As of 5:45pm, I thought perhaps our all-star starter Foster Griffin may be sticking around, since we hadn’t heard of any moves ahead of (what I thought was the ) 5pm EST deadline for trades. I guess it was 6pm EST, because we jammed in one last trade.
Griffin heads to Cleveland for four guys:
- Josh Hartle, LHP AA starter with a 3.86 ERA in 19 starts this season
- Will Dion, LHP reliever with some MLB and a solid 25/3 K/BB ratio
- Kendeglys Virguez, a RHP reliever with a 14.3 K/9 rate this year who just got moved to AA
- Nick Mitchell, a 22yr old OF with decent numbers in AA (.240 with some power, some speed)
The best prospect of course is the AA starter Hartle, who slots just into the back of our top 30 prospects on MLBpipeline.
Is this a great return? No, not really on the face of it. Is it an understandable return? Yes it is. Yes, Griffin was an all-star, one of the best pitchers this season by most measures. He’s also a FA in two months and rebuffed extension talks before getting moved, because of course he did. He toiled in Japan for years to get this shot, now he’s in his age 30 season and he has one big chance in open free agency to get that “one big career deal” that sets him up. He doesn’t want a one-year QO; he wants a 4-5 year deal that sets him up for life.
Should the Nats have kept him, offered him a QO and taken the comp pick instead of what they got? Maybe. As a “large market” team that’s stayed below the luxury tax, under the current system our comp pick would have been just before the 3rd round starts in 2027, somewhere around the 75th overall pick. Would that be better than what we just got? Debatable. Our 3rd rounder this year (Luke Williams, drafted 78th overall) is a prep SS who we probably don’t see until 2030; is that the kind of player you’d rather have instead of the four we got, all of whom are already in AA or higher?
The ship sailed on keeping these guys on Sunday night, so we were going to move him for something, and this sounds like the best deal we could get.
One last side note: the Nats also made an under the radar smart trade, moving the buried AAA outfielder Franklin for another arm.
Clearly there’s a trend here: the bullpen construction project in the off-season of MLFAs and waiver claims just didn’t work. Now they’re going to try building a bullpen from prospects and (hopefully) some strategic FA signings for 2027.
Working on the big board updates and 40-man machinations now.
Btw, I hate that my July rotation piece got buried by these two trade pieces; it takes a significant amount of time to do that post. Bummer 🙂
Eno Sarris of The Athletic just wrote of nine young players he expects to have greater roles. two are Nats. Yovanny Cruz and Abimelic Ortiz.
FredMD
4 Aug 26 at 10:59 am
I agree that moving Franklin was good, even if the return for him was minimal. He was at least a 40+ when he entered the system and, while he didn’t break out significantly, he didn’t crater either. I was hoping he’d still be worth a 35+, but I’d rather take a lottery ticket arm than to hold on to superfluous depth.
But I could not disagree more that Griffin shouldn’t have commanded a better return. Rizzo got Franklin and Ronny Cruz for Soroka. Does anyone prefer this package? Does anyone prefer Soroka to Griffin (at the time of the trades)?
I also don’t understand the obsession with discounting prospects that are far away from the majors. Baseball will be played in 2030. We will still be fans of the nationals in 2030. I 100% would rather have an 18 year old FV45 on the complex than 4 fringe prospects to add to our bullpen shuttle. Don’t forget – a team is allowed to sign FAs to fill holes; you don’t actually need to have the entire roster built from your farm system.
And, Todd, for what it’s worth, I always read and appreciate your rotation writeups. And that’s true even if these trades are demanding more of my attention right now. Thanks for writing those.
SMS
4 Aug 26 at 12:22 pm