Tom Boswell is back, jack! And that's Jack Morris because it's time for takes as bad as Jack Morris being in the Hall of Fame. Boswell pens a piece for the Post that tries to envision a Nats' present that involves keeping Bryce, Trea, and Soto and letting Stras and Rendon go. In a sense, it's making the best FA deals they could have made avoiding mistakes.
It's an interesting thought experiment that unfortunately Boz doesn't put much thought into. In his world signing Bryce stops the Nats from winning the 2019 World Series and then the team fails to do any better in 2020-2023 and without the trades of Max & Trea & Soto and the terrible 2022 that gave them the Crews pick in 2023 they have a terrible farm. In his mind they become the Angels of the NL. But is this really how it would go? Let's just go with results.
2019 : 100% signing Bryce likely means they don't sign Corbin and maybe they don't sign / trade for a couple other guys. Which ones? Dozier? Ok yeah. Anibal. No, they need a starter. One of Gomes/Suzuki? Probably. But also they maybe let Adams walk and Bryce plays 1B. And they probably don't give Rosenthal 7 million for the worst pitching you've ever seen.
Do they make the playoffs? You'd have to think so. They'd have to be 7-8 games worse to miss. And they didn't win the division remember. In fact the most reasonable guess, that they are a couple games worse, which means they likely still host the WC.
Now do they win the World Series? You'd have to guess not. In part because the special role Corbin and other guys played in that run. In part because winning the World Series takes a huge bit of luck. The Nats were a better use of Hader, a Will Smith fly ball going 5 feet deeper, and multiple shots off Max Scherzer going right at guys from not doing it. Chances of rolling sevens again are slim. So Boz is right about this
2020 : But in 2020 what happens? It's a COVID year so it's weird but the Nats OF and 1B situation was flat out awful. Bryce would have been a couple game improvement by himself even in a shortened season. And the Nats were counting on Stras who gave them nothing. With an average performance by anyone they get a couple games there. Corbin by this time was a tick below average. Easy enough to make up. I'll admit that's only 30-30 as a record maybe. But 29-31 made the playoffs. The Nats are in it and if they are in it, they can win it.
2021 : The further we go into this the harder it is to gauge. Again Stras is a nothing and Corbin is now terrible so NOT relying on them is actually going to likely help the team by literal multiple wins. The offense wasn't bad but was unlucky and perhaps Bryce in there is what it needs to click into the top level offense it should have been. But we can't expect GOOD pitching and all this still probably only puts them around .500 at the trade deadline. If they don't sell Max and Trea there's a chance they make a run instead of collapse, and maybe they make some moves. The problem is this year it took 88 wins to win the NL East (90 to win the WC) and I'm not quite sure they make it.
2022 : And now things probably do go off the rails. If Max leaves (which is the assumption if they are paying Trea and about to pay Soto) and Ross gets injured then there is no one left to pitch and even with the three stars and whatever budget pick-ups they make they are still probably slugging their way to about .500. A ton better than 55 wins but likely nowhere near enough to the 87 it would take to get the playoffs.
2023 : It might get interesting here. It only took 84 wins to make the playoffs this year and if they did anything right with starters since 2021 they might have put together enough to get over this small hump. But then again, maybe not. Finding pitching is hard.
For the second part we need to imagine what would their minors look like. I must admit probably not this good. They didn't get much from any tear down trade before 2022 and let's just say Max gets then Ruiz or Grey. Up until here that's not too different. But Soto did give them a full handful of decent prospects. None of those guys; Wood, Susana, Gore, Abrams, Hassell, would be here and that's 3 of the Nats Top 12 prospects, including a Top 10ish overall guy gone. That's not even considering the two guys contributing in the majors also not here.
The draft is big unknown. This is all just spitballing. 2020's middling season got them Brady House in 2021. A better record though could have gotten a comparable well thought of toolsy SS in later rounds. That draft was lousy with them. 2022 got them Elijah Green. A .500 ish record and the same aim of a toolsy OF couldn't help but get someone better than the faltering Green. The guys that fit that description at that point in the draft are actually pretty decent prospect. 2023 got them Crews and I'm not going to even look - around .500 doesn't get them something as good as Crews. But like I said there's a lot more unknowns here. Do they focus more on international signings if they don't have the draft picks? Do they go after more pitchers because of the hitters they signed?
If I were to guess if they signed all three they definitely make the playoffs in 2020 and in one of the next three years things fall right and they make it again. If they make the playoffs twice more that's two more chances to win a World Series. Of course they probably don't - they did make it in 2012, 14, 16 and 17 and came up empty, but we just don't know. Also the seasons are just a lot more fun to watch. They would have a fairly barren farm system though and would not really have a good plan on how they are going to get that pitching to complement the hitting. Comparing this imaginary 2023 Bryce/Trea/Soto led Nats team to a team like the Angels isn't that far off. Not in 2020 or 2021 but for 2023... I think Boz is actually pretty on the nose.
BUT
Boz misses one big point. What if the Nats signed Bryce and Trea and traded Soto? The minors are almost entirely the same. Sure they lack Grey or Ruiz and that matters, but one of them is here along with Abrams and Gore. They also don't have Crews but they likely lucked into an actual OF prospect when kept from selecting Green. And importantly they do have is a lot of money that could go into signing a starter or two. What if that Soto money went into Verlander? Or if they got it exactly right and got Senga and Eflin? Then the 2023 Nats have the young players AND a decent enough 1-2-3 in the rotation have been playing a week ago.
The Nats present isn't great but it could have been better. With the hindsight information we have now we can piece together a way the Nats are both competitive now AND have some hope for the future as well. This isn't magic! We know exactly how things have gone! One should be able to do this! What it turns out the Nats needed to do was sign Bryce and Trea and trade Soto in a fleecing deal. Or really you could say they need to sign two of them and get a ton back in a deal for the trade they do make.
To say the Nats did everything exactly right is to excuse the terribleness of the past few years as necessary. It wasn't. With the right moves the Nats could have shifted from window to window with a minor drop to .500 ish for a year or two. Could the Nats have made those exact right moves? It would have been tough. I'm certainly not going to say yes, but I'll acknowledge it's possible. That they didn't "do the right thing" in an absolute sense.
How about in a relative sense? Not knowing if you can make those right moves, is tearing down to build up the best move? I think an argument can be made that it is. I don't agree but again I have to acknowledge that it's possible. But now the onus is on the Nats to prove that is what they did. We know they tore down. Did they build up?
If they didn't then the Nats didn't do the right things no matter how you look at it. They didn't make the absolute right moves, and they didn't make the right choices to make the relative right moves, if you believe that's what they were, work. I'm not giving them credit for knowing the best path to take if they trip and fall down into a ravine while taking it.
9 comments:
Interesting analysis Harper. I am definitely looking forward to seeing how the prospects and new guys pan out and what they do on Free Agents across the next 2 -3 years.
These are all good points, but you left out of your analysis the part where Boz wants to get an extra special deluxe fruitcake from the Lerner family for Christmas, and this column could possibly move the needle enough to make that happen.
Well, signing the superstars may have undermined the ability to put together a playoff-worthy starting rotation, but it would have been fun to go to the ballpark to see Bryce Harper (future Hall of Fame inductee), Juan Soto (on the path to a Hall of Fame career), and Trea Turner (hall of very good) play each day.
And, the Nats could have stocked up on prospects by trading just one of these three.
Realistically, however, Trea Turner wasn't going to stay. I think Harper would have stayed if the Nats had made a legitimate offer (no deferred payments), and Soto could have been locked in as well.
The problem with all the hypotheticals is that Bryce only signed his 13 year/$330M contract with the Phillies because it was all he could get after sitting out into Spring Training in March. He was gunning for $400+ million (remember when he was asked about a $400M contract and he essentially said "don't undersell me?"). The contract offer that he received from the Nats (10 years/$300M) had a higher AAV ($30M vs. $25.38M). Bottom line: he wasn't signing the Phillies level deal in the fall, and the Nats couldn't wait to figure out how to put their team together. So to sign Harper in time to make the rest of the decisions they needed to make, how high would the Nats have had to stack the money? And how would that have impacted the rest of their roster.
One thing that Boswell and blog Harper have in common is that they make assumptions to feed their narrative. One thing that I do know is that, on the path the Nats took, I was able to walk out of Nats Park with my brother singing "We Are the Champions" after the WS Game 7 watch party. That's a tall mountain for any other hypothetical to climb.
John C - These are fair assumptions. But also Turner wouldn't be up for a new deal until this year. Soto isn't up for a new deal until 2025. So they wouldn't even have to sign these guys. How would that impacted the roster? We can keep playing this game back and forth all we want. I'm not an artist, but I am a master craftsman. Of narratives!
The general point is there was a path to both staying good and staying relevant for the future BUT that's only with the perfect hindsight we have now. To deny that, which is what Boz does... well that's silly. I figure like 27-28 teams could create a similar type of situation. It's not saying the Nats made a mistake. it's saying if you know then what you know now you should be able to do a lot better.
ADDITIONAL BUT is what you note though. All fans really care about is winning it all. The Nats did that. If they did sign these guys you can't guarantee they would. Maybe they win three! But more maybe they win none! And no fan is going to turn down a title that happened for a plan that could guarantee continued success but couldn't guarantee titles.
One thing to note: Harper's only goal was signing the biggest total $ contract in MLB history. That's why his ($330M) was a tiny bit more than Stanton's ($325M). He managed to hold the record for 18 whole earth days, when Mike Trout signed a 12y/$426.5M deal
One thing that we can all agree on is that GM'ing in hindsight is a LOT easier than doing it in real time.
I like reading Boswell, but he really does start with the conclusion he wants to get to and finds the roadmap as he goes with this one. The assumptions in that article are so weird. They sign those three guys and then...never make good roster moves again? Rizzo is one of the slickest GMs out there. He'd find a way to build around a good lineup the same way he found a way to build around a good rotation.
Ending with saying the inspiration is the D'backs...Rangers...and O's? I really don't see much in common among teams that that 1) lucked into the postseason and should get creamed now that they're facing a good team 2) went for it at the trade deadline and 3) built around cheap young guys they're definitely getting rid of next year without winning anything are templates to build on. Couldn't the Phillies, a team favored to go to the WS with literally the same star players the Nats used to have and smart FA pitcher signings, be closer to what the Nats might have been? The Astros are also similar in a way. A few people held over from their previous WS team and some good deals and new guys, and they're perennial contenders.
The fun thing about all this is that we tend to look in one direction "How could it have been better" then all but the Bozziest of us figure out the steps and luck it would have taken, but rarely do we think the other way. Like the Nats could have said after 2019 "This team is perfect! Let's keep it together! We'll sign Stras AND Rendon right now!"
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