Nationals Arm Race

Lannan has the only W for the rotation thus far. Photo: blog.prorumors.com

A major league team’s rotation cycles somewhere between 33-34 times a year.  As I did with the Spring training games, I will try to do a good/bad/indifferent each time through for the pitching staff.  I’ll focus more on the starters but will mention the relievers as is merited.

Good

• Livan Hernandez‘s opening day start (running blog/gamer/box score) may have gone down as a loss, but it was a pretty nifty gem.  He gave up two runs on four hits with no walks in 6 1/3 on only 77 pitches.  He retired 15 in a row after a 2nd inning homer given up to Jason Heyward.  He may have gotten the loss but it was a quality start for sure and he probably pitches a complete game if the Nats could score.
• John Lannan goes 5 complete for the win in the 2nd game of the season (blog/gamer/box score).  Its amazing what a little run support will do for a guy.  I do agree though with Steven from FJB, who criticizes the decision to bring Lannan back after an hour’s rain delay just so he can pitch the 5th and get the W.  Why would he have possibly had Lannan return after an hour’s delay?  That’s why you have long men in the bullpen.  That should have been Broderick or Gaudin in to re-start the game.
• Jordan Zimmermann‘s first start of the season (running blog/gamer/box score) was promising: 2er in 6ip and finishing those 6 innings in just 84 pitches.  Not very many Ks though (only two through six) for a strike out pitcher.  Perhaps he was pitching to contact.
• Sean Burnett: apparently our new “closer” for now.  He’s pitched pretty effectively in limited opportunities.
• Jason Marquis: his 4/5 start (gamer and box)was the first game that I have gotten to see.  And I thought he looked pretty good.  He went 6 1/3, gave up 6 hits and 0 walks and was efficient all night (he was only at 78 pitches when he got removed).  He only had 2 ks but was throwing lots of strikes.   His fastball showed around 90 with great movement and he got lots of groundballs (11 grounders and 5 fly balls).  The middle of the Marlins order had his number but he controlled the rest of the squad.

Bad

• Doug Slaten: three games and three failures in the Loogy role to start the season.  Gotta do better.  Your job is to get the lefties out.  He may not have given up an earned run yet but his whip is a nifty 12.00 through three games.
• The Bullpen on 4/3/11.  Broderick, Gaudin, and Coffey‘s 4/3/11 performances.  Not.  Good.  Notice that these three guys are all brand new to a very good bullpen last year.  I’m not panicking, but i am saying.  Balester may have his ears burning if (especially) Gaudin can’t get it done.

Possibly Concerning

• Storen seems to be getting his confidence back.  But he cannot be giving up two hits and a walk in the 9th inning of a tied game (as he did on 4/5).  He’s not getting any Ks either, and we need his k/9 ratio to be up in the 8.5-9.0 range.

Pitching Summary:

We’ve had four starts and gotten 3 “real” quality starts (plus Lannan on his way to a 4th when a rain delay caused his night to be shortened).  You cannot ask for much more out of your starting rotation.  Last year our first four starts went like this:

• Lannan; 3 2/3ip, 7 hits, 3bbs and 5 runs.
• Marquis: 4ip, 8 hits, 3 bbs and 6 runs.
• Stammen: 5ip, 9 hits, 4 runs.
• Mock: 3 1/3ip, 4hits but FIVE walks and 2 runs.

For the record, that was 17 runs in 16 innings over 4 days.  Our first four starts in 2011 elicited 23 2/3ip and just 7 earned runs.  Quite the turn around.  Too bad the team couldn’t score any runs and went 1-3.

Thoughts on the offense

We’re getting great production out of our stars (Zimmerman has a 1.406 ops through 4 games and Werth is at .945).  Ramos is mashing the ball and Espinosa is 4/10 so far.  The rest of the team?  Bad.  Until last night the lead off  hitters were 0-for-the-season and Riggleman is already swapping players around to put Espinosa at leadoff (a pretty good decision if he can handle it).  Ankiel is 1/12 (but that “one” is a mashed homer, which St. Louis fans are probably cackling about, since they continually warn Nats fans that this is exactly what Ankiel does).  They’ve only scored 10 runs in 4 games (6 of them in their sole win) and definitely need to show better run support.

Summary

Great starting pitching to go with little run support.  I hope this isn’t the story of the season.

Is Ankiel the solution for the Nats in center field? Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images via federalbaseball.com

Editors note: I was out of town last weekend and had this queued up but never hit publish :-).

MLB’s Nationals beat writer Bill Ladson hasn’t done an inbox for a few weeks, probably because he’s been busy at spring training.  Now that the regular season has started and we’ve had some debatable 25-man roster decisions made, he has published another edition of his Inbox column.  Here’s how i’d answer the questions he selects…

Q: What are you most worried about with the Nationals in 2011?

A: I’d say, in order, offense, the starting rotation, center field, and the back end of the bullpen.  I feel like we took a step backwards in terms of offense, we have improved the rotation over last year but still would probably rank this rotation 28th or 29th in the league, that Rick Ankiel in center field doesn’t really help us a ton, and that Drew Storen had such a rough spring that our end-of-game scenarios may be challenging.

Q: How do you think the Nationals will fare this season in the National League East with their off-season signings?

A: Probably the same as last year; last place.  Philadelphia and Atlanta are probably playoff bound no matter how many injuries the Phillies sustain.  Florida is probably taking a step side ways, having lost Uggla but picked up Vazquez (honestly, I don’t see how their fans don’t revolt at their perennial 87 win team doesn’t spend the $10 needed to improve themselves to be a 92 win team and challenge for the wild card).  The Nats may finish above the Mets, if only because that franchise is in such disarray right now.  They’re eating more than $20M in salary for players they’ve already released, they made no significant off-season moves and there’s serious injury question marks around 4 of their 5 best paid players (Santana, Beltran, Bay and Francisco Rodriguz).  I can see that time imploding badly and the Nats sneaking ahead of them for 4th place, maybe.

Q: If Bryce Harper has an amazing year in the Minors, is there a chance he will get a Major League callup?

A: They shouldn’t … but they may.  I would not be surprised to see the kid rocket through low-A and high-A ball.  It would be purely a late-season revenue grab to call him up, but they need to be careful on his service time accrual.  If he plays 30 days in September we’d have to keep him down an extra 30 days in 2012 to ensure he doesn’t become a super-2.  For those not clear on the implications of super-2 screwup, read this bit about the mistake the Giants made with Tim Lincecum.

That being said, i’d love to see him playing in the bigs before his 19th birthday.  That’d be fantastic.  And he may very well earn it.  His weakness in the AFL and in spring training was offspeed pitches, but its hard to fault the kid for wanting to swing and make something happen in the limited time he’s seen.  Once a full season gets going and he’s getting 4 ABs every night, he will learn patience, he will earn walks as pitchers work around him, and he’ll pick his spots.  This, more than anything else, is the lesson he needs to learn to advance in the minors.

Q: Do we see a parallel developing between Roger Bernadina and Justin Maxwell? How long do we have to wait?

A: It isn’t a bad parallel to note.  Bernadina lost the LF job, then the CF job, then the 4th outfielder job to a non-roster invitee.  He’s burning his last option as we speak.  He has a career 80 OPS+.  I openly questioned in this space why he was the presumed starter in LF all off-season, and as it turned out I was right about Morse being the better player.  I think he’ll play out the string in AAA this year and get traded for a low-level minor leaguer at the end of spring training 2012, just as we did with Morgan and Gonzalez this week.

Q: What do you think of the job general manager Mike Rizzo and manager Jim Riggleman have done since they took over in 2009?

A: I think Rizzo has done a decent job with the major league team and a pretty good job with the farm system.  I feel like he’s tried a little TOO hard to rid the team of the non-defensive hitters Willingham and Dunn, and could have gotten more for them.  I understand the Werth signing but think (like the rest of baseball) that he overpaid and strangely backloaded the contract (why back load instead of front load?  We’re actually at LESS payroll this year than last, so we could be paying him $20M this year instead of $10M and still look like we’re treading water).  He’s definitely assembled a team in his vision; defensively gifted, a bullpen full of power arms.  Next step; power rotation.

Riggleman is doing the best with what he has; I don’t believe other managers could do much better.  Most people believe we have probably the 28th or 29th best collection of talent in the majors, but we’re achieving better than 29th place.

Q: Besides Harper, which rookie impressed you during Spring Training?

A: I cannot disagree with Ladson’s selection of Cole Kimball as “most impressive rookie.”  I would not be surprised to see him called up in 2011 and to start getting high-leverage appearances.

Nats fans have seen their last Nyjer Morgan tantrum

Just two days after it became rather clear that Morgan was not going to win the starting Center Field job, Rizzo dealt the player to Milwaukee for low-level infield prospect Cutter Dykstra and some cash.  Nice move by Rizzo, taking a guy we were probably going to release in a few days and getting something (anything) in return.  Dykstra is a younger player but he’s a 2nd round pick who has put up decent numbers in the lower minor leagues thus far.  Keith Law says he’s no more than an Organizational player, but something is better than nothing.

Morgan should be happy with the deal; he may not start in Milwaukee but at least he’s now on a contender instead of being a 30-yr old in AAA.

One could argue the Nats were a bit hasty on the decision; Morgan had turned around his spring, rebounding from a slow start to post a .241/.328/.315 line for the spring.  Perhaps giving him a month into the regular season to see if he could return to 2009 form would have been the right thing to do.  Unfortunately, a log-jam of outfielders in camp that were outperforming Morgan were pressing the team’s hand.

Morgan’s trade means we have no real lead-off hitter.  We probably go with Desmond but he only had a .308 obp last year.  We will replace Morgan in the outfield with a platoon between Rick Ankiel and Jerry Hairston, Jr, neither of which really is a long term solution.  We also seem set to keep Laynce Nix after his great spring, meaning that Bernadina loses the options game and will go to AAA.  My guess is that we’re keeping Nix solely to trade him and get something in value, and Bernadina should be right back up.

My guess on what happens next is something like the following: Ankiel struggles at the plate, we trade Nix and Bernadina returns to the majors as the 4th outfielder.  Then, Corey Brown recovers from his ankle issues, gets healthy in AAA, hits well and gets called up to be the new leadoff/center fielder around mid June.

One nice side-effect of the deal is the freeing up of a roster spot.  Since it is looking more and more likely that we’re keeping 2 and perhaps 3 non-roster invitees we need to make some 40man moves.  Gaudin and Nix, perhaps Stairs seem to have made this team.  We’re at 39/40 now with the Morgan move.  I can see Wang going to the 60-day DL to free up one spot but an extra spot for Stairs is tough.  Perhaps we 60-day DL Elvin Ramirez.  We could just return him flat out (though I’m not sure you are allowed to return an injured rule5 guy).  We could also look to DFA someone; Severino may be expendable with the acquisition of lefty specialist Lee Hyde.

Commenter Mark L, in response to my statement that (paraphrased) the 2011 Nationals cannot afford to keep rule 5 picks on this team, pointed out that the team really has little chance of competing in 2011 and thus it is really the perfect time to be keeping and testing rule5 guys.

In theory I agree with this premise w.r.t. keeping rule 5 guys.  We’re not going to win the pennant in 2011.

I think in reality though the team has gone mostly backwards since arriving here in 2005 and cannot afford to ever seem as if they’re not trying to make progress.  I blame a lot of that on Bowden’s obsession with former Reds and tools-y players who became such a nightmare to integrate as a team that Acta had to be scuttled as a manager in favor of the more old-school Riggleman. The team lost the entirety of good will and excitement that came with a new stadium and the Lerners as owners had to be shocked at how quickly they destroyed their season ticket base (most observers believe they’ve lost more than half their season ticket holders just from 2009!). So the team is just not in a position to play for the future any more; they have to appear to be improving the team even marginally for the next few years to put themselves in a better position financially.

If the team was really playing for 2013 (as, say, the KC Royals clearly are), they’d never have even brought in the likes of Ankiel, Coffey, Hairston, basically every mid-career veteran and go completely with a lineup of prospects and these rule5 guys.   Arguably they wouldn’t have spent the money on Werth either.  What would the 25-man roster really look like without any FA signings?  Lets take a look:

• Catchers: Pudge, Ramos (remember, they *had* to get Pudge b/c of the state of their catcher depth pre 2010).  If you like, you can replace Pudge with someone like Flores or even Maldonado, since Norris is not ready for the majors in 2011.

• Infield: Marrero, Espinosa, Desmond, Zimmerman backed up by Gonzalez and Lombardozzi.  This would have required a serious leap of faith on the readiness of Marrero for 2011, and we’d be rushing Lombardozzi to the majors.  Perhaps we would have replaced Lombardozzi with Bixler.

• Outfield: Bernadina, Morgan, Burgess, Morse and CBrown.  I know Burgess was traded, but perhaps the team keeps him and installs him in right field knowing they wouldn’t have Werth.  Perhaps Burgess and Morse compete for right field and we bring up newly acquired CBrown as the 5th outfielder.

• Starters: Maya, Detwiler, Livan, Lannan, Zimmermann.  I leave Livan in here if only because we signed him to such a sweetheart deal.  If we don’t count Livan, we’re looking at someone like Stammen, Mock, Detwiler or Chico in that 5th spot.  Or perhaps we use Broderick as the 5th starter instead of putting him in long relief.

• Relievers: Storen, Clippard, Burnett, Slaten, Broderick, HRodriguez and Carr/Kimball (with ERodriguez on DL).  Our bullpen would have hard throwers at the back end and we’d immediately give AFL hero Kimball or Carr a shot.

Of this active roster, 17-18 would be on pre-arbitration salaries and the total payroll would probably be in the $28-30M range for the entire team. It’d be the “right” thing to do but the town would absolutely howl in protest.

I dunno. I go back and forth as a fan. Part of me says screw 2011, play the kids, see what they can do this year and regroup for 2012 when you can have a very good Strasburg-Zimmermann 1-2 punch to go along with general improvement across the rest of our younger guys.  The other part of me says that incremental growth in terms of wins and respectability for this team is just as important in terms of attracting free agents and enabling the team to make a quick leap in a couple years. If this team can win 75 games this year, Strasburg comes back and probably improves the team 5 wins just by himself, we acquire an incrementally better #3 pitcher and hope that Maya, Detwiler and our rising AAA guys become real major league options. If you’re a 81 win team a couple of key free agent signings coupled with the natural rise of our core up and coming players can improve the team 10-12 wins very quickly. Suddenly we’re a 90 win team and still have a manageable payroll to augment and take the next steps to rise above Atlanta and Philadelphia in the division.

That’s “the plan,” right?

Morse did nothing but mash in 2010. Why are the Nats trying so hard to NOT use him in 2011? Photo hardballtalk.nbcsports.com

(Ironically, as I was penning/researching this posting all three leading Nats beat writers wrote similar articles.  Hmm.  Perhaps we’re all onto something.  Here’s links to Zuckerman, Goessling and Kilgore‘s similar articles.  Something must have happened in camp today…)

(Coincidentally, i’m also assuming that Rick Ankiel is a backup/fall back plan and nothing more.  He’s had exactly ONE impressive hitting season and was worse than Nyjer Morgan last year splitting time between the Royals, the Braves and the DL.  But it is concievable that Ankiel is “competing” for the LF job as well).

Mike Morse turned out to be one of the bright storylines for the team at the plate last year, posting a very respectable 2010 slash line of .289/.352/.519 and hitting 15 homers in just 293 at bats for a season OPS+ of 133 (3rd on the team behind Dunn and Zimmerman, just ahead of Willingham).   He’s a former infielder who moves around well despite being a big guy and can play four positions relatively easily (both corner infield and both corner outfield positions).

Roger Bernadina meanwhile posted this 2010 slash line: .246/.307/.384 in 461 plate appearances.  He had 11 homers and provided very good outfield defense with capabilities at all three positions.

So, given that the Nats traded away two of their best four hitters last year and clearly seem set to take a small step backwards in offensive production, why exactly is the presumed starter in left field not automatically going to be Morse?

The arguments i’ve heard are variations of three themes: lefty-righty splits at the plate, defense and balance of our lefty-righty hitters on the bench.  Lets discuss each item.

1. Lefty-Righty Splits: the knock on Morse is that he cannot hit right handed pitchers.  He mashes lefties but struggles against righties.  Is this true?  According to his 2010 splits, he clearly hits lefties better (he hit .295 versus .287 against right handers) but more significantly his slugging percentage split is significantly different (.466 versus .625 against lefties).  So clearly he doesn’t hit for as much power against right handers.

The thing is, his performance as a righty versus other righties is still pretty good as compared to the league.  His “sOPS+” values (sOPS+ being his Split league adjusted OPS value) was 126, meaning that he’s about 26% better than the league average for righty-righty matchups.

So, lets quickly look at Bernadina’s splits.  Turns out, Bernadina actually hits lefties BETTER than righties, but his best slugging figure (.429 against lefties) is worse than Morse’s weakest slugging figure.

Conclusion: Morse may be slightly weaker against righties, but he’s better against either arm than Bernadina.  He is closer to a #5 hitter in terms of power while Bernadina is a #2/#7 hitter.

2. Defense: Bernadina is clearly a better outfielder, and has a fantastic career UZR/150 rating in left.  He posted a 13.3 for 2010 and has a career 11.8.  Meanwhile Morse isn’t exactly Reggie Jackson patrolling left field but he’s not bad either.  In very limited LF career stats he has a 15.2 uzr/150 rating in left.  He’s significantly worse in Right … but then again that’s why we bought 7 years of Jayson Werth.

Meanwhile, Morse is also a very good first baseman and has logged time at SS and 3B.  Bernadina is purely an outfielder but can play center in a pinch.

But here’s the thing; you don’t NEED a star quality defender in left field!  Not at the expense of greatly needed offense anyway.  That’s why Josh Willingham still has a job and that’s why Manny Ramirez was able to play in Boston (and in the NL) for so long.

Conclusion: Bernadina’s better in left, but both bring defensive flexibilty to the table.

3. Lefty-Right balance in the lineup.  Morse is a righty, Bernadina a lefty.  Lets look at the probable 25-man roster out-field players.

• Lefty only: Morgan, Bernadina, LaRoche, Ankiel
• Righty only: Pudge, Ramos/Flores, Desmond, Zimmerman, Werth, Hairston, Gonzalez
• Switch Hitters: Espinosa

But, of the presumed starters only Morgan and LaRoche are lefties.  Espinosa switch-hits but he’s probably stuck in the 8-hole until he improves on last year’s tailoff at the plate.  So, if we start Morse we’re looking at a lineup that probably goes L-R-R-L-R-R-R-S-Pitcher.  Three straight right-handed hitters after LaRoche.  If we replace Morse with Bernadina the lineup probably goes L-R-R-L-R-L-R-S-Pitcher, a much better balance.

Of course, we also have one Matt Stairs in camp and people are talking about him making the team as a designated pinch hitter.  I have an awful hard time believing this, but if it happens (at the probable expense of Albert Gonzalez), then having Morse on the bench as a right-handed hitting counterpart to Stairs makes a bit of sense.  Certainly having Bernadina, Ankiel AND Stairs on the bench makes no sense.  But, since Stairs brings no defensive value to the team we’d be incredibly thin at infield backup positions without Morse in the fold.

Conclusion: unclear until we see how Stairs looks in spring training.

In conclusion, there are arguments on both sides for/against either Morse or Bernadina in left.  Perhaps we’ll be surprised by Morse in left and Bernadina in center with Ankiel an able backup (certainly a possibility if Morgan does not improve on last year’s performance).  But I find it hard to believe we’re going to sit Morse over Bernadina or Ankiel at the beginning of the season.