Year four of the rebuild is complete. The team was flirting with .500 well into June but just couldn’t hold it together once they lost their best starter. From the trade-deadline forward they went 22-30 to end the season at 71-91, a .438 winning percentage.
Here’s a quick summary of where we are in the rebuild:
- Year 1: 2021: moved Turner, Scherzer, Schwarber, et al. Finished 65-97. Earned 5th overall pick in 2022 draft (Elijah Green)
- Year 2: 2022: moved Soto and Bell, finished 55-107, Earned 2nd overall pick in 2023 draft after losing lottery, got Dylan Crews.
- Year 3: 2023: Improved to 71-91, dropped to 10th in 2024 draft thanks to new CBA rules despite winning lottery, got Seaver King
- Year 4: 2024: Finished 71-91 again.
Our 71-91 finish, combined with the White Sox getting the same treatment we got last year (i.e., being a big market team that is bad two years in a row getting kicked out of the top 10) and Oakland getting kicked out of the lottery as well (they’re a revenue recipient that’s been in the lottery two years in a row), we stand to benefit by moving up a couple of slots of lottery odds.
Tankathon.com has the current reverse order of draft standings, showing us in 4th place/4th best lottery odds. We can pick no worse than 7th, but can move up to pick #1. (all the draft rules are at the bottom of the tankathon page).
We’re a ways off of from the 2025 draft, but we are starting to see some commonality for the names at the 2025 draft boards. Its looking like a college-heavy first round right now, even though a prep kid could go 1-1 overall. If we’re in the top 7 though, we’re in line to get one of these names right now:
- Ethan Holliday, SS, Stillwater (Okla.) HS. Brother of Jackson Holliday, son of Matt Holliday
- Jace LaViolette, OF, Texas A&M. 1st team All American as a sophomore, 29 homers last year.
- Tyler Bremner, RHP, UC Santa Barbara. 11-1, 2.54 ERA as a sophomore last year, dominated this past summer for the US Collegiate Nat’l Team.
- Caden Bodine, C, Coastal Carolina; .347/.432/.564 first two years at CCU as a plus defensive Catcher.
- Jamie Arnold, LHP, Florida State. 1st team AA, Friday starter for FSU. 159 Ks in 102ip in 2024, co-ace for US Collegiate National Team this summer with Bremner.
- Cam Cannarella, OF, Clemson Freshman ACC POTY, .363/.440/.560 first two college seasons while playing with injury.
- Devin Taylor, OF (CF), Indiana. .357/.449/.660 with 20HRs his sophomore season.
- Nolan Schubart, OF Oklahoma State. Ridiculous 1.351 OPS in 2024. Huge slugger potential.
There’s also a couple of other prep kids in the mix for the top 10, but something tells me we’ll be taking a college player this time around and not a project. We don’t “need” Bodine or an outfielder necessarily, would love to get one of these two college arms. The top of the class certainly is looking outfielder heavy right now. I like the connection to Schubart, an Oklahoma kid (we seem to take a lot of players from that region) who could mash his way up, but BA has him slipping into the 20s for the class so he may not really be in the conversation for the top 6-7 of the draft. I like a slugger outfielder who could project as a 1B/LF/DH rotation kind of guy, but it has to be a major slugger.
Anyway, lots to discuss this off-season. I’m not sure how much i’ll “cover” the playoffs this year due to other writing commitments, but we have options, rule5, and other fun stuff to cover coming up.
It’s an interesting point the Nats find themselves in. The “rebuild” is over. Kyle Finnegan is the only player left in the team who isn’t locked down for multiple seasons of team control with any trade value (and he didn’t help his case in the 2nd half with a 5.79 ERA, yuck). So there’s little room for rebuilding the farm through the major league team. And the team is shedding some of the payroll commitments from the previous roster construction, that besides Strasburg’s salary, the highest paid player next year will be Ruiz earning around $6m.
Previously, tanking could massively boost the rebuild, but as you’ve pointed out, the benefits have been cut significantly, being unable to pick in the top 10 in successive seasons. Thus, the Nats could finish .500 or 41-121 in 2025 and still pick 10th in 2026.
Now, the only way for the Nats to improve their team is through Free Agency, which provides two pathways: signing reclamation projects like Candelario and Floro, to flip at the deadline. Or sign long term guys, like Werth or Scherzer to meaningfully improve the team.
International Free Agency also doesn’t help, as you don’t get perks based on your record, and our International Scouting team is yet again in flux.
So at this point, another losing season in 2025 is not going to make us better in 2026 or the future. Now is the time to pivot to “building”, and at the major league level. The hope is that Wood, Crews, Abrams, Gore, etc. will get better, and make this team competitive next year, but I don’t think that will be enough to be formidable, and we’d probably look at lot like the Reds did this season. Interesting, but not nearly competitive, unless the stars aligned perfectly.
We should therefore be drafting for help in the short term. Though I think our approach from 2024 was sound: a mixture of short term (King, Lomavita) and long term (Dickerson), so that we don’t entirely find ourselves in 2028 or so in the same spot at we did in 2020, without a farm and a rapidly aging/expensive roster.
Unfortunately, this winter’s free agency class isn’t great for the Nats’ needs. In order of importance, I see the Nats needing the following positions:
1. Power bat, ideally at 1B
2. Starting pitcher
3. Catcher
4. Starting pitcher
5.6.7. Reclamation relief pitchers
8. 3B reclamation project
1 & 2 should cost legit money, but 3-8 could all be rather cheap one-year deals, if necessary.
Among the bats available this winter are:
1. Soto
2. Alonso
3. Alex Bregman (3B power bat would also work)
4. Christian Walker
After that you have guys like Eugenio Suarez, Paul Goldschmidt, JD Martinez, but I wouldn’t touch any of these guys, as they’re only good for another 1 or 2 season as they continue their declines. Walker, too, will be 34 next season, so he wouldn’t be a top priority of mine, and Alonso and Bregman are younger (30) but shown worrying signs in recent times.
It should be noted that Vlad Guerrero will hit FA in 2026.
Then among SPs you’ve got a ton of former great SPs, who are rather old now, like Scherzer, Verlander, Eovaldi, Cole, Morton, etc. who could be fine as the 2nd SP, to basically eat innings more effectively than Corbin did. But the only good, young(er) SPs are:
1. Corbin Burnes
2. Blake Snell
3. Luis Severino
4. Max Fried
5. Lucas Giolito
6. Walker Buehler
7. Shane Bieber
But the latter 4 have pretty massive injury red flags, but realistically we won’t be able to get Burnes. Snell is wildly inconsistent and will likely demand a salary that doesn’t align with that inconsistency, leaving us with one of the risks. I hope the medical team will do their due diligence before we hand over 9 figures to one of these guys…
It’ll be interesting to see how Rizzo approaches this winter. He’s been pretty tight lipped so far about the Nats’ ambitions. But another holding off season isn’t going to do this team any favors. The team is set up as best as it can be at this point. Unfortunately, it’s a bit short of the Orioles’ rebuild which won’t make us a 100 win team by itself, so we’ll need another way to boost us from 70-80 wins to 90-100… and I don’t see any other way than through free agency.
Will
1 Oct 24 at 9:25 am
Excellent analysis.
Todd Boss
1 Oct 24 at 1:34 pm
I’ll accept injury concerns for an ace, as long as the price reflects it. If we bring in an SP1, we’re going to have a really solid SP6 in Parker or Cavalli or whoever and decent depth beyond that with Lord, Stuart, Lara, etc.
I’m more worried about Snell’s inconsistency or Burnes’s declining K% because I think the market is still going to pay them top dollar.
I’ve been increasingly liking the idea of Bieber, actually. I keep seeing projections with him potentially taking the QO or a “prove health” contract of $35M for 2 years or something. I think the Nats should offer him a huge guarantee, like $80M/2, but in return get a long term team option, like $90M/5, that works out to be slightly team friendly combined deal if he comes back all the way.
From the Nats POV, we get maybe the highest upside FA pitcher available. We have plenty of SP depth to cover for his innings limits during recovery. 2025 is an in-window year for us, but it’s not our peak window, so having max 100 IP from him bothers us less than other teams in the bidding. We take a huge cap hit upfront, when we have tons of room, and then get a discount later in the window when we might need it.
From Bieber’s POV, I think it’s hard to turn down a guarantee like that when you know there’s a 25% chance or whatever that you won’t be able to come back and be an SP1 going forward. And all it costs you is giving a 20% discount the other 75% of the time. He’s made less than $35M over his career – the injury timing was vicious and he’s got to hate how exposed he is to downside variance here. I bet he’d be up for a structure like what I’m proposing.
SMS
1 Oct 24 at 3:30 pm
I’ll admit up front that I’m going to say some contradictory things, because there are no easy answers. It’s hard to sugar-coat it, though: the Nats are behind on the rebuild. There wasn’t much progress this season. The same record is NOT where they wanted to be. That said, I’m glad they played the kids. Might as well give them the experience, and find out who can play and who can’t.
After meeting the two contract obligations (Stras and Keibert) and the arb and pre-arb guys, the Nats will still have about $180M or so left under the tax line of $241M. It’s well past damn time that Mark Lerner stopped hording his pennies.
That said, I’m not really sure where to spend the money. As much as we’d love to get Soto back, and have virtually unlimited resources to throw at him, why in Heaven’s name would he come back? The Nats would have to sign five or six quality guys to have any hope of convincing him that they’re serious about contending. I just don’t see that happening.
All of the free agent starting pitchers scare me. Every one of them. I like the suggestion of Flaherty, but he’s playing within 30 minutes of where he grew up, living the dream. Maybe they just try to bring back Trevor Williams at a discount. That doesn’t move the needle much, but it’s better than not at all. Will Cavalli be healthy? We have no idea. Will Gray be able to pitch any next season?
I wouldn’t hate a Bieber gamble. I would think it would take a contract similar to Giolito’s. Of course that one hasn’t worked out so well.
Among the current field players . . . yikes. Ruiz really struggled in the first half, ended up with a .260 OBP, which doesn’t come close to cutting it. He and Abrams were supposed to be the core. Oh yeah, that guy, sent home for being stupid and not listening. (Read a little about that Rose fella, please.) He did some decent things at the plate, really tailed off in the second half, and played atrocious defense. He’s not a shortstop, but we know that Garcia isn’t either. (At least he seems to have learned his maturity lessons and put up a much better season.)
Ah yes, defense. The Nats posted a -51.5 defense fWAR, which ranked them #27. How much did that hurt the pitching? Well, the Nats’ starters ranked 23d in team ERA but only 9th in FIP. Alas, they can’t pitch “fielding independent.”
Prospects won’t fix all of this, on offense, defense, or on the mound. But who would sign here, and who is worth the investment?
Despite how much his hitting stats have leveled off since trash cans went out of vogue, I’m interested in Bregman. I was concerned that he might be a product of their band box, but he has very equal home/road career splits. He also has positive defensive stats, every season. He’s a Boras client, and he’ll be 31 before the 2025 season starts. Big gamble to give him a contract beyond four or five years.
Alonso will turn 30 in December. He plays woeful defense. He hit .240 this year and .217 last year. His numbers remind me of Chris Davis’s. ‘Nuf said. Hard “no” from me.
Willy Adames just turned 29. He plays positive defense. He strikes out a lot but also has significant power. One would think he’s going to want one of those shortstop contracts of recent years. None of those have worked out terrifically. Shortstops by and large don’t age well. I can’t see the Nats giving him something close to $200M overall.
Goldschmidt? He just turned 37 and posted a 100 wRC+, with significantly negative defense. Not worth the squeeze. He’s done.
Christian Walker? He turns 34 before next season, has posted consistently solid numbers for three seasons. Defense isn’t great, so he might be more of a DH. For 3/$45M, he could be interesting. Beyond that price, he becomes a risky overpay.
So . . . Bregman, Walker, maybe Bieber and/or Flaherty, but how much better would they really be? They’d still be very dependent on home-grown prospects, both hitting and pitching. But I’d sure rather them sign some guys than just wait around. House isn’t close to ready, despite his promotion. Who knows Cavalli’s situation.
Sigh.
KW
1 Oct 24 at 10:39 pm
@KW – I really appreciate your take, in large part because my default setting is pretty optimistic and I’m always worried that I’m letting my biases get the best of me. But there are several of your points that I just point blank disagree with.
1. There was a lot of progress from last year. It’s the same W/L record, but last year the 1st order pythag was +4.5 luck and 2nd and 3rd order was +10 and +8. This year, the numbers are +1, -2, and -2 respectively.
2. Our lineup is likely to improve next year even if you don’t assume any actual true-talent improvement. Assuming Meneses is going to be cut, position players no longer on the team netted a total of -1 fWAR in 1900 PAs this year. If you also cut / demote Lipscomb, it’s almost -2 fWAR over 2100 PAs. 750 of those PAs will be replaced by Wood and Crews at a minimum of 2.5 WAR/600. Even if you zero the rest out and project additional playing time for Tena, Yepez, House, Call, Garret and the rest as replacement level, that’s a 4 WAR improvement without signing a single FA or any player actually improving.
The SP picture isn’t quite as rosy, since we’re losing 3.7 fWAR Corbin and Williams. If we don’t sign anyone, Herz’s full season will get about 1 WAR of that back. And I think you can project whoever emerges healthy and tolerable from Cavalli, Lord, Stuart and the rest to around 1 or 1.5 WAR, so it’s about a 1.5 WAR loss.
But net net, even assuming we sign no one and no one improves, we’re up to a true talent baseline of 74 wins.
3. A rebuild doesn’t need to product a winning team. You just need to establish a baseline where a reasonable set of FAs bring you into contention. You yourself point out how much goddamn room there is (or should be) in the budget. If there’s $120M to spend, and they can sign FAs that are worth $8M per WAR (the average cost), that puts our expected wins in the upper 80s and the team is right in the WC mix.
4. I actually believe in the potential for lots of our players to improve. If Ruiz can hit like the previous two years and defend like this year (which sounds plausible to me), that’s a 1.5 or 2 WAR swing. Both Wood and Crews should improve from here. Probably by more than 1 WAR/600 each. I see serious upside in Herz and Gore. Abrams is a wild card now that we know what he’s dealing with. But it’s undeniable that if he can get his head right, he can be much more productive than we saw this year. Maybe those coin flips fall our way, maybe they don’t. But I don’t think you can look at the core as a whole and expect their true talent over the next 3-4 years to be lower than what they showed this year.
5. It’s a small point, and Walker may be old, but he was the best defending 1B in the league this year.
I don’t want Bregman and I do want to put 600/15 in front of Soto, but the rest of your FA takes make sense to me. But I only think the path to this point will have been a failure if we don’t take the next step – which is spending serious money on some good FAs. We still won’t be anyone’s preseason WS favorite, but that’s not really my standard for success, at least not next year. Your milage my vary.
SMS
1 Oct 24 at 11:58 pm
Good points, both KW and SMS.
KW, I share you concern that the rebuild has fallen a bit short, but also share SMS’s point that there’s still quite a bit of upside within the team.
We are pretty clearly a 70-72 win team at the moment, but accept SMS’s point that just with a bit of experience and reversion to the mean, this team could find another 10 wins in it. However, there’s the same opposite possibility, and to go back to my Reds comparison, they basically did nothing this past offseason thinking their young core would improve, and they went from 82 wins last season to 77 this season. Development is not linear.
But even in this scenario where the players, on the whole, improve and we improve by 10 wins next season, an 81-81 team just isn’t good enough. You needed to win 89 games to make the playoffs this season. Thus, we need to add at least another 10 wins through free agency.
I pointed out over on NatsProspects, that signing Soto to play 1B, would see a 5-6 WAR swing, assuming Soto is half-decent defensively at 1B (a not small assumption). Nats 1B were worth -0.6 WAR in 2024, and Soto would, on average, be good for 5-6 WAR at 1B (but potentially more). That gets us half way.
Without getting too sidetracked, I’m much more of a believer in bWAR for pitchers than fWAR, as bWAR is based off results (ERA), while fWAR is based off hypotheticals (FIP) (it’s the opposite for batters, but that’s another discussion). Why I bring this up is that Corbin is the personification of this divide. According to bWAR, Corbin has been worth -4.0 WAR between 2021-2024. To me, that tracks with his combined 5.71 ERA (easily the worst among qualified SPs in that period). But fWAR estimates Corbin was worth +3.5 WAR over the same period. That’s a divide of 2 whole WAR per season. Since I prefer bWAR, I think it would be VERY easy to improve on Corbin’s ~-1.0 WAR/season. If we signed any of the abovementioned SPs, it would be very easy to find another 4 WAR, going from -1 WAR to +3 WAR, which gets us nearly to that 10 win boost we need.
Find a competent 3B/DH, and sign another 5th SP, say Nathan Eovaldi, who’d be good for another 2-3 WAR and would largely cover Williams’ surprisingly good 2024 season, and we could find ourselves around a 90 win team. But that would cost around $100m/year to do, something like:
Soto: $50m
Bieber: $25m
Eovaldi: $20m
Martinez: $10m
Couple relievers like Floro for $2m each
But again, this largely hinges on Soto wanting to rejoin the Nats and not stay in New York, who will almost certainly want to keep him. Swapping in Alonso would be cheaper, but also he’s a significantly worse player than Soto. Walker is interesting, but his age profile means he’s almost certain to soon turn into 2024’s Paul Goldschmidt, and at this stage we should be targetting guys who will be able to contribute to the team over the next 5 years, not just the next 2. But given the dearth of options, he could be a decent idea to bridge us to going after Vlad Guerrero next year.
Will
2 Oct 24 at 7:19 am
Sorry one last point: I’ve made my opinion of Ruiz quite clear already, so apologies for beating a dead horse, but just swapping from Ruiz and Millas as starter and backup would gain us another several wins.
Ruiz has been worth -0.7 fWAR (bWAR is particularly useless for catchers, because it does not account for framing, a noted weakness of Ruiz) over the past 2 seasons and 1047 plate appearances. I don’t know at what point we realize Ruiz is who he is, but over two full seasons he’s been worth negative WAR, and it seems reasonable to predict another below replacement season next year (around -0.3 WAR). But all you need to do here is give Millas the lion’s share of playing time. To no fault of his own, Millas’ playing time sample size is still very small, only 95 PA, however the signs are pretty good. He’s rated as an above average defensive catcher, and a better hitter than Ruiz, which was always meant to be Ruiz’s strength (96 wRC+ vs 83 wRC+). I know it’s a risk given the sample size concerns, but what else can I do if Martinez refuses to play Millas?, but Millas has been worth 0.5 WAR in those 95 PA. Scale that up to 500 PA, and he could be worth 2.6 WAR. Boom, there’s another 3 wins to be gained with no further action and at no additional cost.
And, hey, maybe everything clicks, and Ruiz finally starts playing up to his potential, great, you can increase Ruiz’s playing time, and no harm is done. But it’s madness to me that the team keeps waiting for Ruiz to come around, when better catchers are being blocked from playing. A silly, but pretty reasonable $60m contract extension shouldn’t have anywhere close to this amount of sway. But the team does have a worrying trend of being stubbornly resistant to eating bad contracts (see Corbin, Gallo, and the Strasburg shenanigans for further evidence).
Will
2 Oct 24 at 7:35 am
Ghost at NatsTalk posted yesterday that someone with the team told him that they see their chances of getting Soto as 0.5%. As in, it isn’t happening. (And I say this as someone who would put 12/$600M with no deferrals in front of him and make him tell me no.)
On a team-wide level, here’s where we start the offseason: to get in wild-card contention, the Nats need to find a way to score around 100 more runs next season and allow around 100 less. That would take them from a run diff of -104 now to +96. Wild card teams:
SD +91
ATL +97
NYM +71
(AZ) +98
BAL +87
KC +91
DET +40
You guys seem more concerned about/focused on starting pitching than I am. Gore, Parker, and Herz all had FIPs under 4. That will play. Corbin will be addition by subtraction, but Irvin ended up with a FIP the same as Corbin’s. Cavalli will be in the mix, and they’ll probably sign at least one FA, but likely not a top one.
I think the bigger bang for the buck would come by investing in the bullpen. I never want to see Tanner Rainey again.
You also prevent runs by defense, and they’ve got real issues on the left side of the infield. What do you do with Abrams? Who plays 3B? I’m not head over heals for Bregman, but I also don’t think House is close to ready. They’ve been stopgap at 3B since Rendon left, and 1B even longer. Those are also two big offensive cog positions that have gone wanting for a long time.
OF defense should be a lot better with a full season of Wood-Young-Crews, three guys supposedly all good enough to play CF. Will and I have had a friendly debate about whether Young can/should be a regular for the long term, but for 2025, he’s good enough, and a big plus defensively.
I’m really not sure where you get the 100-run improvement on offense without some FA action. Wood and Crews should improve, obviously/hopefully, and Garcia finally seems solid. Abrams has to be a part of the offensive equation, no matter what they do with him defensively. Like SMS, I’m crossing my fingers on Ruiz. They drafted for SS and catcher, but those guys will be two or three years away.
If they make some decent moves, I’ll buy what Will is selling — that they can get close to .500 next year. But that’s not contending. Rizzo was adamant that they would be at .500 in 2024 and contending by 2025, but that hasn’t happened. They were 18 wins short of the 2024 NL wild card line, and that’s a big gap to close.
KW
2 Oct 24 at 8:41 am
Ruiz’s numbers confuse me. If you told me that we have a catcher who had 24 doubles and 18 homers in 136 games in 2023 and 21 doubles and 13 homers in 127 games in 2024, and that he only strikes out 11% of the time, I’d buy stock in that. But he comes up empty in nearly everything else.
There’s not enough of a sample size to know if Millas is going to hit at the MLB level. I seriously doubt that Rizzo, after having extended Ruiz, will bumping him from starting, but more equitable sharing of the position with Millas would seem to be in order.
KW
2 Oct 24 at 8:53 am
KW, I think our rotation is in surprisingly good shape. However, in this era, injuries are an ever present danger. You need more than 5 SPs to compete, and if we’d be targeting injury-plagued young SPs, like Bieber, Giolito or Buehler, or injury-plagued old SPs (Verlander, Eovaldi, etc.) as seems the only real option, that should factor into our rotation depth.
Gore, Irvin, Parker and Herz are a great foundation. But they each have serious concerns too. It’s just as likely that Gore discovers some consistency as his control continues to plague him. We need contingencies for when this happens. And when one of them inevitably blows out their elbow.
I have no faith in Cavalli. Pitchers don’t miss two full seasons to TJ. There’s clearly bigger problems here, and until he throws a few starts in a row in AAA, I won’t be expecting anything out of him. (same story for Cole Henry and even Gray, though I’m more discouraged by the fact that across nearly 400 major league innings he just hasn’t been good than by the injuries)
The prospect we should probably expect the most out of next season is actually Andry Lara. But Stuart and Lord should also be in the mix too. Sykora and Susana, the real gems, and maybe Clemmey too, are still 2+ years away. But we need this constant pipeline, because for example, Gore only has 3 more years of control.
On the bullpen, I’ve made my frustrations with bullpen promotions clear, but in AA there’s a ton of interesting pieces, that could contribute next season: Marquis Grissom, Matt Cronin, Jack Sinclair, Daison Acosta and Tyler Schoff all had very good seasons. Then Ribalta, Willingham and Brzykcy just need to figure out how to translate their very good minor league performances to the majors.
Then we have Ferrer, who quietly had a breakout season, Robert Garcia, Finnegan, La Sorsa and Law coming back (plus technically Rainey too). But we’d be really smart to not overpopulate the bullpen. Relievers are in this weird place where they cost nothing via free agency, but can net absurd value at the trade deadline. The Royals just flipped 2 months of a washed up Aroldis Chapman for 6 seasons of a playoff ace in Cole Ragans, and there’s a dozen other examples like this. I don’t understand why this hasn’t translated to the free agency market, but the Nats are well placed to continue benefiting from their weird market inefficiency. Sign like 2-3 to major league deals, and another 5 or so to MILB contracts, like they did last winter. In a few seasons, Robert Garcia will probably net us the future equivalent of Wallace+Lomavita.
Will
2 Oct 24 at 10:00 am
The FIP WAR vs RA WAR is always an interesting question. I don’t really love either methodology, to be honest, but for projection purposes I usually favor FIP because it’s been shown to be more predictive of future performance (at least until we have several seasons worth of data).
But regardless of that, I think we’re all pretty close to the same page on the pitchers. We have a 4 mostly proven starters that will fall between a 2,2,3,4 and a 3,3,4,5. And between Cavalli, Lord, Stuart and Lara it feels very reasonable to assume that we can cover the rest of the starts adequately if not necessarily well. I still want to sign a FA with ace upside if we can, but our SP pipeline is mostly fine.
Re Ruiz, what frustrates me about him, but at the same time gives me hope, is that he’s just been so inconsistent. His defense this year was fine. His defense 2 years ago was fine. His offense last year was fine. His offense two years ago was fine. He just needs to do both at the same time, and he hasn’t done that since 2022. (Though he was +0.5 WAR post July 1st, so even that over a full year would be a step in the right direction and a fair return for $6M.)
Best case scenario is that he’s been overworked and catching 90 or 100 games instead of 120 helps. I’d love to see a more even split between Ruiz and Millas next year. And then next offseason we can re-evaluate our catching situation. We’ll have another year of scouting on and development from Loma and Bazzell by then too.
SMS
2 Oct 24 at 2:05 pm
I see that Ghost/Steve at NatsTalk has elaborated on something I had mentioned — that FIP indicates that our starting pitchers were a lot better than our defense:
https://www.talknats.com/2024/10/02/defense-matters-and-you-see-it-in-the-era-fip-comparison/
He floats the idea of moving Abrams to 3B. But then who plays SS? Garcia? (One of the least-prepared players I have ever seen attempt to play SS at the MLB level.) Tena at 2B? or Wallace?
It’s all a real puzzle, all the more since they also desperately need to upgrade offensive output at the same time.
KW
2 Oct 24 at 2:46 pm
Eh, I’m pretty sure that Abrams with better habits and preparation can play adequate defense at short and deliver at least 3 WAR/600 from there.
And if Abrams can’t get his shit together, he probably would fail at 3rd too.
I think we just have to hope for him to get the support he needs this offseason.
(Either that or have Nunez somehow actually have or develop a league average-ish bat. Not impossible but not likely.)
SMS
2 Oct 24 at 3:04 pm
Watching Tena at 3B and Abrams at SS, it couldn’t get much worse swapping them. Tena, after all, came up through the minors as a SS, and Abrams’ arm is definitely good enough to play at 3B. It actually might be a really good idea.
The other unspoken option here is to trade Abrams (or Ruiz), but I have no idea what sort of return package they could get, but with the number of holes still left to fill, it couldn’t be that difficult to find ways to improve the major league team. I wonder what it would take to pry Coby Mayo from the Orioles? I have no idea how they’re going to assemble an infield with Henderson, Holliday, Westburg, Mountcastle AND Mayo, not to mention Basallo being blocked by Rutschman. Talk about an embarrassment of riches…
Will
2 Oct 24 at 5:30 pm
I hope that Abrams realizes how badly he has screwed up. The Nats would have been talking to him this offseason about an extension. Instead, everyone is wondering where he fits, and if he has trade value.
Abrams certainly seems like he should be one of the key pieces of the rebuild. But in 2011, so did Danny Espinosa. No one is indispensable.
KW
2 Oct 24 at 10:00 pm
Tip ‘o the cap to SMS, who made the point that Ruiz’s defense improved a lot this year. His pitch framing went from “dreadful” to basically on or just under average. His pop time is still bad, but his CS% (20%) was basically league average (21%). And while it’s a rough measure, he had far fewer balls going to the backstop (WP + PB) than either Millas or Adams.
Frandsen (and Ghost) love to rag on Ruiz’s framing, but Statcast is OK with it.
John C.
2 Oct 24 at 10:01 pm
Overlooked in the extensive rebuild analysis is the possibility to rely on a trade or two. I see that as more likely than a big free agent splash.
FredMD
3 Oct 24 at 3:41 pm
FredMD: you make a good point about trades. We definitely have a dearth of one asset in particular: outfielders. Here’s a quick glance out our system OF depth chart:
– MLB starters: Wood, Crews, young
– MLB backups: Garrett, Call,
– AAA prospects: Hassell, Pinckney
– AA prospects: Lile, De La Rosa
– Lower level prospects: Vaquero, Green (maybe), Acevedo, Batista
That’s definitely a crew of players who we can draw from. If Hassell and Lile along live up to their potential we can use them
Todd Boss
3 Oct 24 at 7:37 pm
OF is definitely the place where we have too much talent, but beyond them I don’t see many other positions we would want to/could trade away players, which kind of touches on KW’s point on the rebuild coming up a bit short. Ideally, you’d have lots of talent, albeit unevenly allocated, kind of like the Orioles with their bevy of hitters, especially infielders, but comparative weakness at pitching. Here, we just have a list of mostly failed prospects below the major league level, Lile being the exception. And as much as I like Pinckney, I don’t think others necessarily do. Hassell, de la Rosa, Green and Vaquero may still retain some of the value that had them getting serious buzz in the past, but we would absolutely be selling low on them. And really, how much value could we get in return for a former top prospect? The minor leagues are absolutely littered with these players. Blake Rutherford, obtained for free, was more highly regarded at one point in time than all but Wood and Crews. The key difference with him being that he actually hit well at AA, something most of our OFs are presently struggling with (if they’ve made it at all to AA).
Realistically, at best wouldn’t we expect a similar return: i.e. a former highly regarded OF prospect for a former highly regarded infield prospect? And does anyone here really have faith in our development team to “fix” any kind of hitter? And I’m not sure these kind of players would really move the needle much in terms of boosting the rebuild. They, like Green, Vaquero, Hassell and de la Rosa, would essentially be lottery picks, much more likely than not to succeed. Even sure-fire top prospects are still lotto picks with a high bust potential (see: Senzel, Nick).
Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe we could find a team that was super high on Green around draft time and still see a potential #1 pick in him. But I’m curious other people’s thoughts on this.
Will
4 Oct 24 at 3:46 am
Will, you’re singing my song, brother. As much as we’d all like a big trade or two, our high-level asset collection from which to trade isn’t deep.
When you think about the big trades in Nats’ history, nearly all of them involved top 100 prospects. That’s currently Crews (not being traded), House, Sykora, and Susana (on some lists).
Alex Meyer (for Span) was ranked higher than Sykora, House, or Susana are now.
Souza made #37 on the BA list in the offseason of the trade. He was coming off two monster minor-league seasons (1.022 at AAA in 2014, comparable to Wood’s 1.058 at AAA this year) — for Turner and Ross.
Giolito and Lopez had already pitched in the majors, with Giolito a top-20 overall prospect, Lopez in the top 100, and Dunning a first-round pick who made top 100 after the trade (for Eaton, coming off a 6-WAR season).
Milone and Peacock would be similar to Parker and Herz (not big prospects but already looked good in the majors), plus the best young pitcher in the organization (Cole = Sykora), and a top young catcher (Norris = Lomavita or Bazzell) — for Gio.
So . . . if you want to make a trade to add a significant piece of the puzzle, other teams are going to want House, Sykora, and/or Susana. Personally, I think Susana may be a Meyer type who will struggle to reach his potential. I wouldn’t mind parting with him. I started a minor fire storm recently with the suggestion that House wasn’t untouchable in a trade. But if they were to move Abrams to 3B . . .
Who is untouchable? Wood and Crews. It’s a short list. If you want to put Sykora on it as well, that’s your prerogative, but look above and remember that Riz has traded the top pitchers in the organization before.
In the minors, Lara, Lile, Morales, King, Dickerson, and Lomavita — all probably ranking somewhere 101-200 — would also have some significant trade value, but only if combined in a multi-player trade. In the majors, they’d probably still have to do some combination with Herz/Parker/Irvin to get real value, like they did in the Gio trade. Gore would have higher value but also would be less likely to be moved. Abrams, Garcia, and Young all could have varying degrees of value but likely would need to be combined with others to add a significant piece.
Cavalli and Bennett would have some value, but who knows how much while coming off injuries, particularly with Cavalli struggling so much with rehab. (Love for Cavalli in the Natosphere seems to have dimmed considerably.)
KW
4 Oct 24 at 11:33 am
I think Rutherford takes it a step too far. He may have had a lot of value at peak, but he was 25 by the time we signed him as an MLFA. All our superfluous prospects are still young enough to be prospects, and only JLDR has entirely lost his prospect status for me.
But you are also right that we need to be realistic in what teams are going to be willing to offer in return for the fringe to mid-level prospects that we all see to be likely superfluous to the team’s plans. Lile, Hassell, Green, Vaquero – even at their sell low-ish current standing – those guys will return solid rentals, could be swapped for similar talents who play other positions (eg some other team’s Angel Feliz or Tyler Stuart) or be the secondary pieces in a blockbuster deal.
What they won’t do, on their own, is bring a 3 WAR player to the big league team for 2+ seasons. That kind of trade would need to include talent from our big league roster and/or top 100 prospects. I don’t really think that path is particularly likely this offseason, and I don’t see the rationale to prioritize trades over FAs when the committed payroll is so low, but Rizzo has pulled off major surprise trades before and it would ridiculous to think it’s impossible. Maybe we take over Arenado’s contract in return for Pinckney or some other minor prospect, and that makes House available. House, plus one of Sykora or Susana, plus one of Lile or Hassell — now that’s a blue chip package that can get Crochet or whoever. So, maybe. We’ll see. But the mechanics of FA seem much much simpler to me.
SMS
4 Oct 24 at 11:41 am
Free agency is certainly more direct, but perhaps not “simpler” to actually pull off in real life. Part of it is that the Nats aren’t close enough to contending that top FA’s want to come here, unless the Nats really overpay. Part of it is that the FA pitching market really scares me. Part of it is that everyone wants really long contracts now, most of which won’t end well.
We’ll see. I don’t want to be a downer. It just seems like it’s going to be difficult calculus to find a path to significant improvement.
KW
4 Oct 24 at 10:21 pm
@KW – I think “playing for a contender” can be an overblown consideration for most FAs. If you’re a top-tier guy signing for 6+ years, I think it’s more about the culture and the owner committing to compete long term than the exact personnel on the roster. We don’t know exactly what Rizzo is able to say about that, but I hope it’s a good story. And given the totality of the Lerners time as owners, I don’t think it’s that hard a sell. I mean, we’re not the Yankees or the Dodgers but we’re very much also not the Pirates or the A’s.
And if you’re a mid-tier guy signing a 2-4 year deal, I think there’s a good chance that your main non-financial concern has more to do with your own playing time and opportunities to excel than the team-wide projections. You’d rather contend than not, but it wouldn’t take that much for a team to check the box. Especially if it’s your first FA deal, you’re probably looking for reasons to take the most money.
We’d still have to be the highest bidder – I’m not expecting anyone to offer the Nats a discount – but I don’t really understand or believe in a macro trend keeping players from coming to DC. (On the player side, that is. On the team side, the Lerners may refuse to spend or Rizzo may think contention is still too far away. Both of those are possible, if unlikely, and either would enrage me as a fan.)
That aside, I share many of your concerns around the FA starting pitchers. Trade targets too. Just a ton of risk everywhere you look. I still want an ace, if it’s possible, but if Rizzo thinks Cavalli’s chances of pitching 100 innings next year is 80%, then I could really see them just rolling with our existing SP depth and only upgrading the offense. And I think I’d be mostly OK with that.
But I’m not OK with the team signing two bats at $30M/2 and $12M/1 and calling it a day. We need some real players and there’s room in the budget to afford them.
SMS
5 Oct 24 at 12:21 pm
A post that dealt with the draft has once again amplified how much every fan want to be a GM. I enjoy all the commentary.
I view the Nats as in the process of a remake rather than a rebuild. The team in the 2010’s had a clear goal, win a WS before Ted died. They drafted, signed free agents and made trades with this objective.
Now they are taking the long view and trying to construct a team that wins 90+ games every year. Not everything they did in the past fits this plan.
I’m very happy with their progress.
FredMD
5 Oct 24 at 12:44 pm
Overall, while there have been some optimistic developments, I’m disappointed in where they are with the rebuild. They’ve posted back-to-back seasons of 20 games under .500, and there’s nothing currently about the roster that screams massive improvement ahead. Yes, we’re quite hopeful about full seasons of Wood and Crews, but they’re both still young and inevitably are going to have ups and downs.
Some things have been self-inflicted (drafting Green, other top picks who haven’t panned out or are developing very slowly). Some couldn’t have been anticipated (Cavalli’s injury, Bennett’s injury, Abrams’s situation).
One thing that’s interesting from last offseason to this one is that this time last year, we were really enthusiastic about the hitter pipeline but really concerned about the pitchers. That script has flipped. Parker and Herz have exceeded expectations. Lara and Susana rebounded and looked like the high-level prospects they’re supposed to be. Sykora was dominant. Stuart and Clemmey look like significant additions. And Lord has done wonderfully unexpected things.
With the hitters, Wood took a significant step forward. Garcia made the improvements at the plate that he needed to make to be a quality player. Crews hasn’t disappointed, but neither has he particularly sparkled (yet).
Guys like Abrams, House, Ruiz, and Morales still have healthy ceilings, and maybe Hassell as well, but nothing looks guaranteed with any of them. House and Morales aren’t close to being MLB-ready.
The glass half-full scenario is that 2025 = 2011, the young kids finally click a little, pitching keeps them in games, the team surges to close to .500. Half-empty is another year of treading water while waiting yet longer on development. I’m sort of expecting something in between, maybe around 75 wins, with a lot of questions still unanswered.
KW
7 Oct 24 at 10:22 pm
It’s hard as a nats fan not to watch the KC Royals, who went from 56 to 86 wins in a season, and not be frustrated. but yeah, its hard to lose your opening day starter (Grey), your planned #2 starter (Cavalli), your actual best 2024 pitcher (Williams) and your 2nd round draft pick from three years ago (Bennett). If Cavalli’s in the majors and putting up a 5-win season, while Grey is still giving 4-5 win performance, suddenly the team is a buyer not a seller at Trade deadline.
Royals improved 10wins on offense and 20wins in pitching; it can be done.
But, they also had the White Sox in their division (they went 12-1 versus CWS, 74-75 against the rest of the league)
Todd Boss
14 Oct 24 at 12:59 pm
There’s definitely a huge heaping scoop of unsustainability with the Royals. Basically, I think it’s next-to-zero probability that Seth Lugo is a 4.7 WAR pitcher and Michael Wacha a 3.3 WAR pitcher next season. Both those figures are career bests for both players, who just finished their 9th and 12th professional seasons at ages 34 and 32, respectively. On the offense side, they had exactly two hitters with a WAR above 2.0. Sal Perez at 3.1 WAR, which is just a smidge below his career best season of 3.2 WAR, in his 13th season and at age 34 as a catcher. The other hitter above 2.0 WAR was the incredible Bobby Witt Jr, with 10.4 WAR (!!!). The Royals batters were collectively worth 20.0 WAR. Witt was worth 52% of the entire roster on offense!
Moreover, their farm system is absolutely barren of talent. There’s no help coming through the pipeline. This is the best they’re going to be for a very long time. Any improvements that come from their other recent prospect graduations in Pasquantino or Garcia will be more than offset by the aforementioned 3 players’ inevitable reversion to the mean, and I just don’t think Witt or Ragans can get much better than they already are. Poor Witt, he’s going to be the new Mike Trout: a generational talent stuck on a garbage franchise.
However, it is a good reminder of the value in investing in short-term bullpen arms via free agency. The Royals signed Aroldis Chapman to a 1yr/$3.75m contract two offseasons ago, flipped him to the Rangers at the deadline for two unexceptional prospects, one of whom, Ragans, instantly turned into an ace, and has put up 7.3 WAR in a season and a half with the Royals.
We’ve already got our version of that in DJ Herz, plus Stuart and Clemmey coming up the ranks. We should keep doing this.
Will
15 Oct 24 at 9:41 am
Will, those are a lot of good points about the Royals. They did catch lightning in a bottle. To Todd’s point, all the teams in that division benefited considerably from getting to beat up on the White Sox. Maybe we can hope that the Marlins keep imploding, although the Nats are also stuck in the same division with three big-spending, talented teams that likely won’t be declining for a while.
It’s worth noting that I was calling all last winter for the Nats to sign a couple of mid-market starters, and I would have been pushing even harder for that if I had known what the team probably knew about Cavalli’s lack of recovery progress. Now, the odds of winning the playoff lottery with Lugo and Wacha were long, but it happened.
The Nats certainly seem better positioned than the Royals for sustainable success with the guys in their farm system . . . if they click, and if the team is right about which ones will click and which ones won’t. But the Royals’ example of adding a couple of veterans to the mix is instructive.
The Nats certainly won’t have much holdover veteran presence. Corbin figures to be gone, and Trevor Williams will be a looking for a good contract somewhere. Gallo likely won’t be invited back. Vargas is 33 but is under team control for another season due to his limited MLB experience.
KW
15 Oct 24 at 2:50 pm