Nationals Arm Race

Werth is still the high-man on the payroll. Photo via fansided.com

So, one big factor in any team’s off-season plan is figuring out exactly what the payroll is going to look like, to figure out what their budget is, and then go shopping from there.  This post goes through the guys we have under contract as we speak to try to do some projections of what we already have committed in terms of 2016 dollars and therefore draw some conclusions about how much FA shopping/veteran salary acquisition we’ll be doing this coming off-season.

(note: all this data is, of course, in a Google XLS for your perusal and/or available as a Link to the right).

The 2015 Nats opening day payroll (according to Cots) was $162,014,559.  This represented about a $25M bump from the previous year and included a significant amount of money heading to Free Agents in the last year of their deals.  Here’s the list of Salary immediately coming off the books from the 2015 team:

So, that’s $61M coming off the books.  I’ve counted the option buyout dollars for the 2016 options of Janssen and McLouth in the 2016 figures, but this is still a significant sum.

So, 61M coming off the books; how much are we committed to for 2016 as things stand?

First, lets look at dollars committed to Existing Veteran Players under Contract:

I count about $82M committed to these 7 players for 2016.  I’m only counting Scherzer‘s salary at the $15M for 2016 since that’s what he’s gonna get paid exactly in 2016.  Cots has a whole complicated explanation when it estimates payroll on its site (see this link) by prorating his signing bonus over 7 years and a whole different calculation made for luxury tax purposes, but I think that’s a mistake to use anything other than the actual dollars going out the door in a given year.  The Lerner’s kicked that can well down the road by getting him to agree to defer literally half the money in the deal for the express purpose of keeping its present value down for their budget, so that’s how i’m figuring it here. If you disagree, feel free to argue about it in the comments.

If the Nats can move Papelbon and some of his $11M in salary, all the better, but I figure they’ll likely have to eat a lot of it to do so, so I can’t see this figure moving much with off-season trades.

Next, lets look at the Players Eligible for Arbitration.  I’ve put in some quick guesses/estimates for arbitration figures for these players.  I’ve historically been somewhat conservative in my guesses, so these might be off by a million here or there, but in the macro sense it won’t make that much difference.  If you think i’m wildly wrong about (say) my Strasburg estimate, lets argue in the comments:

So, if we keep all these guys I can see them costing in arbitration about $36.6M.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see Storen traded of course, nor would it surprise me to see Moore DFA’d outright, or for the team to acquire another backup catcher and part ways with the light-hitting Lobaton.  But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.  For now, $36.6M is a good estimate.  Thankfully Strasburg really struggled this year, otherwise his arb-3 figure might be closer to Zimmermann’s last arb figure ($16.5M) than the $12-13 he may eventually get.

Coincidentally on Rendon: did you guys see where he made the Super-2 cutoff on the exact day in terms of service time?  2 years, 130 days.  And that’s exactly what he has.  So, depending on how he plays over the next few years that likely costs the Nats at least $8-10M in salary.  Hey, not my money.  I don’t exactly think the team was actively trying to manipulate his time like they did with Strasburg, so maybe they just don’t care.

So that’s 7 vets and 8 arbitration cases.  That leaves 10 players to fill out the rest of the 25-man roster and they’re all Pre-Arbitration Players:

If the 2016 season started tomorrow, this is how i’d project the rest of the roster coincidentally.

Even factoring in nominal raises for guys like Roark and Robinson, this still doesn’t even total half of what Papelbon is due in 2016.  Pre-Arbitration players; the best deal in the game!

Here’s the rest of the 40-man roster, who under my projections would be toiling somewhere in the minors on a 40-man roster prorated basis:

I don’t think Cots counts these guys against payroll because unless they’re on the 25-man roster actively, they’re not necessarily getting paid like it.  I think.  I’m open to suggestion here.

So, where does that leave us?

• Existing Veteran Players under Contract: $82,671,429
• Buyouts of 2016 options: $2,250,000
• Players Eligible for Arbitration: $36,600,000 estimated
• Pre-Arbitration Players: $5,260,000 estimated

Total 2016 Projected Payroll: $126,781,429.

That’s $35m less than 2015.  So, if you make the argument that the Lerners will keep payroll even with 2015, that’s about $35M of payroll room with which to work.  For some reason I think they’re going to rein back in payroll, so lets call the target for 2016 about $150M.  Not too bad; that should buy what this team needs.

In my “GM for a Day” post in early October 2015, here’s what I put as a shopping list:

• Bullpen; if a $10M closer is acquired, you off-set the salary a bit with a Storen trade, and then perhaps buy a mid-level veteran RHP for $5-6M/year.
• Lefty hitters: not much on the FA market that won’t cost you an arm and a leg; we could get creative and move some depth for another $10M outfielder type and use Taylor as a 4th.
• Backups: Maybe some infield depth in the $5M range.
• Maybe rotation competition; frankly there’s better things to spend money on, so I think they go to battle with what they have.

So, that’s roughly $25M in acquisitions, right around the $150M target.  That could work.

What do you think?  Sound like a good plan?

Inspired by a MLBpipeline.com’s similar data for their top 100 players, here’s a look at the Nats top 30 prospects, where they’re starting the 2015 season, and where we expect to see them by year’s end.  I’ve also thrown in where they were last year and a prediction of where they’ll be at year’s end.  (Along the same theme,  here’s where all 300 named players from Keith Law‘s per-system top 10s are starting as well).

For my top list of prospects, I’m using MLB.com’s list and rankings … and have thrown in Trea Turner in his approximate MLB ranking (around 4th-5th in our system).

I’ve uploaded the XLS that I used to create this spreadsheet to google here.   You can sort the spreadsheet online by any of the columns (in fact, i’ve added a pseudo-rank column for each category for intelligent sorting from high level to low) to see where these guys will be by team.  To summarize:

• 6 of them should be in Syracuse most of the year
• 8-9 in Harrisburg
• 10-11 in Potomac
• 3 in Hagerstown
• likely 4 in short season ball.

So, lots of talent close by in Potomac …. as we all already knew.

Fyi; i’m going to re-publish my spreadsheets of prospect and farm system rankings soon after a bunch more rankings came in and I did some historical research. I filled in a bunch of previous rankings (lots and lots of google research) and have links to every ranking that I could find.  For those of you with old Baseball America handbooks, I could use the rankings out of there to complete these xls.  More later.

This is maybe the last time i get to recycle this shot of Detwiler. Photo Haraz Ghanbari/AP via federalbaseball.com

Got back from a meeting late thursday (aka the last day of these crazy 2014 Winter Meetings) and saw that one of the longer serving Nationals players in Ross Detwiler was reportedly traded to the Texas Rangers for two minor leaguers.  Not sure who broke the story but I got it from Mark Zuckerman.

The return, per this USA Today story, is INF Chris Bostick and RHP Abel de los Santos.

Others in the Nats blogosphere have done the research on these two; no need to rehash it here.   Short version: both guys played 2014 at high-A Myrtle Beach, where presumably the Potomac staff gave plenty of insight.  Bostik is a 2B and de los Santos is a reliever with big K/9 numbers.  By all reports Bostik is a fringe top 10 Rangers prospect and de los Santos is a sleeper.   Neither is a 40-man roster guy, leaving the Nats with a vacancy for the moment.

Honestly, I think this is a good move for both player and team.  I was somewhat worried the team would non-tender Detwiler rather than sign up for the $3-$3.5M he’d earn in arbitration.  I would be too; his role on the team as last-man-out-of-the-bullpen can pretty easily be filled by any one of a number of rubber-armed veterans available on veteran-min contracts of $750k-$850k, or more than happily by one of our spare 40-man starters slated to pitch in AAA in 2015.  Thanks to Jim Bowden‘s roster-moves in 2007, Detwiler blew through his options and service time far before he should have (per Zuckerman’s article, Bowden made a hand-shake deal to call up Detwiler in his draft year … a decision that has handcuffed the team with Detwiler for years.  Now his options status is someone else’s problem.

At the same time, I do think that Detwiler can be a serviceable starter in this league, as his 2012 season showed.  He just needed a shot, and that shot evaporated in this organization.  So he gets a chance in an org that really, really could use him.  He projects as being part of the 2015 opening day Texas rotation right now, behind Yu Darvish, Derek Holland, Colby Lewis and Nick Tepesch.  However Texas has two other good starters coming off serious injuries (Matt Harrison had spinal fusion surgery in June and Martin Perez had TJ in May), so Ross will have to work to keep his spot if these regulars come back healthy.  But that’s more opportunity than he was going to get in Washington.

Was this a good return?  Probably, considering that I thought he was a non-tender candidate.  Two high-A->AA prospects in positions of need works for me.