But it's also really dark pretty much an hour after sunset so who really knows.
The point is : Winning Streak!
The Nats crushed the Orioles, coming back late on Friday and winning back to back games that were almost over before the 3rd inning began. Last night they continued the hot starts, scoring 4 runs before getting out of the second. This little run has taken them from the "oh uh are they among the worst non Colorado teams in baseball?" back to "this is who we thought they'd be" and a 72 win pace. As we are nearing Memorial Day weekend and the usual "OK NOW let's seriously look at these guys" I think this should be the general consensus on how to look at the season. Ups and downs will happen. It's a 70-75 win team. I'll be genuinely surprised at anything else through the trade deadline (after that rosters and targets can change)
If you are a Nats fan - basically the last 7 days were what you wanted to see. Abrams and Wood leading the team with great lines across 6 games. Crews knocking a couple out of the park while not striking out at all the last two games. Jacob Young going 3 for 8 in limited time. Luis Garcia doing ok. It was a good week for the young core. Let's hope Crews MRI isn't serious but the kid is young without much injury history so I'm cautiously optimistic there.
We mentioned CJ Abrams a couple posts ago and it's worth going back to him because this guy was meant to be a star, a Top 10 prospect in all of baseball two years in a row. These things are not guaranteed, but when you've managed to corral three of them onto your team at the same time chances of you going 0-3 has gotta be very slim. It could be that Abrams is just having an extended hot streak but it's just as hot as anything he had going last year. He had a 36 game run of .309 / .401 / .561 centered around June, he's at .313 / .371 / .569. Another week like this and he'll put that 2024 streak behind him. Abrams did start his career in a worse spot than people thought but every year Abrams has improved. This could be the "put it together" year.
The Soto trade will work out for the Nats in numbers but then it was always going to do that. Nearly every trade of a vet for kids gives you generally more value. The pure numbers guys love to talk about that even though really would you want 5 kids giving you 13 WAR over 5 seasons or one guy giving you 10 over 2+? I hope you understand the latter is more conducive to, you know, winning stuff.
BUT the Soto trade may actually just work out period. Wood looks to be a star. Right there it's almost a push. Abrams being a star too? Hard to not say it's a win, even if it took a couple years. Gore flirting with being an ace? Ok now it's a clear win. Jarlin Susana given he's just 21, remains a Nats top pitching prospect. He's hanging in in AA which is a perfectly fine place for him to be. And that brings us to the last piece*, Robert Hassell.
With Crews going down the Nats are bringing up Hassell from AAA. Hassell's journey has been kind of a long one. He was seen as a very strong prospect, dominating A-ball at age 19, but hurt his hand in 2022 and has been trying to play through his return to the game. 2023 was dismal but 2024 showed signs of life and with the space available in AAA Hassell has gotten his chance there. The results are... mixed. Overall he's hitting ok, but not walking enough and his power is pretty moderate. His May overall has been very good but that was more a scorching opening week than a sustained performance. It's likely he won't perform in the majors but he's not here to do that. He's here to get a taste.
The overall point though with these kids coming into form is the Nats have to do something to support this round. It isn't as strong as the 2011ish time frame where generational picks, kids, and slow starters all lined up perfectly. This is just kids and mostly just bats. Where's their Gio? Where's their Werth? The Nats did set up some pieces for success. This past off-season was the time to strike. This next off-season will be late but better late than never.
*well technically Luke Voit was that
Agreed with the qualitative takes here, but the story was that Bell got most of Susana, so I think the fair comparison is Soto vs Gore, Abrams, Wood and Hassell.
ReplyDeleteAnd one way to address the value of concentration that you bring up is to use WAA instead of WAR.
Soto post-trade put up 10.6 WAA. Gore, Abrams and Wood have combined to only around 3.5, so far. But that "so far" is crux of it. We get 2 7 more seasons of Gore, 3.7 more of Abrams and 5.7 more of Wood. And they all look comfortably like above average players going forward. Even somewhat conservatively estimating a 1 WAA pace, that's 12.1 more.
You'd need a pretty severe discount rate to still prefer SD's side of it.
Two real endpoints for me is "did you qualitatively get something similar to what you gave up". IOW if you jettison a HoFer you need to get back at least one really good player, not a handful of ok guys. I think Wood is pretty much set to be that so we hit that bar and Abrams/Gore have solid chances to also be that.
ReplyDeleteAnother endpoint is what did you use the return to do? Presumably you jettison the present for the future. Did you win in the future? Even if you get back more than you gave up if you didn't do anything with it what exactly is the value outside of stats on a page?
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ReplyDeleteSo I feel like with Soto, there's kind of a special case. Given the contract he got, he was never going to stay in DC, and was always going to make 29 teams cry uncle and go with whoever gave up last.
ReplyDeleteThe Nats' options, and I'm not defending them, were trading him for peak value or just getting a compensatory draft pick, who'd probably need TJ before Boras let him come to camp in the first place.
So we just have to come to terms to the truth that the better talent you find, the harder it is to keep them.
So realistically Soto was a 6-year interim phase of getting the trade haul. And those guys are too. So until the Nats become one of the 4 or 5 teams willing to spend $300M , this is all a waste of time. As is sports, for that matter.
If your goal is to win a championship, none of the teams won any of the Soto tades. If your requirement in trading a "HOF" player is to get one back, you're pretty much doomed to disappointment. That's an almost impossible standard to meet because (duh) HOF players are very rare. I can't think of any time a trade of a HOF level player approaching free agency netted a HOF player in return.
ReplyDeleteBut that's not the calculation that faced the Nats. Soto was going to free agency after the 2024 season, period. Even Harper's beloved Yankees tried to sign Soto to an extension. Soto didn't even talk beyond "nah, I'm good." And once there, as events demonstrated, there were teams out there that could stack money higher than the Nats could. The whine of commenters and even bloviating talking heads in the media who should no better is that "you can't let a player like that leave." Problem: YOU CAN'T STOP THEM. That's why it's called "free agency." If you're a contender, you could quite rationally ride the years of control out to try to win a title. It worked for the Nats with Rendon and the end of Stras I. But Soto in 2022 couldn't make the Nats a contender before leaving after the 2024 season. So the team could ride it out, sell a few more jerseys, and find themselves with a crappy roster and a comp pick as Soto rides off on a raft of Cohen money. No bueno. Or they could do what they did: bite the bullet and try to leverage those 2+ seasons into some future number of contending seasons.
I agree with Harper you can't do a straight WAR evaluation to determine who "won" a trade. Having an 8 WAR player makes constructing a roster that can compete for a title much easier than having a couple of 3's or 2's. But, like the straight WAR comparison, that's too simplistic. Soto wasn't going to be part of the next contending Nats team. The question is whether the return for trading 2+ years of Soto can create the core of the next Nats contender. Suffice it to say that two years in the outlook is very promising. If the Nats had gotten two solid supporting plalyers - think Paul O'Neill, Joe Rudi types - that could be a part of a contending Nats team that would be enough.
It's was not an HOF for HOF kind of trade, but I recall discovering at one point as I was a nascent Nats fan transplanted into DC that if not for a certain trade, certain players could have all been Nats - Cliff Lee, Brandon Phillips and Grady Sizemore. For Bartolo Colon. There is somewhat of a parallel in that trade to this one. If you know you can't hold on to a guy...give yourself a chance down the road.
ReplyDeleteLooks like the best players on the team right now are Wood, Abrams, and Gore
ReplyDelete