Morosi is saying teams are interested in the Nats pen.
The Nats are currently in a playoff spot, albeit under .500.
Sell or no?
The Nats aren't probably better than San Diego, Arizona, or Cincinnati as it stands now but
- As long as the starting pitching keeps doing this they are barely worse
- We might see the end of Corbin and the beginning of kids that can hit* improving the team
- There aren't particularly guys in the wings waiting to do what this bullpen has done
I think they deal. Bullpens are generally highly variable and the same set of guys aren't likely to be this good again. They can use the kids and changes to see if they can stay competitive in a weak NL.
Please remember when answering :
- if you want that playoff game that's not the best way to get it.
- if you want future success trading these guys vs keeping them will likely barely matter.
*although we're still waiting on Wood to play again and they managed to really hide an injury that has kept him off the field for a month.
32 comments:
Sell!! Trade everyone you can that isn't part of the long term plan. Don't leverage your future to lose in the wildcard round (if you even make it that far). This team is fun to watch and I don't want that to change, but I think we have the talent available to trade and still be a fun team to watch. Trade Lane Thomas and bring up Wood. Trade Finnegan and Harvey, move Corbin to the pen and let someone else close. I say trade or release anyone you can and bring up all the prospects.
While the goal isn’t to be competitive this year, it is to be competitive next year. Finnegan, Harvey and Thomas are all under team control next year, right? I’d do what I think Rizzo is doing. Make them available, but ask a high price. Getting back single A prospects who are years away just for depth doesn’t help.
Also, I’ve said this before but losing games via blown saves is soul-sucking. If they trade both Finnegan and Harvey, it may be hard to watch. So I would only trade one or the other.
It they're willing to spend next offseason (not crazy, I'm a realist, and I know this is the Lerners... but get to 8th to 12th in payroll range), sell. If not, I'll take a run at the playoffs with the best team I can put on the field.
I love how you can make the playoffs now if you're a team that's slightly worse than average. 🙄
I know, I know. Old man shouts at clouds. Sigh.
Part of getting ready to compete is learning how to win and building the confidence necessary to do so.
Tanking the rest of the season will take the team backwards, even if we end up with a slightly stronger base of talent overall.
If we can make trades that better next year’s team and aren’t a huge step backwards then yes. But that’s a very narrow lane. And definitely don’t sell the kids to try and max out this year.
I would be shocked if they traded Thomas, Harvey, or Finnegan.
The plan is probably a repeat of last year, hope to trade Winker/Senzel/Rosario/Gallo/Floro for another DJ Herz or two. Those roles can be backfilled with Wood/Lipscomb/etc whereas the two best bullpen arms cannot be replaced by ... Robert Garcia and Rico Garcia? Can I interest you in Joan Adon: Closer? (I cannot.)
The last 2 innings of any close game would immediately become a horror show without Harvey and Finnegan.
The would net a nice return, but the thought of it scares me.
With the injury to Williams, the only rentals with any value are Winker and Floro. I think an optimistic but plausible return for either would be prospect ranked around 20th in our system. So, Pinckney or Made or Brzykcy or Saenz. If Williams is able to come back in time to have 3-4 solid starts before the deadline, he'd fetch a return similar to Candy's last year.
With Winker, though, if Wood or Crews is ready, you should have already moved him to primary DH and DFA'd Rosario, so the replacement for Winker really should be the second of Wood and Crews. And if you assume Wood is ready but Crews is not (which feels most likely to me), maybe you don't trade Winker for the FV40 after all.
It's harder to pin down the expected return for players with 1.5 years of control, but for me to consider trading Harvey I would need to get an FV50 (like Cavalli or House) and for Thomas or Finnegan I'd want two FV 45s (so like Lile, Herz, Susana, Sykora). I don't think Thomas's market is that robust but if his next 30 days are as good as his last 20, maybe that changes. I also only trade Thomas if I think both Wood and Crews are ready, and in that case I don't trade Winker so he can DH and be OF4.
The other players with 1.5 years of control are Law, Senzel, Rainey and Vargas. My sense is that none of those players are worth more to some other team than they are to the Nats, so I'd be pretty surprised if they're dealt. Likewise the only players with 2+ years of control that aren't key to our next window have no trade value (Weems, Meneses), so I don't expect anything to happen there.
So, all in all, I think I trade Williams if he's healthy and Floro for what I can get. I don't think both Wood and Crews are ready by late-July, but if they are I also trade Thomas if I get a strong offer for him and Winker otherwise. Finnegan and Harvey are the hardest to predict, because in a market with few sellers, the contenders who miss out on Miller might get extremely aggressive, but I'd need to be overwhelmed by the offers and would prefer to keep at least one of them.
I'd be reluctant to trade both Harvey and Finnegan but I would prefer to trade one rather than keep both. And I'd prefer to trade Finnegan and keep Harvey, but I suspect the demand for Harvey is higher, which means Harvey will net a better prospect, which makes him more worth trading. I could see Harvey contributing to a potential playoff run next year, so he'd be nice to have. But: relievers break and/or turn into suck all the time. Sell high.
Thomas is interesting. On a playoff team, he's a great 4th OF and probably fine as your third-best OF starter. He's somewhat expendable on a Nats team with a lot of good OF prospects. I think 2025 James Wood is very likely to put up more WAR than 2025 Lane Thomas, but it's far less clear that the same is true of 2025 Dylan Crews vs. 2025 Thomas. So Thomas could have some real value for the 2025 Nats. It's conceivable to me that the offers for Lane are not high enough to give up on his 2025 value.
Get whatever you can get for all the rentals, including Williams. For each of them, it's not clear that their post-deadline performance would be meaningfully better than their in-house replacements. Maybe one of the lottery tickets hits and you end up with Tanner Roark in four years. Or you take advantage of an options crunch and turn Jon Lester's corpse into Lane Thomas. These are gambles you gotta take no matter how close you are to playing in the WC game and getting bounced in Round 1.
@Mike Larson
My optimistic spin would be the additional wild card slot gives teams an incentive to be at least decent, leading to a bunch of middling teams slugging it out to be the last team in instead of a top-heavy playoff field accompanied by a bunch of teams that don't try at all. They end up under .500 because, while matching up against each other fairly evenly, they still lose to the best teams (conversely, they mostly win against the true crap teams, but there aren't as many of those).
We have now spent 4 years rebuilding to where we have a half-decent team with a number of high-ceiling prospects in the upper minors. 2025 was to be a transition year to winning in 26, but with Garcia having finally claimed 2nd base and the unexpected emergence of Irvin, Parker, and Herz over the last 12 months.....there is a case that 24 is our transition year and we can compete seriously next year. We need more players to reach their potential and maybe a FA or two, but it all feels possible.
Our last run of excellence culminated with a WS victory, a thin farm system, and the oldest team in baseball. I want the next run of excellence to create a dynasty. If so, , then we need to focus beyond the upper minors--by filling our lower and middle minors with a wealth of potential stars who are 3, 4, 5 years away from the big leagues.
Steve - The last run of excellence gave you 9 seasons 2012-2020 where you can say the Nats were contending (with 20 being full of shenanigans). If you are looking for a longer run than that it's going to take money bc the only teams to be consistently good that long are the Yankees and Dodgers. I'd take what they did before, ask for a little more commitment to the entire team and run with it.
It's true! Houston? 9 years and now probably looking at a few years off. Current Braves? They are arguably on year 7 and struggling to keep it going. Cardinals? Well you see where they are now Unless you mean like the Guardians "dynasty" where they've managed to spend 2-3 years around .500ish before popping back up not cratering but not being relevant either. I mean we can all say "just pull one of those Braves in the 90s 16 year runs" but come on now
I don't want to sell on an emotional level just because I remember 2021 too vividly, where the Nats were a roughly .500 team, slumped largely due to injuries (the big turning point mostly being the Padres game where Scherzer blew the 7-0 lead), then traded Max, Trea, and everything else not nailed down except for Soto, and spent the back half of the year having surprisingly functional hitting and SP and a bullpen that was basically 2022 Corbin for four innings a game. And then proceeded to be just as awful in 2022.
As far as the rental guys go, sure, sell. Winker, Rosario, Gallo, Williams, Floro, if somebody wants them and is willing to offer more than pocket lint, sure! That's what veteran players on expiring contracts playing for meh-to-bad teams are for! If Wood or Crews is ready for their crack at MLB then clearing outfield space for them sounds like a nice idea.
For the rest of it, then I really think it depends on what's being offered and whether the team, especially the starting pitching, can continue to be competitive. Moving Harvey or Finnegan seems like a good idea; keep one to anchor the back end of the 'pen in 2025 and get some value for the other one. Senzel, too, is actually hitting a lot better than I think we realize, by wRC+ at least, and might actually have value without hurting the team too much (it might be a better deal to trade him, move Winker to DH, and bring up Wood and/or Crews, maintaining competitiveness and getting a higher overall return).
I would hold on to both Harvey and Finnegan -- unless the Nats are offered a high-level prospect. With one or two big bats from the farm system, and a few free agents, the Nats could compete next year for a wild card. (Teams -- not thinking of any team specifically -- have won the World Series from the wild card slot.) Harvey and Finnegan are under team control, and have a multi-year record of success. A good team needs two (or more) "closers" -- to cover the 8th and 9th inning, and as insurance in the event of injury. If the Nats fall flat next year, they can still trade Harvey and/or Finnegan at the trade deadline. The return might be less, but I can live with that.
Where did you get four years from? The rebuild started halfway through 2021 and we aren’t even halfway through 2024.
Sell what you gotta sell!! I do love Hunter Harvey, but I'd understand a trade.
I'm a bit confused by your Wood note. How much did they hide the Wood injury? They announced he had a hamstring injury and then there's a report from june 6th that he's getting back to practice, and then Andrew Golden tweeted today that he's expected to play in games this week. I don't know, seems like enough for a hamstring injury.
There’s still more than six weeks until the trade deadline. Unless Rizzo gets an insanely good offer, he’d be nuts to deal someone now. Let the games play out and add that data to the decisions.
(I know that this is a terrible take for generating the clicks/preemptive outrage upon which the internet thrives, but to me that’s a mark against the internet, not the take)
Sometimes statistics take a while to catch up with reality. Fangraphs gives the Mets at 26.9% chance of getting a wild card berth, the Nats a 3.2% chance.
Collected numbers provide a way to describe and predict what happens. But they need to be corrected when input assumptions prove wrong. How many here think the Mets have a 10X better chance to play a WC game than the Nats?
In fact, Rizzo's scouting team picked up a few under-the-radar pitchers whose numbers were thus far unknown to most, and they turned out to be gold. Rookie Strasberg KO'ing 14 was historic; Herz's 13 'might' have been a blip, but he has my attention and I want to see more.
I'm enjoying these vindications. If anything, they show a minor league system that is much better than pundit rankings. Rizzo does need to keep adding to it, but its also time to focus on the field.
A window is a window. If this is the first year, I say go for it. Entertain offers to improve the farm, but play for that berth!
“Go for it” is fun, but vague. Are you so enamored with the 2024 Nats that you’re willing to deal prospects to boost their chances at what would likely be a brief playoff appearance IF they make it?
Not me. With six weeks to go I’m in the “both” category. Trade a bag of baseballs/OG types to pick up a useful player from a team dumping salary? Sure! Trade even a mid-level prospect for a roll of the dice at long odds? Nope The farm system is top heavy. Thinning out what depth there is for an uphill climb to (possibly) a 3rd WC? No, thanks
Will trading/standing at the deadline mean anything to potential free agents? Maybe, but "truckload of cash" will of course mean more.
I think most of us here agree that the third wild card is not super exciting, but I wonder to what degree the team will push people to buy playoff packages if they're within shouting distance late in the year. Of course they could be a wild card and end up with zero home playoff games, but could locking up some sweet playoff package cash matter to the team's buy/sell strategy at the trade deadline?
I most definitely wouldn't want to see the Nats buying for the sake of this year--no rentals, please. Any additions to the team on the MLB level that aren't pickups off the waiver wire (eg. Ramirez) should be players with years of control. Like, I could see them trading for someone like Kevin Gausman. Or something like the Varsho/Moreno trade between TOR and AZ where each team swapped a player with long-term control from a position group where they had a lot of players to get one in an area where they were weak.
But "Go for it!" in 2024 basically means "don't sell a player you have if you believe the value you get back for them isn't worth what being in the WC race means." If someone wants Harvey, Senzel, Thomas, etc., then they need to be offering us something meaningful, not flotsam, jetsam, and maybes. Maybe it's worth keeping Winker. Reaching the playoffs, as Carl notes, has value, both in terms of direct financial benefit and in terms of energizing the fanbase for 2025, and that value may be deemed greater than whatever low-tier prospect two months of a rental may get. (On the other hand, I still think we should be looking to move rental players from position groups where we're going to be giving kids a shot. Crews just moved up to AAA, but it seems very natural that Wood would be given a few months this year when he's back up to speed from the hamstring injury, and he would replace Winker or Rosario on the roster.)
I actually don't hate rentals if they're cheap and clear upgrades at positions of need. So basically a 1B.
I was looking through our top 30-40 prospects and I think there are plenty of trade-able folks.
Narrowing just to bats and removing anyone seemingly in our direct plans, you have moderately big ticket trade bait with Morales, Lile, Hassell and Vaquero. And then you have additional value in Pinckney, Cox, Baker, Made, Green, White and JDLR, though in some of those cases we'd be selling pretty low and there might actually be negligible interest for Green or JDLR, for example.
If we can get a good rental 1B, say, Pinckney + Made, I do that. Alternatively, I could see us going bigger and getting Yandy Diaz for something like Lile + Vaquero. Honestly, if I'm Rizzo, I'm hearing everyone out. I'm not sure if I can recall such an ambiguous trade deadline.
(I narrowed to bats because our pitching staff seems to have a lot of moving pieces right now, and I figure Rizzo will want to see how folks develop and return from injury before making any decisions. In a different year, he might be forced to trade Lara or Lord or Alvarez to get the piece we need, but I think this year he's going to have a pretty robust BATNA and won't part with anyone he doesn't want to unless the return is overwhelming.)
Separately, I'm confused why everyone is so down on the 3rd WC. The current structure treats the 2nd and 3rd WCs basically the same, and the difference between them and the 1st WC and 3rd division winner is just hosting that series. Maybe that's a big deal in terms of incremental revenue, but home field advantage is only like 5%. Plenty of away teams win series and just last year both world series teams won their WC series as the away teams.
The reason to remain skeptical about this year is that we're functionally tied with 6 teams, all of which are projected to be better than we are. Even if you think FG, for example, is too low on our chances at 3%, you can't think it's more than 10 or 15%. So, yah, definitely not the time to go all in. But WC1 > WC3 >>> just missing the playoffs >>>>> being out of in mid-Aug.
Following up on Nattydread, any insight on why every major publication and fangraphs playoff odds keep giving Nationals no respect? Have the Nats only played bad teams all year with a real brutal stretch to come? Do they assume Nats will sell off everyone? Do they not factor in mid season progress?
Nats went 5-1 over the week and are in tie for playoff spot and somehow fell one spot in Athletic MLB ranking to 25th!!! I would understand if the Nats had a really bad run differential or X-W/L but they all seem in line with a just under .500 team. Would love to see a deep dive into this.
On selling, I agree with some others, trade anyone who is not under control next year. I would say it makes sense to trade some of the relievers and Lane Thomas, but if Nats are getting closer to Wild Card berth, does it make any sense to give these guys long term contracts instead of trying to lure a Werth type to sign instead? I am thinking more and more that Lane might be worth holding on to. I would put a high price on Lane, Harvey and Finnegan and if its met then move them.
@Anon
what it boils down to is the Nats are getting a lot of surprise performances that most think will come crashing down to Earth, so projection systems and "expert" opinions don't see the team as being as strong as others with similar records. Basically, they don't expect Winker, Senzel, Williams, Irvin, Garcia, etc to keep playing this way because nothing in the past indicates they should keep playing this way.
There may be some truth to that, there may be some extra pessimism, but at the end of the day it's not illogical to think the team has been punching above its weight most of the year
@CP + Anon
The gap is not just whether a player in a small sample has "gotten lucky" by batted ball placement or potential HRs carrying or whatnot. The projection also needs to regress to priors because the small samples cannot cover all the different meta-game states - various zones from different umps, playing through minor injuries, how juiced the ball is, different weather conditions, the 5 starts in a row where you're tipping and you can't figure out what's wrong, etc. It's perfectly reasonable to think that, for example, Parker's or Herz's expected true talent level is less effective than we've seen so far from them. I think even us optimistic Nats fans do that naturally when we say "solid SP4" instead of "holy shit, look at his kid!"
That said, the projections mostly do buy in on Garcia and Winker. Senzel's bat is expected to regress pretty heavily, and that makes sense to me as a median outcome. Young's defense is also supposed to be above average and not elite based on minor league scouting and stats, and that's the big reason the projections think he'll fall off. For me, though, his statcast peripherals (reaction time and sprint speed) are rock solid support to the eye test, so I'd bet pretty heavily on him keeping it up.
On the pitching side, the projections are believing about 30% of the improvement across the board. If they keep it up the rest of the year, though, it will probably get up to around 75% for next year's projections.
Extra wild card slots, yeah, but the NL just sucks right now too. Only the Braves and the division leaders are above .500, and that Braves team could fade without Acuña.
I haven’t done a deep dive into minor league stats or anything, but Herz’s flaw as a prospect seemed to be lack of control. Very possible the team liked his stuff and saw something correctable there; sounds like he was able to throw his change up more effectively than his first couple majors starts during the 13K game.
Or drive attendance as more people come to see a competitive team. The Herz game helped get some people’s attention.
So far this season’s turning into the best (realistically) possible outcome: a scrappy competitive team that could play meaningful games in September while developing a bunch of young guys. And they have 2-3 prospect bats knocking at the door who could backfill spots for traded vets.
I think trading most of these guys, if you can get a decent (top 20 in the other team’s system) prospect makes sense. Thomas is at an age where he could still contribute to a contender if they extend him, but there are probably other places to spend that money that provide more value. If there’s a market for most of those position guys, they should go. I agree with others that trading *both* Finnegan and Harvey seems a little trickier, but generally it makes sense to trade hot relievers until you’re in definite playoff contention territory.
Re: the downers on projection/rankings, I'd like to add that cold, hard numbers have shown that pre-season prediction models are better at predicting second-half performance than first-half performance is. So while we all hope that Irvin, Parker, Abrams, etc. have all hit their genuine upside and established themselves at the high levels of their possible outcomes, it's more likely than not that they're due for some regression. Only if they continue to play well over time does it become more likely that Parker, say, is the next Jordan Zimmerman rather than a kid having a hot streak. As a fan, I want to believe that our young players are working out well, that our player development people have finally gotten their heads on straight. But I can understand why stats-based media would trust their computers, because they have years' worth of data telling them that if the Nats scrap their way into a WC slot they'll be the exception, rather than the expectation. (And as for non-stats-based media, most of them are "Oh, yeah, Washington has a team, don't they?")
(I do note that FanGraphs' Power Rankings, which uses an Elo-based system that's a lot more reactive to recent performance than to projections, has them at 17th starting this week, which is more reflective of what's happened on the field.)
@DP
That's certainly true about out young pitchers. The projections don't really believe any of the breakouts and think Gore is the only above average starter in the bunch. And I agree with you that we should be prepared for there to possibly be some truth in that.
But the bats are actually a very different story. Abrams and Garcia are taking expected steps forward and rest of season Zips (taking one projection system as an example) is, if anything, expecting them to improve slightly from here. It's now reading Winker's down year as an injury-caused aberration, and has bought him on him being a useful player (though only worth 1.6 WAR/600 compared to his prorated actual of 2.4 - but that's a big bump up from the preseason projection of 0.3).
Thomas had a very slow start, so his WAR/600 has only been 0.6 this year but ZIPs is still in on him generating 1.8 WAR/600 going forward. Likewise, it sees Meneses as 0.9 WAR/600 bench piece and not below replacement like he has been, and it's still seeing Ruiz as a 2 WAR/600 player, though the preseason projection on him was even rosier and he's the player whose forward looking expectation has dropped the most since opening day.
Like I said above, there are only two offensive players that are projected to fall off - Senzel, who Zips still thinks is comfortably below replacement though not quite as abysmal as it did preseason, and Jacob Young. And Young is an interesting case.
I think it's plausible that his bat falls off a bit from here, and with a wRC+ in the low 70s in stead of the mid 80s, he'd be worth 1.5-2 WAR/600 and would slot in as a luxury OF4, like MAT was for us. That's around what Zips sees for him going forward in terms of overall value, and that's far cry from the 4.0 WAR/600 borderline all-star Young has been so far.
But that's not why he's projected to fall off. Zips thinks his batting like is completely sustainable -- it doubts Young's defense and only grades him as "above average" in center going forward. He's ranked 23rd in DEF among 79 CFs - right behind Trent Grisham and Alex Thomas.
I know defensive stats are fluky, and if you're a computer system that can't watch the games and all you know is that he's made more catches than you'd expect over a half season, I get maybe being conservative with Young's projection. But we have been watching the games, and we know his sprint speed is 96th percentile and his reaction time is off the charts. I think this is a rare area where we can actually trust the eye test enough to reject the projection and I'm pretty confident that he'll stay closer to gold glove excellence than merely above average.
Yeah I expect some drop off to happen, but projection systems sometimes undervalue young guys and have a hard time adjusting in-season for skill improvement. 17th feels about right for this team, though maybe they sneak higher and end with one of those wildcard slots (in a super weak NL).
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