hate to see this. Photo via usatoday
Just a placeholder post for discussion on the hot topic of the day/weekend.
Adam Eaton‘s ACL injury creates some short term and some longer term implications for the roster. Lets talk and speculate while we wish him a speedy recovery.
sidenote: With modern medicine ACL injuries take time, but also take *time* before the player is ever feeling “right” about his leg again, so this is certainly a bummer for both Eaton and the team. Reported 6-9 month recovery time before he’s back on the field. But by all accounts it really takes athletes two full years to “trust” the repaired ACL. We’ll get to what I think this means for our roster longer term below.
Short Term: obviously we’re seeing a like-for-like replacement in CF with Michael Taylor. We are all well aware of his short comings, and i’m guessing this may be his “last chance” to show that he belongs in a starting role. Interestingly, the team opted not to call up Brian Goodwin for the backup OF bench role, but untested Rafael Bautista. Neither are really tearing it up in AAA this year; Bautista’s got a .291 BA but its rather empty, while Goodwin’s OPS is in the .640 range. Dusty Baker installed Taylor in the 2nd spot in the order inexplicably (lineup construction theory tells us that you want your BEST hitter in the #2 hole, not your worst) and he was rewarded with a 3-5 day from him. But I’d much, much rather see Rendon or a hot Werth batting 2nd with Taylor buried further down (like, 8th).
If Taylor fails to produce, there’s not a whole lot on the farm to draw from. Victor Robles isn’t ready (and he’s hurt), nor is Juan Soto. I’d probably dip to AA and pluck the hitting machine Andrew Stevenson to backfill in center if a need arose. But that’s a tough jump for Stevenson, who basically has a season and a half of pro ball experience.
Trade market? its probably too early for most teams to start thinking about a trade. We’d have to ride out a sub-par Taylor for a couple of months before the trade waters started heating up. But there’s definitely teams out there who are punting on 2017 who might have CF capable guys to flip; looking at Kansas City (Lorenzo Cain) if they continue to struggle Oakland’s Rajai Davis, Toronto’s Kevin Pillar if Toronto can’t un-bury themselves, or the Angels (Mike Trout) .. ok just kidding there. I can’t really see any obvious trade candidate from an NL team; all the guys on floundering NL teams seem like prospects that they’d want to keep, not veterans or FAs-to-be worth flipping. Anyway, we might not want to trade away more depth for a piece though, especially a rental.
Lets hope for a Taylor career resurgence, or perhaps a Stevenson call-up.
Longer Term: I wonder if this injury doesn’t make the Nats re-think their off-season strategy. Will Eaton be able to play CF next season? Will he have to move to LF while (as mentioned above) he learns to trust his knee again? If Eaton has to move to Left, then there’s no possible way that Jayson Werth continues his tenure here. I realize you guys may not think Werth could re-up on a shorter term deal .. but if he has a nice season and we still have a need in LF, why not? Anyway; Eaton in LF, Harper in RF (because apparently Baker won’t even think about moving Harper to CF like i’ve advocated in the past), which leaves us short a CF yet again. It could happen. Like our rotating door at closer, are we looking at more rotating doors in CF?
Will Stevenson be ready for 2018 to man CF? Will Taylor own it? Will Eaton be ready? Or are we looking at a FA stop-gap to Stevenson/Robles tenure?
Might be way early to worry about this stuff (ok, yes it is way early). Just idle thoughts while we see if the Nats can salvage a win in this awful series.