Before we moved Curtis Mead, I wrote a bit about “should we trade assets” at the trade deadline. The decision basically was whether to keep everybody in order to make a possibly futile run at the final Wild card, so that we could earn ourselves a 3-game away series in Atlanta.
Well, we just got SWEPT in a 4-game series in Atlanta, as a pretty clear preview of what we were actually fighting for, and before the final game of the sweep was done, the GM had clearly red the tea leaves properly and the team had moved Luis Garcia. He was held out of Sunday’s game .. but still boarded the team charter to Philadelphia since the trade wasn’t finalized, so he got the news mid-flight, and then had to catch a shuttle up the coast to join his new team.
- Yovanny Cruz, 26yr old 40-man RHP reliever who just made his MLB debut
- Jake Bird, 30yr old 30-man journeyman RHP reliever who’s in his 5th pro season but who still has 2 years of arb control.
- Jack Cebert, a 2025 15th round RHP starter from Texas Tech who just got to AA
- Ben Grable, a 2025 11th round RHP reliever from Indiana who also just got to AA.
Two 40-man players coming over; one replaces Garcia and Poulin goes to the 60-day to make room for the other.
We part ways with the longest serving player in our organization, an IFA we signed in 2016 as a 16 yr old who has certainly run the gamut of ups and downs in this org. He was a serious non-tender candidate just last December, but for reasons discussed in my post on the topic then, the team kept him and things paid off. He’s mashing this year, slashing .283/.313/.560 as of the trade, well ahead of his career slash line of .368/.301/.431. He LEADS the NL in slugging percentage amongst qualified hitters, which is amazing to see. He’s also an abhorrent fielder, going from -17 DRS at SS in 2022, then getting moved to 2B, where he got progressively worse over the next 3 years, culminating with a -17 DRS figure in 2025 (that’s awfully hard to do at 2B), which then led to him going to 1B this year.
To his credit, he’s slugged his way into supporting his starting at 1B. He’s also a severe platoon guy, posting a .918 OPS figure against RHP this season versus just a .627 OPS against LHP. Despite hitting well this season, his OPS is still a meager .313, but he goes to a park where his pull-happy swing could net him homers in bunches.
My cynical take? We took a non-tender candidate with a career .301 OPS who’s been relegated to 1B and turned him into 4 arms. No, these are not 4 arms who are going to challenge for the Cy Young necessarily, but we’ve turned Garcia into two relievers who can help today, a pretty solid looking AA reliever, and a AA starter who could turn into something.
I like this trade, and I like what the front office is thinking.
Todd, I agree with your analysis here. I for one don’t see Garcia sustaining his current pace as a new norm, so good to sell high. Similar to the Mead trade, I think the team is thinking that the new pitchers will offset the offensive loss and probably keep the team at the same level they’ve (unexpectedly) been performing in terms of W-L. Count me as someone who thinks Ortiz and/or Morales can make up most, if not all, of Garcia’s offensive output. If that’s the plan then I’d guess that we don’t need to worry about trading Abrams today. Griffin I would guess does get moved though, probably for another near to the majors arm(s), unless they think they can keep with with a QO or don’t get an offer that would match the comp pick. But I’d bet they do.
MG
3 Aug 26 at 10:21 am
I’m fine with selling (or mostly selling) given the standings. And I agree that LG is a limited player and I even agree that this return is a good fit for our org, but the straight objective math is that the trade favors the Yankees.
Using Zips, LG is worth 0.5 WAR the rest of 2026 and 2.1 WAR in 2027. 2.6 fWAR at $13M/WAR is $33.8M. We have to guess at the arb raise LG gets next year, but I figure his total salary from the Yankees will be about $13M. Surplus value of around $20M.
Using FG’s ratings, the deal is 1 40+, 2 40s and an ML reliever a hair better than replacement. Those value out to $7M, $4M each and $1M respectively. That’s $16M. Basically, it was 1 FV40 lighter than fair.
Of course, the price isn’t determined by the value, and this might well have been the best offer on the table. And I’m not sure it’s so much worse than fair that I wouldn’t have taken it. How many wins is LG worth over Ortiz + Morales anyway?
But it’s a bummer to see yet one more trade where we got the worst of it (as far as you can tell in the immediate aftermath). There’s a lot to like about the new FO, but I’m not sure I think negotiating is their strong suit.
SMS
3 Aug 26 at 11:47 am
I also agree with your analysis, Todd. Most importantly, Gable and Cruz could be key pieces of the bullpen for many years. Both seem to have really good stuff. Gable has struck out 39 in 29 AA innings. Cruz has struck out 52 in 35.2 AAA innings.
Nothing’s guaranteed, of course. But think what a difference it would make to actually have high leverage relievers you could trust. It’s been a while.
Bruce
3 Aug 26 at 4:49 pm
LG and Griffin for 7 prospects (and Bird), and only Cebert is going to make our top 25.
What a disaster.
SMS
3 Aug 26 at 5:55 pm
I too am underwhelmed with the returns on both Garcia and Griffin. But I’m perplexed by the underwhelming returns on almost everyone this deadline. The Gausman, Ray and Castillo trades also yielded very, very little value.
Weirdly, though, a few trades, like Rutschman, Soriano, and, very weirdly, Erik Miller brought in past trade deadline-esque prospect yields.
But I guess the market wasn’t there? But for Griffin, we got 4 players who are barely prospects. They seem to be consensus 35/40 prospects with Hartle being the only clear 40. Because of Griffin’s circuitous pathway to the majors, I think he’s uniquely likely to be looking for a long-term deal this winter. It’s quite possibly his one chance at a payday, thus I think there’d be less chance of him accepting a QO than comparable SPs to him, and then we’d be compensated with pick 1-32 or so. This season, all QO comp picks were rated as either 50 or 55 FVs by MLB.com. It seems to me 1 55 FV is far superior to 4 35 FVs. But what do I know… Toboni seems to be a big fan of quantity over quality.
Will
3 Aug 26 at 6:30 pm
I missed the Nats traded Christian Franklin for Joe Glassey.
I guess that explains the acquisition of Nick Mitchell?
Glassey has traditionally been old for his level, but he doesn’t seem to also suffer from terrible control like the other 100 relievers we’ve picked up this season.
Will
3 Aug 26 at 6:33 pm
the thing I don’t get about the farm system today is that “minor league relievers aren’t worth even looking at”, but when do the Nats ever call up a guy starting in AAA to be a reliever? For that matter, when do they ever develop relievers? They’re almost always the results of trades or waiver pickups. Maybe that’s part of the problem?
keivn R
3 Aug 26 at 7:37 pm
Rough deals for the Nats. The Griffin trade was a disaster-it will be interesting to revisit down the road what the QO pick would have been for Griffin if we kept him compared to Josh Hartle who charitably would be prospect 25 for Cleveland. We moved Garcia for 3 relief arms (14, 25, and 30+ ranked by MLB.com) and Bird who the Yankees couldn’t wait to get rid of; meanwhile the Yankees gave up prospects 5 and 13 for Heliot Ramos a regressing LF with 9HRs this year and a .728OPS…
AG
3 Aug 26 at 10:57 pm
Todd, I’m kind of surprised that you like the Garcia trade. You have a pretty strong stance that relief prospects have very little value (even the very good ones), so now that we’ve acquired 3 for Garcia and two more for Griffin (5 of 8 total players received), isn’t that bad value? Or, after this disastrous season, are you coming around to relievers having more value?
While on the topic of hoarding relievers. I’m surprised with how bad the org has been at identifying relief talent. Rizzo never knew how to build a cohesive and complete bullpen, but he’d occasionally find diamonds in the rough. Harvey, Finnegan, Garcia, were just a few reclaimed prospects that the Nats “fixed” and then eventually flipped for talent. But we also had a few modest free agent successes, like Floro, Law and Barnes. Don’t get me wrong, there were far more misses than hits, and arguably Rizzo’s misses in 2025 (Sims, Poche and Lopez were historically bad) were a big part of his getting fired. But this season has been defined by an incredible volume of bullpen churn. By my quick count, we’ve used 23 relievers this season. What’s incredible to me is that almost every single reliever identified and acquired under Toboni has been abjectly bad. Our “successes” (and I use the term loosely) this season in the bullpen have been exclusively internally developed players from the previous regime (Lord, Ribalta, Alvarez, heck, even Eddy Yean could kinda fit in this group as he originally did come thru the Nats org, though more seriously, Yean is the singular success case). There’s more than a dozen guys acquired this season who’ve been really, really bad.
And it doesn’t stop there. The farm system is chock full of really bad recently acquired MiLFA relievers. Listing the failures would take too long. So who are the best relief arms we’ve added this season? I can’t identify a single player in AA or AAA, despite there being several handfuls of arms. You have to go all the way down to A ball before you find a few guys who haven’t been awful. And here, there’s huge question marks because they’re all significantly older than average, and it remains to be seen if they’re just small fish in a minuscule pond. Jacob Roberts and Jackson Dannelly have had modest success across Fburg and Wilmington, but after that there’s very little, despite both bullpens being littered with MiLFAs.
Toboni wasn’t handed an easy task. The organizational depth left by Rizzo was awful, but it’s kind of strange that the little talent we did have have been the most successful. Guys like Jack Sinclair, Robert Cranz, Merrick Baldo, Jared Simpson, Luke Young, who are by no means special talents, have been the most successful relievers this season. While the massive infusion of random relievers under the Toboni regime have been almost uniformly failures. It looks like talent identification of relief arms is a serious deficiency. I just hope we haven’t just spent almost the entirety of our major league roster’s trade value on a bunch more turds.
Now, I don’t think the guys we acquired are turds. They have flashy, projectable stuff. But Yovanny Cruz, for example, was a MiLFA this winter. The Yankees clearly saw something in his triple digit stuff that warranted signing him. Meanwhile, the Nats made Tyler Baum and Euri Montero their first MiLFA signings… Maybe that was a casualty of the chaos of the re-org this winter, but the players acquired since all key posts have been filled doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence. Let’s see how they fare this winter, and how this bevvy of new arms performs over the next month and a half.
Will
4 Aug 26 at 3:28 am
I’m not defending these trades (though I see the rationale for preferring quantity over quality). I do feel strongly, however, that the word “disaster” cannot apply to transactions involving a 0.3 season of Foster Griffin and 1.3 seasons of Luis Garcia. They are just not valuable enough pieces to get exercised about a light return. I reserve that term for getting meh MLB production in return for a 0.3 season of Max Scherzer and 1.3 seasons of Trea Turner.
The real, useful information would be the other offers on the table for Griffin and Garcia (which is unknowable), and whether the FO was planning to give Griffin a QO if it did not deal him.
Derek
4 Aug 26 at 9:02 am
agree and one step further, do they even know that the QO rules will be as is?
FredMD
4 Aug 26 at 9:41 am
@Derek – that’s certainly fair enough.
My “disaster” comment was more driven by them giving up the season for this pittance and not giving up uber-valuable trade chips for this pittance. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that wins don’t matter unless it changes your playoff odds. The joy and misery is real, and I’d rather win 76 than 72 games in a season. I know a lot of fans don’t agree with that, and for them trading all assets for whatever you can get might sit better than it does for me.
But I agree – the return I was expecting and would have been fine with, something like 4 45s for the both of them, wasn’t going to make or break the franchise.
SMS
4 Aug 26 at 9:56 am
I think anyone labeling these moves “a disaster” is drastically over rating who we traded. Curtis Mead was DFAd on March 31st, Luis Garcia was a serious non-tender candidate, and Griffin was on a 1yr/$5.5M deal as a 30yr old coming over from a AAA league. So, in that lens, turning all these guys into *something* as opposed to nothing was a win, even if we didn’t like the return. I havn’t written up the Griffen trade, but am not really that surprised it was “less” than Garcia honestly. You have Griffen for 2 months, then he’s guaranteed to go FA, while Garcia is at least with NYY for another year.
I think back to the CC Sabathia trade in his walk year; Cleveland got back one big-time prospect … who never amounted to anything.
As for getting relievers back … I think my “stance” on relievers is this: I don’t think a reliever in AA is a prospect, but they can still be an important part of an 8-man bullpen. Just like a middle infielder in AA can eventually be an important role player in the majors. Same as a backup catcher. These guys have “value” but they’re not prospects. They’re two st eps above “org guys” and one step above “4-A guys.”
Ask yourself this: if we had just three more competent relievers this year, actual good arms who were reliable, would we be 55-59 or would we be something more like 60-54? I think we know the answer.
Writing up Griffen trade now.
Todd Boss
4 Aug 26 at 9:56 am
SMS–I agree 100% that it’s better to win 80 games vs 76 or 76 vs 72, and it might have been worth holding on to Garcia or Griffin rather than get the pupu platter of pitchers each returned. I guess my stance is that these are relatively insignificant decisions either way.
I’m a lot more exercised about how they’re using House and (to a much lesser extent) Crews on the MLB roster. Both pay 100% of the time against LHPs. Great. I find it INSANE that the team is starting Vivas or Tena at 3B over House against RHPs on a regular basis. On a playoff-caliber roster, Vivas and Tena are 5th infielders at best. The marginal upgrade over House against LHPs is unequivocally outweighed by House getting more experience. And if you want to trade House, hiding him against RHPs is telling the world he’s the weak side of a platoon. He should play every day. I feel the same way about Crews, though the case for giving him more off days is stronger given that the club has four MLB caliber OFs who need to play.
Derek
4 Aug 26 at 10:24 am
@SMS: “giving up on the season?” I would phrase it more like, “Nats saw their future this past weekend in Atlanta and made the right move.”
In a blink of an eye, the Nats went from 1gB to 5.5GB in the wild card. AT BEST they were competing for the 6th wild card, which would get them a 3-game away series in Atlanta, where we just lost 4 straight where we were mostly uncompetitive. So, do you want to keep everyone and try to claw your way above 5 over teams just to have the opportunity to likely get swept by a 95 win team? Or do you cash in and sell high on Garcia and Griffin?
I’m a cynic, especially after the last half decade. I have no confidence this team would even GET to the 3rd wild card, let alone actually do anything with it. An away wild card series doesn’t bring any home games for the fans, and i find it patently hilarious that johnny come lately joe six-pack fans are posting crap like, “if they trade Foster Griffin i’m done” crap on FB and reddit. Really? When this team signed Griffin in December did you even take note of the move?
Todd Boss
4 Aug 26 at 10:31 am
But that’s just my point, Todd. I don’t need to win a couple of series to be thrilled with getting the wildcard. I don’t need to actually get the wildcard to be thrilled and appreciative that they’re in the mix for most/all of the season. And I don’t even really need for them to be in the mix, for me to experience the joy of watching less awful baseball.
This team was always a longshot to make the playoffs – I don’t think there’s a single day when I would have bet on them at 4-1 odds. And I still value the fact that they were playing better baseball than we expected, and I don’t zero out the worth of that continuing for the rest of the season.
I’m a cynic too. We weren’t going to make the playoffs. If we did, we lose. So what? That doesn’t mean that the results don’t impact the fan experience. At least not for me.
And to be clear – 1’d be 100% fine with trading Griffin for a better return. Soroka got us Franklin and Ronny Cruz. Lane Thomas got us Clemmey, Ramirez and Tena. Lane Thomas was at least as flawed and incomplete of a player as Garcia and Griffin is objectively better than Soroka was. Do you really prefer this return to those packages?
I just don’t see how you can call it “selling high” after we’ve seen the price they got.
SMS
4 Aug 26 at 10:44 am
I don’t want an away wild card; I want a divisional series at home. And these moves get us closer to that in 2027 than had we done nothing.
I guess selling high depends on whether you think Mead/Garcia/Griffin’s performances this year were “the new normal” for them across the board, or was it a one-off?
If you think this was a fluke performance for all 3, then we sold high. All three were well, well above their career slash performances this year, and after watching Garcia in particular lumber around the infield with a .301 career OBP, now stuck at 1B before his chubby ass is relegated permanently to DH duty … i’ll take what we got.
What we should now get is a clear pathway for the next two months of full-time ABs for Crews, House, Ortiz, Chapparo, to see if they’re going to be something or a bust. Same with hopefully Alvarez, Cornelio, hopefully Perales soon. We should release Mikolas today, Littell tomorrow, and see what we have. If we lose every start these kids make for the rest of the season, that just means more draft dollars next July.
Todd Boss
4 Aug 26 at 10:59 am
I had another thought about the Griffin extension.
He can demand $120M/5 all he wants, but there’s absolutely no way he’d get a guarantee close to that with a QO hanging over him. Last year, two pitchers got amounts in that ballpark after rejecting a QO: Ranger Suarez and Framber Valdez. Griffin’s been pretty good, but even he can’t think those two are his comps, right?
People don’t always act rationally, and we can’t be stunned if Griffin was just dead set on going to FA, but he can’t credibly demand more in an extension than he’d get in FA (and he can only demand that much if we’re to believe that’s he’s completely risk neutral – which is doubtful but possible).
I do recognize that there is a chance that QO penalties are lessened or eliminated in the CBA, or that there are other changes that drastically increase the general salary levels, but if I were Griffin I’d be very reluctant to bet on that – especially when the alternative was presumably along the lines of structuring an $80M/4 deal to include a $20M signing bonus that I pocket before the lockout.
SMS
7 Aug 26 at 11:57 am
Shit – I put that in the wrong place. Please ignore. I’m going copy it over to the newest post.
@Todd – not sure if you can or care to, but if you want to just delete these, that would be fine with me.
SMS
7 Aug 26 at 11:59 am