Nationals Arm Race

Cliff Lee. Photo: Al Bello/Getty Images

As Cliff Lee continues to dazzle in the post season (his most recent effort being his 8inning, 2hit 13k gem against the most potent offense in Baseball, your NY Yankees), rumors of his purported price tag in the Free Agency market continue to reach spiraling heights.  The most common numbers thrown out start at 5yrs, $25M per.  One author at Forbes thinks he may approach $200M for 6 years combining salary and endorsements.

If you are trying to compare talent to contract value, then you have to start with the highest paid pitchers at current.  CC Sabathia is at $23M/year, Johan Santana is at $22.9M/year on average, and Roy Halladay took a slight discount to sign with Philadelphia (and be able to live in his offseason Odessa home 2 extra months of the year and drive to Spring Training) and is making $20M/year on his new deal.  Clearly, Cliff Lee has shown that he belongs at least at the $20M/year scale.  But how much higher makes sense financially for the signing team?

Forgetting for the moment that payroll means very little to a team like the New York Yankees (unfortunately his likely destination), lets talk about the value of the Free Agent contract and whether a team that gives out a $25M/year contract can ever really get their money’s worth.  Baseball is filled with horror stories of huge FA contracts that went bust.  Names like Zito, Dreifort, Pavano, Neagle, and Hampton fill general managers and fan’s heads with dispair.

How bad were these contracts?  I put together a spreadsheet with every significant starting pitcher FA contract that I could find, then cross referenced it by the Pitcher’s Won/Loss record during the duration of the contract.  See below: the table is sorted in reverse order of $/win.  In addition to the major FA contracts, I also arbitrarily added every “Ace” starter in the league, resulting in names like Lee, Jimenez, Price and Buchholz being in this list despite not being major FA pitchers (yet).  Their inclusion illustrates one of my major conclusions below.

Comment on Won/Loss records; yes I know that individual pitcher wins are not a great indicator of a starter’s worth.  However, they do reasonably indicate over the course of a longer term period the value of that pitcher to a team.  Perhaps a better argument is free agent dollars per quality start (despite the quality start measuring basically a mediocre start of 3ER or less in 6ip or more by a pitcher, it does generally correlate well to team wins andveven to a “real” quality start of 2ER or less in 6IP or more).  At some point I’ll re-run the analysis and count up QS per FA dollar to see how it compares.

Note for the purposes of this argument:

• The Contract total value is averaged over the life of the contract, even if the payments are different during different years.
• The W/L record is for the pitcher over the life of the contract, not necessarily for the original signing team.
• If the contract is current (i.e., runs from 2009-2012) then I’ve only counted the completed regular seasons.
• There are no off-season records taken into play.
• I entered in both Japanese Pitchers (Igawa and Matsuzaka) with massive posting numbers twice; one factoring the posting fee and the other not.  Without the fee Dice-K looks halfway decent but with it he’s overpriced (something all Boston fans probably already knew about their highly paid #5 pitcher).

Conclusions.

– If  you can get 1 win per $1M expended, you are doing about average it seems.  Anything above $1.25M and you are looking at a questionable contract.

– It is difficult to look at any contract below $1M/victory and say that the team made a bad deal.

– The absurdly low $/victory values for David Price and Clay Buchholz demonstrate as clearly as possible the value of the pre-arbitration superstar.  Tampa Bay (who did a similarly shrewd deal with Evan Longoria, buying out the arbitration years and tying the player to the club past the 6-year pre-FA window) now gets Cy Young-quality starts from Price for the next two years at 1/20th his market value.  Buchholz is even more evident; at a pre-arbitration salary of $443,000 for 2010, he went 17-7 and gave the Red Sox #1 starter capabilities.  On the open market he’s worth at least $15M/year at that level of productivity.

– The worst FA contract ever given to a starting pitcher wasn’t one of the aforementioned infamous culprets; it belongs to one Kei Igawa.  The Yankees paid the posting fee of $26M just to negotiate with him, then signed him to a 5 year, $20M contract.  For that outlay of $46M guaranteed, the Yankees have gotten a record of 2-4 over parts of two seasons, and he hasn’t appeared in a MLB game since June of 2008.  Luckily the Yankees can afford it; this kind of FA mistake would cripple a mid-to-small market team for years.

– Jason Schmidt‘s 3yr, $47M deal with the LA Dodgers is the largest $$ bust in terms of a pure FA play, not counting the vagarities of the Japanese posting system.  Schmidt had ironically just finished an incredibly efficient deal with San Francisco, where he went 71-36 over 5 seasons on a $40M contract (resulting in a very good $/win number of $563,380).  Six games into his Dodger career he went onto the DL list with shoulder injuries that eventually cost him the rest of 2007 and all of 2008.  He tried to regroup in 09, failed to make the team out of spring, made a few starts and was back on the DL.  All told, 3 wins in 10 starts for $47M.

– Some of the infamous deals do appear close to the top of this list; Neagle’s $51M for a 19-23 record.  Dreifort’s $55M deal resulting in a grand total of 9 wins and only 26 starts.  Ironically, the highest single season salary was Roger Clemen‘s $28M deal with New York in 2007.  For that money the Yankees got a middling 6-6 record.

– Are there any major FA deals that ARE paying off?  Well, you have to dig deep.  CC Sabathia has won 40 games for the Yankees in the first two years of his $23M/year deal, which is easily the best 9-figure deal.  However, it is early; we need to check back in years 6 and 7 of this deal.  Mussina went 92-53 for the Yankees after he signed his $88M deal in 2001.  Verlander won 18 games this year for his $16M annual salary and looks like a good bet to continue that trend.

– The BEST long term FA deal ever signed has to be Pedro Martinez‘s 6year $92M deal.  He went 117-37 between 1998-2004, won 3 Cy Youngs, had 2 Cy Young runners-up, and in the year 2000 posted an ERA+ of 291, which accounts for the best modern-day single-season pitching performance in the history of the game.

Bringing this back to Cliff Lee; the conclusion is thus; he may earn a $25M/year deal but the odds of his continuing to win 20-22 games/year for the duration of the contract and thus inflating the $/win value will eventually prove that contract to be an albatross (even more so if he misses significant time to injury at some point).

As I watch the NLCS and its surprising results so far (Cody Ross with a Reggie Jackson-esque performance thus far, Roy Halladay getting beat, etc), you can’t help but notice some interesting items about the Giants roster and its makeup.

1. The Giants THREE highest paid players (Zito, Rowand, Guillen) are not even on the post season roster, and their 4th highest paid player (Renteria) is not the starter at short.

2. The position players that the Giants are depending on are all either developed internally (Posey, Sandoval) are retread/journeyman free agents on one-year deals (Torres, Uribe, Huff, Fontenot) or total reclamation projects (Burrell who was DFA’d earlier this season and Ross who they got on waivers).

3. Almost their entire pitching staff is home grown. Lincecum, Cain, Sanchez, Bumgarner plus setup/closer
combo of Romo and Wilson are all original SF draft picks. Only #5 Starter Zito is an (infamous) FA acquisition.

Here’s a quick table of Giants “primary starters” player acquisition methods:

By way of comparison, the Nationals opening day roster featured only FOUR such home grown players (Zimmerman, Desmond, Lannan and Stammen).

The Giants list their 2010 payroll at $96M, of which $42M is allocated to those 3 guys not even rostered.  Imagine what this team would look like if that $42M was properly allocated.

I think what this shows is that, with enough development time and effort put into your pitching staff you can get to the playoffs even with near replacement players in most of your fielding positions. Hope for the Nats, since this seems to be the direction Rizzo is going with his 2009 and 2010 pitcher heavy drafts. 8 of the first 11 picks in 2009 were arms, and while only 4 of 2010’s top 10 picks were arms there was significant funds paid to Solis, Cole and Ray.

Can the Nats turn these two drafts (plus other prospects) into a Giants-esque rotation? Strasburg, Zimmermann, Solis, and Cole all project to be #1 or #2 starter quality per scouting reports. Those four, plus live arms in the pen like Storen, Holder and Morris could be our future. 3-4 years out future, but still promising.

Or am I too rosy glasses colored?

A slight faltering at the tail end of the season leaves the Nats with the #6 overall pick in next year’s draft.  Here’s how the first round will go next year.

Pittsburgh was 5-6 games “ahead” for the #1 pick for most of the 2nd half.  Seattle’s historically bad offense locks them into the #2 overall pick.  Baltimore’s late season surge under Showalter cost them a couple spots but gives the fanbase hope for 2011.  Arizona’s unprecedented 2 top 7 picks (the 2nd is compensation for failing to sign Barret Loux after an MRI showed a more significant arm injury than anyone knew) should make for a great draft for them.  Houston nearly jumped into the mid-teens by having a scorching August but settled down into the #9 pick, just ahead of San Diego’s compensation pick for failing to sign Karsten Whitson (I believe he was diagnosed with diabetes and opted for college instead of going pro).

By “tying” Cleveland (Washington gets the better pick because of a worse 2009 record), we actually jumped the compensation pick of Arizona, which is good news.  There is sure to be some good talent in next year’s college pitcher rich draft at the #6 overall pick.  (Early draft reviews show possibly guys like Gerrit Cole, Danny Hultzen, Matt Purke, or Taylor Jungmann at that spot). Plus, we may pick up another pick in the first round depending on the outcome of the Adam Dunn offseason (see a previous post here about Dunn’s current TypeB status).

Full Reverse standings are here at mlbtraderumors.com.

Now that the regular season is over, lets take a look at the opening day payrolls and how the teams finished up:

What we see here is some direct relationship between payroll and performance at the very top and bottom of this table: the Yankees certainly bought their way into the playoffs while the Pirates certainly played their way to the worst record in the league with the lowest payroll in baseball.  But how do you explain the other 28 teams in between?

First lets talk about the high end of the spectrum.  The Red Sox slumped at the end of the season to the 10th best record but were only a game worse than the AL West winning Rangers.  Several high payroll teams (Cubs, Mets, Tigers) continue to show why long term contracts for aging veterans are not the way to win in modern baseball.  Well, unless you’re the Yankees and you buy enough of them to cover for mistakes (see Vazquez, Javier).  The two LA teams are both in the upper ends of the payroll spectrum but faltered this year for different reasons (the Angels with injuries and key FA losses and the Dodgers with ownership ridiculousness).

At the other end of the spectrum, the Padres and Rangers are in the beginning stages of where Tampa and (to a lesser Extent Florida) are now; teams that gutted themselves, developed their teams through superior drafting and player development (even with the Lee trade most scouting pros believe the Rangers still have the best or 2nd best farm system) and kept payroll low.  If you have superior drafting capabilities and develop players, soon you’ll have a good young team, cost contained, that outproduce multi-million dollar free agents.  Also, Kudos to the Atlanta Braves for smartly spending money and continuing to produce quality major leaguers.  A team that spends $84M on payroll certainly can’t complain about being poor, but to produce a playoff success with a young team and with more players in the wings (Mike Minor comes to mind)

A good number of teams fall more or less in line with their payroll productivity.  St. Louis underperformed this year but finished with the 12th best league record and the 12th highest payroll.  Milwaukee, Arizona, Washington, Cleveland, Colorado and Philadelphia all basically finished in line with their payroll output.

However, when a team with the second lowest payroll (Padres) misses out on the playoffs on the last day of the season, arguments for a salary structure in the major leagues basically goes out the window.  Why would you penalize a team for excelling at player development and shrewdness in the amateur market by going to an NFL-esque salary structure?  If the Rays can consistently outperform a higher payroll team like Toronto with more expensive personnel, shouldn’t the message be to teams to get better management and a better plan?  The real lesson learned is that no matter what your payroll, incompetence in the front office will turn a $100M payroll into a poor team (see the NY Mets for the past few years).  Each of the GMS of the teams with the 5 biggest “negative” deltas between payroll and record (San Diego, Texas, Tampa, Cincinnati and Oakland) are on the short lists of anyone’s GM of the year candidates.  Meanwhile, the Executives of the 5 “positive” delta teams (the Mets, Cubs, Mariners, Orioles and Tigers) are being questioned or (in Minaya‘s case) already out the door.

The Yankees continue to spend a ridiculous amount of payroll (at $200M+, that is nearly 7 times what Pittsburgh spent last year) and look to add to that amount with rumored FA chases of Cliff Lee and Carl Crawford.  This cannot be healthy for the competitive spirit of the other teams playing in the AL East.  But if there doesn’t prove to be a direct correlation between payroll and results, how can anyone realistically ask for a salary cap?

So, the entire principle behind NOT signing Adam Dunn during the summer was the 2 draft picks we would acquire (the signing team’s 1st pick and a supplimental) after he declines our arbitration offer.

Check out this link at mlbtraderumors.com.  If this site is correct, and the analysis is accurate, then Dunn has fallen just below the threshold and is now a Type B Free Agent.

From a Nats standpoint, this is an unmitigated Disaster.  Now not only is there more incentive for other teams to sign him,there’s even LESS incentive for him to take a deal from us.  And, we’ll get merely a supplimental 1st pick.

Unless the entire 2010 season was just a charade and we plan on signing him anyway.  Per Boswell there’s a 3-year deal on the table now.  But if you’re Dunn, you HAVE  to see what is out there right now, right?

Assuming that he does not consider AL teams, as he has stated he wants to continue to play the field, here’s a quick rundown on NL teams and their 1st basemen situation:

NY: Ike Davis; up and coming prospect
PHI: Ryan Howard: long term contract
Fla: Gaby Sanchez (doesn’t matter, they’re not FA buyers)
Atl: Derrick Lee, who is a FA.  Troy Glaus also a FA but was awful this year. Could be a buyer.

Stl: Pujols
mil: Prince Fielder
Cincy: Joey Votto
Chi; it was Derrick Lee til they traded him.  Possible FA buyers.
Hou; it was Lance Berkman til they traded him.  But are they FA buyers?  I don’t think so.
Pitt: Garrett Jones (doesn’t matter, they’re not FA buyers)

LA: James Loney: cost contained and home grown.  plus no FA $$ spent until ownership divorce settled.
SD: Adrian Gonzalez
SF; Aubrey Huff: a FA and SF desperately needs hitters.
Col: Todd Helton; not the greatest hitter anymore but signed through 2013.
Ariz: Adam LaRoche who is a FA but I sense Ariz is rebuilding and not FA buyers

So, if he goes anywhere I think it could be either Atlanta, Chicago or San Francisco.  Chicago already has some serious payroll issues and an underperforming team.  SF may not have the payroll flexibility to buy Dunn despite really needing him.  Atlanta only has $60M committed next year and has a bunch of arbitration cases … but they’ve spent over $100m on payroll as recently as 2 years ago and may expand it out again.

Adding in AL teams, looking at 1B solutions (I can’t see him signing up for a team that will ONLY DH him, so we have to look at teams where he splits time between 1B and DH).

Bos: Youklis/Victor Martinez
NYY: Teixeira
Tampa: Carlos Pena, a FA who will be allowed to walk.  However, Tampa won’t buy Dunn
Tor: Lyle Overbay, a FA who is 34.  Can’t see Toronto buying an aging FA w/ new GM in town.
Balt: Ty Wiggington: another aging mediocre FA.  But are Orioles buyers?

Det: Cabrera
CWS: Paul Konerko, a FA coming off a fantastic season; i see him resigning here.
Minn: Justin Morneau
KC: Billy Butler
Cle: Matt LaPorta, the future of this team right now and bounty from the CC Sabathia trade.

LAA: Kendrys Morales;
Oak; Daric Barton: up and coming hitter, only 24.
Sea: Russell Branyon/Casey Kotchman but they have Justin Smoak coming up (bounty for Cliff Lee).
Texas: Jorge Cantu/Chris Davis; rotating door post Smoak trade, but Mitch Moreland is prospect of the future.

So, from what I can tell there’s only really 4 AL teams that even have FA spots at 1B.  Chicago (resigning Konerko), Tampa (not FA players), Toronto (are they FA buyers?) and Baltimore (why would Dunn go to a WORSE team than Washington?)

I still see him focusing on the NL.  Based on this … Dunn seems like he may have options in the NL, which means our chances of having him accept a 3 year deal with us less likely.  Not good news for us in 2011.

When the Nationals signed Cuban defector Yunesky Maya in July, we thought we were getting a seasoned international competitor, a professional pitcher who would be the next in a good line of comrades who have made an impact in the majors.

After watching and commenting on  his MLB debut, I was impressed.  Maya wasn’t overpowering but showed a great variety of pitches and a fearlessness on the mound.

However, his fourth start yesterday (box/gamer) demonstrated the same issue that plagued him in his first three starts; the big inning.  In each start now, he’s had one bad inning amongst several good ones.  Yesterday he was unlucky to give up an unearned run in the 3rd, but then gave up 4 runs in the 6th and was yanked.  The crushing blow was a no-doubter homer from Atlanta’s shortstop Alex Gonzalez on a first pitch hanging curveball.  Suddenly the Nats are down 5-0 and have given up 4 runs in an inning, a relatively insurmountable score because of the “big bang” theory of baseball scores (see this Boswell chat for more details, but analysis of box scores over the years shows that in more than half of baseball games, the winning team scores more runs in ONE inning than the losers score the entire game).

This is why these big innings are troubling.  You give up 3 or 4 runs in an inning with an offensively challenged team like the Nats (playing yesterday without Espinosa, Zimmerman, and without original #5 hitter Willingham) are almost always going to lose.  Sure enough, Derek Lowe shut them down for 6 relatively innocuous innings and the Nats never scored at all.

I was at the game yesterday, which makes analysis of Maya’s stuff rather difficult.  All we can see is the mph on the pitch to guess whether it was a fastball, curve or change.  Maya didn’t seem to be throwing hard (averaging 88-89, maxing out 91 or so per yesterday’s pitch f/x data), and certainly wasn’t getting strikeouts (1 K in 25 batters faced, not even getting his counterpart on strikes).  His pitching coach was interviewed though and commented that Maya has found MLB hitters to be far more patient than in Cuba or International competitions, and that MLB umpires are not giving him pitches on the corners.  He seems to be nibbling, not throwing strikes or trusting his stuff.  It also goes without saying that he is still in early season/spring training mode, having only made his professional debut for us on August 13th.  Still, it is hard not to be concerned about his performance thus far.  Did we waste $6M on him?

Side note about the unearned run in the 3rd: Gonzalez made a fantastic diving stop with guys on 1st and 2nd and 2 outs, only to see Kennedy failing to cover 2nd base for the easy force out.  Possibly a mental error but more likely a result of the exaggerated pull shift the Nats employed on Atlanta’s catcher McCann.  So he forced a throw to first from his knees that short-hopped Dunn.  Dunn ineptly missed the throw, it got by him and a run scored. This error was then attributed to Gonzalez, who gets penalized AFTER making a great play and to try to make up for his teammate’s mental error.  A better first baseman makes that play easily.  This is just another example of how unfair our basic fielding stats are these days and how you just can’t measure some things in a box score.

On the same play, as the ball was getting past Dunn, the Atlanta runner running from first (Heyward) blew through the stop sign and was thrown out by 20 feet …. so he did what came naturally to major leaguer,s recently; he tried to bowl over our catcher (Ramos) instead of sliding or giving himself up.  Ramos pulled an “ole” move, kinda dodging the collision attempt and getting the tag in.  I realize that in some cases a catcher blocking the plate gives the runner little choice but to try to dislodge the ball by barreling into the opposing player.  But on a play like this I think the choice to try to deliberately harm the catcher needs some league retribution.  Heyward, to his credit immediately apologized to Ramos for his decision, which probably prevented further retribution.

Lastly, read this nugget in Nats News Network, where Riggleman has said that Olsen takes too long to warm up and thus can’t really be used out of the bullpen.  In other words, be prepared for a non-tender on December 1st.

Washington’s recent 4 game winning streak, including 3 of 4 from Houston, has probably taken them out of the race for the #3 pick.  As it stands, we have the #7 overall pick, just behind Arizona’s compensation pick.  They now sit 3 games “behind” for the #6 pick and 3 games “ahead” for the #8 pick.

In the 11-14 spots are the high-payroll failures from the 2010 season; LA Dodgers, LA Angels and NY Mets (though the biggest payroll failure this year has to be the Chicago Cubs).

Hello all.

Two administrative things today.

1. I’ve tired of the spam comments that are popping up on the site, so i’ve changed the commenting behavior to force you to have to log in to comment.  Apologies but that’s the way it has to be.

2. I’ve started a new gig and haven’t really had time to post or update some of my tracking spreadsheets.  I’m working on some post-minor league season reviews by affiliate and should start posting those soon.

Thanks, todd

Though not nearly as heralded as Strasburg or Zimmermann‘s debuts this season, Cuban FA signing Yunesky Maya had his MLB debut last night against the Mets at the stadium.  He took the loss 4-1 (gamer/box), with the Nats struggling against fellow MLB Debutante Dillon Gee.  Maya’s insertion into the September rotation spells the probable end of Scott Olsen‘s Washington career and represents the possible 5th of 5 starters the Nats are looking at for their 2011 rotation.

Unfortunately, nerves and overthrowing seem to have gotten the better of Maya, as the Mets tagged him early and hard in the first.  Maya was visibly nervous, breathing heavy and breathing hard before his first pitch.  It is probably hard to overestimate what we were witnessing here; a player who risked his livelihood and his family’s well being back in Cuba to defect to chase his dream.  Perhaps the culmination of the situation over came him.  Whatever the cause, the first four Mets hitters all got solid wood on the ball, with Ike Davis absolutely tattooing a ball to dead center for a quick three runs.

From my viewpoint, Maya was struggling early with his “height” on his fastballs (certainly the gopher ball to Davis was belt high and went a long way).  He also couldn’t get “on top” of his curve, which looked closer to an euphus pitch than a sharp breaker.  Masn showed his velocity as maxing out at 94, but Pitch f/x showed a max of 91.5 (further proof that stadium guns are “juiced”).

After giving up a run-scoring single to the opposing pitcher in the top of the 2nd however, Maya looked like a different guy.  He has an abbreviated motion that has a similiar (but less exaggerated) leg kick to Cuban compatriot Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, and seems to have the same arsenal of pitches.  Per the MASN broadcasters he has 5 pitches (fast, curve, change, sinker, and a slider), but he demonstrated several others.  He changed speeds on all his pitches, moving his 4-seam fastball in and out.  He had good movement on the fastball (after the 1st anyway) and worked inside on hitters fearlessly. In the 3rd-5th innings he was on top of his curve and it demonstrated pretty significant 12-6 movement.  On a couple of occasions the hitter patently gave up on a curve that started at or above their head, only to watch it break into the strike zone.  He showed a sharp slider that he struggled to control most of the night.  He had a conventional changeup but also showed what had to be a split-fingered changeup that would dive down with great movement.  Finally he showed some variety by throwing both his slider and fastball from a near sidearm arm angle.

So, if you’re counting pitch varieties I saw: 4-seam fastball, sidearm fastball,  2-seam fastball, conventional changeup, split-fingered changeup, 12-6 curve, conventional slider and a sidearm slider.

Maya started out the game by working fastballs to hitters, but by the end was throwing an array of offspeed stuff to then setup a sneaky fast 4-seamer.  It makes you wonder if he was being told by the dugout to work that way.  Clearly he was more effective throwing more junk (ala Livan Hernandez) and you have to wonder if he changed tactics on the fly.  In this regard, I was very surprised to see the rookie Wilson Ramos behind the plate; why wouldn’t you start the future hall of famer with a new guy making his debut?  You’d get a better game called and have quicker adjustments on the pitch calling once it became apparent what the guys’ strengths were that night.  Curious.  In any case, after the first four guys hit the ball hard, he didn’t give up a well hit ball the rest of the night.  Lots of popups, lots of groundballs.  He’s not a strikeout pitcher; just a guy who throws a bunch of pitches well and keeps you off balance at the plate.

Verdict; I like what this guy brings to the table.  The scouting reports say that he “knows how to pitch” and that became pretty apparent as he mowed through the mets lineup the 2nd and 3rd time through.  He retired 11 of the last 12 batters he faced (only blemish being a walk to the guy who mashed a ball out, obviously pitching him carefully).  He looked fearless, threw his pitches well and I can’t wait to see his next start.

Coincidentally, Maya represents the 14th pitcher to start a game for us this year.  That “leads” the majors in a rather dubious categoryand goes a long way towards explaining how the Nats season has gone.

In other pitcher news, Detwiler pitched 2 innings with little fanfare; he threw easily and loosely, gave up some hits but worked through 2 innings decently enough.  He’s got his hands full though next spring when it comes time to displace one of the 5 current starters.  Lastly Balester pitched 2 strong with 3 Ks; he makes perfect sense as a long man out of the bullpen and I think his days of starting are over.

While attending a fantasy football draft, I missed the melee from last night.  But certainly I was not surprised to hear that Nyjer Morgan was in the middle of it.  Borrowing from an email conversation between friends Jamos and Droopy this morning, here’s some point by point thoughts on all of Morgan’s various transgressions lately.

1) Nyjer shouldn’t have gotten into it with the Phillies fans. (isn’t anything involving the words “tauning” and “Philadelphia sports fans” always going to end in disaster?).  Fans are antagonizers, and drunken late-inning fans close to the field who are purposely talking to the players are only looking for a reaction.

2) Nyjer was wrong to give the shoulder bump to the Cardinals catcher.  Agree; Nyjer wrong to hit the St Louis catcher, but that’s a Washington-St Louis issue and i’m sure it will come up next  year if Morgan is still on the team (big “if” here; see later)

3) Nyjer needs to keep his trap shut to the Media when asked about batting 8th and being sat by his manager.  Riggleman is old school and rightly sat Morgan so he wouldn’t get a ball in his ear from Wainwright after the questionable behaviors the previous night.  As for batting eighth … well Nyjer, when you have an OPS+ of 72 and a puny OBP of only .317 on the season, you can’t really complain when you’re put in the 8th spot can you?  How about you perform to your 2009 levels (OPS+ of 121, .396 OBP) and let your bat do the talking?

4) Nyjer should have slid into home against the Marlins, but you can’t fault him for what he did.  As Riggleman was quoted in the post-game, it is incredibly hard to 2nd guess sliding versus body blocking at home plate.  You’re trying to get a read on the catcher’s body language and his positioning as you’re racing down the base-path to try to score the winning run.  You’re certainly NOT saying to yourself, “Hey I really want to hit this guy how can I do it?”  Nyjer made the decision that a collision was going to give him the best chance to score the run.  Riggleman supported him there.  It certainly wasn’t nearly as questionable a play as the Utley-Flores incident that essentially took out Flores for a season and a half.  The fact that Florida’s catcher suffered a season-ending injury is tough though, which led to the next point.

5) I don’t fault the Marlins for throwing at him—however, you’ve got to do it in his FIRST at-bat. You don’t wait until the fourth inning when you’re up 14-3 or whatever to throw at him. Florida could not have been more obvious about what they were doing.  The SECOND time you throw at a player?  That pitcher and coach should be fined and suspended.

6) I don’t think Morgan’s stealing falls into the realm of baseball’s “Unwritten Rules.” Yes, it was a blowout at the time, but the Marlins had their closer in the game in the 8th inning, as Zimmerman pointed out.  And by the way, the whole “you don’t steal when you’re up by 10 runs” never applies to the  LOSING team.  Whoever said that Morgan was showing them up was just looking to stir up trouble.

7) Lastly, I’m ok with Nyjer rushing the mound after getting a ball thrown behind him in his third at-bat. Agree wholeheartedly; the first time you get hit is payback.  The 2nd time is an attempt to damage a player’s career.  I’d support the charging of the mound and if i’m a vet on the Nats i’m going out there for blood.

Noooooow.  All that being said.

Nyjer Morgan’s performance this year, his lapses in judgment in the field and on the base-paths, and certainly his severe lapses in judgment in the past two weeks says to me that his usefulness to this franchise has reached an endpoint.  Rizzo has gone out of his way to rid the team of clubhouse lawyers, cancers, non-hustlers and problem children.  I think a 2011 outfield of Willingham, Bernadina, Morse with Maxwell as a backup is quite serviceable for the short term (without considering any FA pickups, which are a possibility in the OF in the off season).  Perhaps by 2012 we’ll have Michael Burgess or (hold your breath) Bryce Harper ready to take the field.  Perhaps the Nats go after someone like Jayson Werth and keep Morse as a super-sub.  In any case, the only reason to hang on to Morgan right now is if Rizzo was saving face and holding on to one of the key members of the 4-player deal with Pittsburgh.