offered and you take the best you can. Perhaps this was it. But the best thing they got overall was Lane Thomas* and that's not the rebuilding core you expect to have after trading away what might be two HoFers (one in his prime with time left on the contract) and a bunch of useful pieces. Just whiff after whiff here
At this point, even though they would objectively nail the Soto trade, the Nats were done. That trade became all the Nats had to rebuild with. The 2020 draft and beyond weren't barren but they didn't produce the immediate talent you'd hope for heading into what they knew at the time would potentially be a rebuild. Even the incredibly deep 2023 draft had the Nats with the #2 pick grabbing Crews who has developed perfectly well but also has not been impactful as six of the 12 players drafted immediately after him**.
There was not a bunch of guys creating stars and filling in gaps. There was one - Brad Lord. Maybe 2 if you count "defensive OF" which Jacob Young was. There maybe more coming but the timing for the rebuild when you give up in 2022 is to see a path forward in 2025, which they did. And see it start to come together in 2026, which it did not.
The Nats didn't see the issues of 2020 were real and long lasting and waited a half-season too long to begin the rebuild. Thanks to a traditionally weak drafting ability they didn't have the organizational depth to support the rebuild, creating very little talent while keeping the wrong guys. When tasked to begin the rebuild whiffed on a number of trades giving the Nats half the base they might expect and they couldn't find immediate impact guys in the draft or through international signings.
Rizzo blew it. As a bad drafter who relied on big bets paying off but a decent trader, he needed to nail all the trades to set this up or get lucky again in the draft. He didn't get lucky and he got the trades wrong at the worst time.
*Drew Millas was part of this group so I guess we can say the jury is still out. I guess.
**and four of those were HS guys
8 comments:
Hindsight often colors our memories of how we felt when something happened, but I can honestly say that I absolutely hated the Max/Trea trade at the time. If the Nats were going to trade both players to one team for a huge package (which I don’t love, but regardless), you have to get at least one above average regular back. And it was clear at the time that it was unlikely to be the case. Yes having a reliable catcher is important, but extremely few catchers in the history of the game have been pillars of a team, and Ruiz didn’t profile at all at that level of player. You would have to have a generational level catcher coming back to make that a good trade. Even at the time of the trade the best case scenario profiled as a 3/4 starting pitcher and an acceptable major league catcher, plus some lottery tickets. And they didn’t even get that. Just awful.
I mostly agree with Harper's analysis. However, my recollection is that Josiah Gray was pretty highly regarded, and pegged to be a solid #2. The Soto trade was a big win. If the Nats had spent some money on free agents to support the players received in the Soto trade, the Nats could have been at least a .500 team, if not a Wild Card contender. But the Nats didn't spend any money, and thus, did nothing to fill the holes in pitching, 3B, 1B and DH.
You can blow a trade but have it be reasonable at the time. What matters is how it works out not what we think about it. We give credit to them if they "find a gem no one else noticed" so we should smack them if they "get fooled like everyone else"
It's hard because we can't know what they could have but didn't get. So was this the best offer at the time? Maybe? If you want to rebuild quick (mistake) with guys closer to the majors?
But we also have to evaluate it as what happened, not as "anything else would be worse". and what happened was the Nats got a big fat nothing
Like PotomacFan, I mostly agree with Harper's analysis. I will say that I think that he reads 2020/2021 a bit wrong. I think that it's obvious that Rizzo was aware of the problems revealed in 2020 and planned accordingly. The 2021 team was clearly designed as a Plan A/Plan B team. Plan A: Stras pitches, Corbin doesn't suck, the lineup coalesces and the team competes. If that doesn't happen, there was a ready Plan B option of blow it all up. If you look at the team there were a LOT of players who would have been free agents at the end of the season. If it comes to Plan B, you move all of them for whatever you can get at the deadline. And it kinda worked. The team rode the magic Schwarber ride to contention; by the end of June they were only two games out of first place. The Schwarbs got hurt and July happened. POOF! Plan B. Of the 75 prospects moved at the deadline, the Nats' netted the #1 prospect (Gray), the #3 prospect (Ruiz), the #19 prospect (Aldo Ramirez, for Schwarber), the #25 prospect (Carillo), the #27 prospect (Millas, for Gomes/Harrison), #41 (Adams, for Brad Hand), #48 (Mason Thompson, for Hudson), #50 (Schuman, for Gomes Harrison), #53 (Barly, for Hudson), and the #74 (Casey, part of the Max/Trea deal) and #75 (Guasch, for Gomes/Harrison) prospects. (source: FG analysis (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/ranking-the-prospects-traded-during-the-2021-deadline/). They also, and most successfully, got Lane Thomas for the decaying remains of Jon Lester. That was a huge win.* Of the eight players moved (Max; Trea; Schwarber; Gomes; Harrison; Hudson; Hand; Lester), only Trea was under team control after 2021, and he was only under team control through 2022.
So Rizzo did plan for the "hey, 2020 wasn't a fluke" scenario. And got what at the time seemed like real pieces back. But Harper is right that, except for the Lester deal, the returns didn't pan out. As of now the only players remaining in the organization are Ruiz, Gray, Millas and Adams, and Adams isn't on the 40 man roster.
*The Thomas trade may well be considered Rizzo's last hurrah in the "how did he pull THAT off" trade category. Lester was Lester for the Cardinals, never made the playoff roster (to be fair, only the WC round), and retired. Thomas produced 6.4 (of his career 5.5!) bWAR for the Nats and then in turn was flipped for Jose Tena (currently on the 40 man roster, 0.6 bWAR ), Alex Clemmey (#6 BA prospect, #10 Prospects 1500), and some guy (Rafael Ramirez). Jon Lester did a lot more for the Nats by being traded than he did on the field.
I think this is a pretty fair take, Harper, and I've been thinking about this lately too.
One thing you don't mention is that the IFA pipeline also went through an absolutely terrible stretch from 2017 to 2023. The first two years of that have an excuse, process-wise, because of the $300k cap in 2017 and 2018 - having Ferrer pan out is probably at least as valuable as should be expected from those two years giving that restriction. But in terms of the results, that's 7 years, and something like $25M in bonuses, and the returns were abysmal. One good reliever (Ferrer), a few ok but not great prospects (Vaquero, Mota, Jose Feliz and, I guess, Lara still though once you clear waivers, you can't have much remaining value). And nothing even that went out the door as trade bait. Even in those bad draft years, there was some value being created. The IFA situation was even worse.
And there were some other parts of the story that you can't really blame Rizzo or ownership for, but definitely affected the path. We got unlucky with the one year on, one year off, draft lottery for big market teams (and we're unlucky that we're a big market team that wasn't able to control its own TV revenue). We also were paying QO-penalties throughout our window, back when they were higher. And we also had some very bad injury timing for trade chips - Schwarber in 2021 and Williams in 2024 come to mind. Either of those guys makes it another 6 weeks healthy, and we could have likely gotten a top 100 prospect back for them.
Also, among the effects of the Strasburg signing, I think you have to include a gun-shy ownership that won't spend any money. We're never going to have another long stretch of being competitive until that changes.
Being pessimistic is in my DNA, so it's not shocking I came to this conclusion, but I will toot my own horn and say I was calling for a rebuild in Aug 2020 by selling Max to give up on 2021 and ensure that we could make use of Soto/Robles in the latter years of their control. Guess Rizzo never read the comments on this blog
I think what really killed the rebuild was Rizzo's stubbornness. He revamped the player development org at least 2 years after we'd all been screaming on this blog to invest; he stood pat in 2020 when the team was not just bad, but OLD; he refused to update his draft strategy; he held onto Davey for way too long; and beyond Soto, he held onto players too long and diminished their trade value.
I say all this despite still being a pretty big fan of Rizzo. His player evaluation skills were unmatched, hence his skill in trades. He was a great scout, got some luck in the early years with Harper and Stras, and built a team that was by and large successful for an entire decade, culminating in a WS. But goddamn did that early success make him stubborn in his ways and make him think he was the smartest guy in the room
Yup.
Honestly, my only point of debate is whether we can hold Rizzo accountable for bad judgment in the 2021 trades or whether the Nats' player development (in MiLB, but also at the MLB level) was just so bad (...also Rizzo's fault; I'm definitely blaming the man for the rebuild's failure, just not sure of what I should be blaming him for) that it ruined good prospects. I'm not even sure that we can per se state that Rizzo was bad at the draft, because those drafted players had to go through the Nats system. I had no idea just how bad things were in terms of process (the results speak for themselves) until gems from this offseason like "now, every MiLB team will have a defensive coach!" came out.
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