Nationals Arm Race

Scott Olsen‘s 12th start of the season eventually ended in a 10-2 nats loss last night, though that scoreline wasn’t totally his fault.  Strange start for Olsen, who absolutely cruised through the first 5 innings (one hit and one HBP through five, lots of groundball outs, very few hard-hit balls).  He was sitting at around 60 pitches and looked like he might put up a solid 8 inning start.  Suddenly the top of the 6ths starts pinch-hit homer, then a triple, then a walk of Heyward (hardly someone you can blame pitching carefully to with a guy on third and none down).  And he gets the hook!?

Why?  Why give him the hook after two guys hit good balls in a row.  So that a guy we signed on a minor league contract earlier this year (Peralta) can come in, let both inherited runners score on back to back doubles, and ruin the game for Olsen?  That was unproductive.  Sometimes I think Riggleman over-manages and over thinks his situations.

Olsen now sits at 3-5 an ugly 5.14 era and 1.44 whip.  But his advanced stats look better.  FIP=3.51 and xFIP=4.07, which is actually 2nd best of any starter we’ve used more than once the rotation (behind Strasburg).  His BABIP is .320, meaning he’s slightly unlucky on balls in play.   He’s had three horribly games on the year that have destroyed his era/whip numbers.  But he also had a string of 4 games and 25+ innings with 2 earned runs allowed.

I think Olsen’s spot in the rotation is safe for now, but either he or Lannan probably gets the hook when we bring up Maya for a few spot starts.  But at least he’s earning a contract tender in arbitration proceedings in the off season.

Bryce Harper‘s last minute signing for something not quite as stratospheric as was requested by Boras ($6.25M bonus, $9.9M 5year contract) caps off a phenomenal draft for the Nats.  Going in, pundits were giving the team little chance to sign 4th rounder AJ Cole or 12th rounder Robbie Ray (both high end HS prospects with strong college commitments).   Even 2nd rounder Sammy Solis would be tough; his injury history knocked him out of the 1st round and there is always a chance with such guys that they’ll stick around for their senior year to increase their draft status (this is exactly what happened with our 14th rounder Timothy Smalling, a SS from Va Tech.  He has a shoulder injury, meaning he dropped from the 10th round and the nats weren’t offering 10th round signing money.  He’ll play his senior season and try to increase  his value).

In the end, the nats got 25 of their first 26 round draft picks to sign.  They paid overslot for Cole, far overslot for Ray and got them in the fold.  I say bravo to the Nats for ignoring the edicts from the Commissioner’s office to pay slot money (this the same commissioner who basically ran the team into the ground between 2002 and 2004, somewhat leading to our current predicament today in terms of lack of talent from those drafts), preferring instead to spend more money than ever before to get commits from players who can change the course of the franchise.

Great day today.

One last note.  I realize we’ll have this “signing day dance” no matter what actual calendar day is selected, and certainly this is a better system than what existed before a signing deadline day was picked (before, the benchmark was whether a player had begun to attend classes at whatever college they committed to, which led to all sorts of shenanigans and really wasn’t fair to Div-I programs who had a guy on campus ready to attend classes then suddenly was playing rookie league ball in florida 2 days later).  But the next collective bargaining agreement HAS to move this date up.

High end guys like Harper, Sammy Solis and Cole have now basically wasted an entire pro season of development because they knew they could squeeze more money out of teams by waiting til the end.  Plus, MLB “asks” teams to delay announcing over-slot deals so that there’s not a feeding frenzy of agents going “well player X got $2M so my guy should get $2.1M” all summer.  Here’s the current major dates on the GM baseball calendar:

• The draft is held the first week of June (June 5-7 this year)
• The all-star break is usually the 2nd week of july (this year it was july 11-15th)
• And then the (non-waiver) trade deadline is July 31st.
• The current draft signing deadline is 8/15 (unless it falls on a weekend, then its pushed out like it was in 2010).

From a GM perspective, a ton of work leads up to the trade deadline so you can’t put it between the all star break and the end of july.  Why not put the trade deadline somewhere in the first week of july?  The 2 weeks immediately following the draft are spent signing the low-end/college senior prospects already; once that is done why not just play the Scott Boras dance, get the kid signed by July 7th, and have the kid playing by mid july?

Boss

The “10th day of Strasmas” was today, as wonderkid took the mound against the Arizona Diamondbacks to finish off a quick homestand.  Coincidentally, the Nats have now “overtaken” the Astros for the 8th draft pick, but it’ll be hard to maintain this pace.  He didn’t look bad but he didn’t look that good either.

Strasburg went 5 innings, gave up 5 hits, 7ks, 0 walks, 3 runs but only one earned and was lifted in-between innings sitting on 85 pitches.  The two unearned runs were due to the 3-base error Strasburg himself committed by letting a throw to first sail down the RF line, scoring a guy from 1st and putting that runner on 3rd with one out (scored on the next pitch by a routine flyball).

Most of the hits were weaker.  Reynolds had a seeing eye single through the middle, Montero had a jammed soft flyball into center, and Drew hit another relatively innocuous ball up the middle.  Chris Young turned on a fastball pretty well, hitting a sharp line drive into left but got stranded.

The best hit ball of the night was LaRoche, who has been incredibly hot lately, absolutely unloading on a 2-0 fastball that Strasburg left up and over the plate.  LaRoche’s ball was the kind of ball you swing through and don’t even feel the contact on the bat.  Definitely a mistake to a guy who made him pay.

Strasburg’s first pitch registered 101 on the TV gun (impressive considering that normally he eases into it).  He had good velocity most of the night, he had control of his curve, and he threw his change up well.  All in all, an unlucky error cost him 2 runs to blemish an otherwise pretty good line.  I think the Nats are babying him a little bit and should have let him pitch the 6th.  If he gets to 105 pitches, it isn’t the end of the world.  I’d rather see the guy stretched out to 105 than yank him at 85.  There was no pressing pinch hitter need in the bottom of the 5th either.

Editor’s Update: Apparently Strasburg was lifted mostly in part due to the 10 minute delay caused by Arizona law protesters who took to the field.  Strasburg cooled off too much as a result and Riggleman didn’t want to risk it.

As far as the game goes, Willingham hit a 2 run bomb to tie it up and get Strasburg off the hook for the loss.  Zimmerman absolutely killed a ball in the 6th to give the Nats the lead, and Clippard/Burnett/Storen closed it out for the win.

Bottom Line; not the greatest line for Strasburg and no W on the board, but he looked good and he only really had two hard hit balls off of him all night.  Looking good.

8/14 made five (5) starts now on the season for key off-season acquisition Jason Marquis.  That’s 5 starts, 5 times he’s given up as many earned runs as he had innings pitched, 5 times he has failed to pitch out of the fourth inning (!!) that’s 5 losses and 5 times the nats were completely out of it before they had a chance to get going.  2 years, $15M for a guy who wasn’t supposed to be an ace but was supposed to be a quality, eat-innings, pitch decently well as a #3 or #4 starters.  Certainly that’s what he’s been for years for various teams.

What has happened?  He was basically throwing meatball pitches up there against major league hitters.  No sink, no movement, just mid-to-upper 80s meatballs that were hit and hit hard.  Is it still physical?  He did have a minor surgical procedure a couple months ago.  Is it mental?  You need bravado to be successful in the major leagues and he might be short on it right now.

But, what should we do?  Do you sit him?  Put him in the bullpen?  DFA him?  Ask him to go to the minors (where he hasn’t been since 2003)? Replace him with someone else?

I know we have probably better options than Marquis right now.  Stammen pitched well in his last few starts and didn’t deserve to lose his rotation spot honestly.  Zimmermann is ready to come up; there’s only so much dominance of AAA pitchers that is needed.  Maya is a pro and only needs a few warmup starts.  Mock is on a rehab assignment.  Chico pitched well in a spot start against the Dodgers earlier this year.

However, we are committed to 2011 with the guy.  And Instead of turning $15M into a complete waste, i say let him work it out, let him take his lumps as he essentially repeats spring training in August against teams in the pennant race.  Its not as if the Nats are going anywhere.  The season is now about 75% complete, we’re in last place and we’re not getting any better.  All we’re playing for at this point is draft positioning (currently 8th!  we’re getting better, er i mean worse).

Of course, I’ll bet the Nats invent some nebulous “soft tissue” error soon on Marquis (my guess; elbow strain) that gives them an excuse to 15-day DL the guy and put someone better in the rotation.  It is the best solution honestly; he saves face and saves his ego and can write the whole season off to a tough injury.  We’ll see.

A 5-game losing streak, and having lost 7 of their last 10 games, has the Nats inching towards not meeting some pretty realistic goals for the season.

Most pundits thought a 70-win season was a good goal for this team after going 59-103 last year.  For the first time this season, the team is now projected to miss that goal.  Currently sitting at 49-66, they are on pace to finish 69-93.  We’re 71% of the way through the season and this losing streak is coming at a time where we are (finally) getting our presumed starters back.

More interestingly, the Nats are now inching closer to the “loser pack” of teams that are going to make up the top 10 of next year’s (talent-rich) draft board.  For months we have more or less been locked into the #9 pick in the 2011 amateur draft.  We are fully 5 games behind Milwaukee for the 10th pick.  Here’s how the draft order is shaping up (records as of 8/13/10):

9. Washington Nationals: 49-66
8. Houston Astros: 48-65
7. Chicago Cubs: 48-67
6. Cleveland Indians: 48-67
5. Kansas City Royals: 47-68
4. Arizona Diamondbacks: 46-70
3. Seattle Mariners: 44-71
2. Baltimore Orioles: 40-75
1. Pittsburgh Pirates: 39-75

Hey,  we’re only 3 games from drafting #4 next year!

Sports writers and baseball analysts have been beating the drum for years for some sort of payroll system modifications in baseball.   Especially in recent years with the dominance of the Yankees and Red Sox, who have been 1-2 in total salary for a while and have both made the playoffs more often than not in the past decade.  Last year was especially bad, when most of the playoff spots went to big market, big teams.  Great for playoff rankings, bad for most of the teams in the league.   The Yankees spent nearly SEVEN times as much in payroll entering 2010 than Pittsburgh; how can that be equitable?

Well, don’t look now but if the season ended today, as pointed out in this USAToday Article, only two of baseball’s top 10 salaried teams would qualify.  Most of baseball’s current 8 playoff teams are from middle-of-the-road payrolls.  There are two notable outliers: Texas comfortably currently sits atop the AL West with the 27th largest payroll and San Diego, with the 2nd LOWEST payroll in the majors, leads the NL west.  (See this google xls I put together briefly to show teams by record rank, playoff position and salary at the beginning of the season).

Each time a team like Tampa, San Diego or Texas competes well with the big boys, it makes it harder to implement some sort of reform.  Especially since you can look at each of the top tier payroll teams that are NOT in playoff contention right now and excuse their season.

• #2. Boston: still have the 5thbest record and would be leading most any other division.  Lots of injuries, transition year away from expensive older vets like Ortiz and Lowell, $10M in dead money.  Theo keeps talking about a transition year; he’s biding his time before he can re-do the team in the image of the 04 and 07 teams.
• #3: Cubs: over paid for Soriano, Zambrano underperforming, Fukodome bad signing.  Just not well constructed team.  Hendry on the GM hot seat.
• #4: Philadelphia: great team, killed by injuries and inconsistent pitching.  You wonder how badly the Lee trade bungling will hurt them in years to come.  I still think they’ll overtake Atlanta, especially now that Chipper is done for the season.
• #5: Mets: how does Minaya still have a job?  They seem to spend money because they have it, not because they acquire good players.  Oliver Perez, Jason Bay god awful signings, and just Santana and Beltran cost more than the San Diego Payroll annually.
• #6: Tigers: you have to hand it to the Tigers owner, who purposely over spent b/c his town was so badly hurt in the economic crash.  But he has some very expensive players tied up (Cabrera, Verlander, Guillen) for a number of years and their role players aren’t good enough.  Dark Days ahead for Detroit.

So, the #1 payroll team has the best record and the #30 payroll team has the worst record.   But the teams in between aren’t acting like we expect.  Is this Moneyball re-incarnated?  Well no.  Billy Beane’s teams success in Oakland was less about his OBP-centric stats drafting and more about the three starting pitchers (Zito,  Hudson, Mulder) his teams were graced with (as pointed out in this excellent Buzz Bissinger article).  What it does point out is that good GMs (even the wealthy ones in NY and Boston) are starting to value the draft pick and the young player and are becoming better and better at drafting them.  San Diego and Texas both kept payroll low, traded away vets, accumulated draft picks.  Texas easily has the best farm system in the majors and now has a powerhouse team for very little money.  This is exactly the same blueprint practiced for years by Florida and Tampa, though Texas has shown they are not afraid to buy talent at the deadline (something the panhandle state teams never do and thus one of the reasons why neither team really has any appreciable fan following).

So, what should base ball do?

1. Should there be a salary cap?  Well, yes I think so.  I think the Yankees have a totally unfair player advantage over the rest of the league and it shouldn’t be possible to have 4 times the payroll of a team within  your own division.  But i have no idea how to implement it.

2. Should there be a salary floor?  Well, no.  Because teams like Texas, Florida, San Diego, Tampa and (in years past) Oakland have consistently shown that you can build great cheap teams by depending on player development, drafting and having an entire team of pre-arbitration or arbitration-eligible guys.  You can’t force a team to spend money just to achieve an arbitrary salary floor.  Plus you have to allow teams to blow things up and start over (essentially what Toronto is doing now) and try to build for the long run.

21 days on the nose since his last start Strasburg took the mound last night and, well, got hit.  Hard.  He gave up 6 hits and 6 earned runs (thought the last run was courtesy of Batista allowing his inherited runner to score).

4Ks and 2 walks but he was behind most of the hitters and went 3-2 more than a few times.

Those 6 hits were no flukes.  All of them were extra bases.

– A homer by Uggla (who hit a 1-2 fastball up and in and lined it into the stands.  Great swing, no mistake here.).
– A bullet of a double by Hanley Ramirez (he hit a first pitch fastball that was right down the heart of the plate the other way over the RF’s head).
– Another well hit ball by Uggla for another double (he sat on a 2-1 fastball and swung hard on it).
– Another bullet by Stanton (who sat on a 2-0 fastball and tattooed it into the leftfield corner).

– Hanley hitting a hanging 0-2 curveball for a double into left field (definitely a mistake pitch).
– finally, Gabby Sanchez hit a 1-1 ball on a line to left field.  Scored a double but should have been an error on Willingham, who gloved it but a good fielder easily makes that catch going backwards over their head.

So, what happened?  It all comes down to one primary reason: Strasburg had Zero feel for any of his pitches besides his 4-seam fastball, and even that was all over the place.  For the first time in his starts i saw a MPH reading of 101, but he couldn’t control it.  He threw six or seven curves before getting one called for a strike.  His 2-seamer kept missing the plate low.  He had so little feel for his circle-change that he only threw it once in the first 4 innings.

So he keeps running up the fastball.  Constantly behind in the count.  By the 5th inning it was clear that he was throwing it slower just to get it over (aiming it almost) and that’s why he got the yank.  This is a good hitting team.  Hanley Ramierez, Gabby Sanchez, Uggla, and Stanton did the damage.  He walked a .234 hitter twice and both times it led to Uggla getting a 2 out atbat that he shouldn’t have had.  But what we saw is that good hitters, if they know what is coming and can sit on the fastball, can hit the fastball no matter how fast it is going.

In the end, it is all rustiness.  He’ll probably be dominant again in his next start (Sunday 1:35pm game at Nats park against Arizona).

your cub reporter,
boss

Droopy passed along a great trivia question; what four players have hit 400+ homers and have 10 gold gloves.  (the question was spurred on by one of the four answers, one Andruw Jones, having just hit his 400th homer this season and joining this exclusive club).  (The other three answers are at the bottom of the post).

But, it got me to thinking.  Andruw Jones is only 33, has 400 homers, 10 gold gloves and should be towards the end of his prime as a ballplayer.  Instead he seems to have basically forgotten  how to hit at age 30 and is bouncing from team to team to try to regain his swing.  Certainly Andruw is not a HoFamer at this point in his career, but if he was able to turn it around and become relevant again, even for a couple of seasons, and achieve some milestone numbers he very well may be.   I think the epitaph of Jones’ career will read something like, incredibly accomplished early in his career but inexplicably washed up by age 30.  Steroids?  Falsified age? Anything is possible.

Here’s a couple other test cases for HoF worthiness:
1. Johnny Damon.  Currently sits at 2527 career hits at age 36 and still hits well enough that you’d have to think he has an ouside shot at 3000.  Is he a hall of famer

if he gets to 3000?  The only guys who have 3000 that are NOT in the hall are:

• Rose (ineligible)
• Biggio (will be soon)
• Palmeiro (Roids).

Bonds retired with2935 (roids).  Jeter will get 3000 but i think he’s HoF material no doubt.  Harold Baines another test case; 2866 hits but isn’t getting close to induction on the votes.

My vote: nope.  Not an impact player, also an accumulator of stats over a long career.  He’s actually a worse fielder and hitter than Baines.

2. Jim Thome.  Currently sitting at 578 homers career and almost a lock to get 600 at age 39 and producing pretty well this year.  A number of years getting

MVP consideration but never finishing top 3.  5-time all star.  Some fo the hall of fame standards stat measurements have him just over the cusp.  My “standard” is always the stardom or fear factor test.  When Thome comes up, are you scared?  Are you on the edge of your seat?  Would you (as a visiting fan) see his team coming to town and think about buying tickets so you could see him (like Pujols with St. Louis for example).

My vote: borderline yes.

3. Adam Dunn.  (for the sake of argument you have to project his career to what it probably ends up at).  I’ll project him, sitting at 346 now but on pace to end
this year at 360 , to end up with right around 600 homers for his career. Analysis: give him 40-40-38-35-30-30 for the next six seasons, taking him to age 36 and sitting at around 575 homers.  Even if you trend those numbers down a bit, he’s still sitting in the mid 500s at age 36, and Thome has hit hearly 100 homers after that age.  Hell, if Dunn stays healthy and doesn’t precipitously decline in power (like Ortiz), he has an outside shot at 700 homers.  Unbelievable.

But you look at his career “accomplishments” and there’s NOTHING there.  To date he has made ONE all star team, finished 4th in ROY voting and in only two seasons
has even had an MVP vote, let alone come close to winning.  If Dunn reaches 600 homers is he a hall of famer?

My vote: nope.

There’s other great test cases out there (David Ortiz, Carlos Delgado, Jim Edmonds or Paul Konerko) with it comes to looking at “home run accumulations” for a career.  Perhaps another time.

ps: Trivia Answer: Andruw Jones, Ken Griffey Jr, Willie Mays and Mike Schmidt.  Al Kaline had 10 gold gloves but exactly 399 career homers.  Barry Bonds only managed 8 gold gloves before turning into a hulking left fielder on or about the same time he found steroids in 1999.

I don’t always necessarily agree with Chris Needham, who runs the Capitol Punishment blog and can be, well, “acerbic” at times with issues about the Nationals franchise.

But on this issue I kinda agree.  The Nats are honoring Andre Dawson tonight as a cherished former member of the franchise.  Which I think is fine.

But our history as a city hosting baseball goes beyond the Expos.  We claim Frank Howard and remember his great homers in RFK (despite the fact that they moved to Texas).  We remember Walter Johnson as probably the greatest player in our history (despite that version of the team now playing in Minnesota).

What do you guys think?  I thought about it from a football perspective and used a couple of recent relocations:
– Do Baltimore fans claim old Baltimore Colts as part their history, or the Cleveland Browns?  Maybe not the greatest example since Cleveland immediately got their team back via an expansion gift to the city.
– Do St. Louis fans remember the old St. Louis Cardinals and claim them?

I dunno.  I’ve read complaints from former Expos fans that the Washington ownership has almost systematically tried to forget that this team came from Montreal.  And I guess for good reason; the franchise was so  undersupported and badly run that they were closer to contracting it than giving it to DC.

But for me, DC baseball means the team playing here at the time.  We all know why the first two iterations of the Washington Senators moved away (primarily that the city just couldn’t support a team).  But this team is here to stay.

boss

As the team starts to get some clarity in their rotation (guys coming back from injury and replacing AAAA starters), I was thinking about our 2011 rotation.

2011 rotation competition (assuming everyone is healthy).  Listing all 40-man starters.

• Locks (in order): Strasburg, Zimmermann, Marquis
• Heavily Considered (in order): Maya, Wang, Detwiler, Lannan, Olsen
• FAs to be: LHernandez
• Minors/Left out: Stammen, Atilano, Martin, Chico, Mock, Martis, Thompson

I can’t imagine us actually going with the first 5 names on this list, simply because they’re all righties.  We have several decently accomplished lefties in the mix and you would have to think at least one of them will make the cut in 2011.  The team really likes Detwiler, but Lannan has been our most effective pitcher over the past few seasons.

Some other thoughts on the names on this list.

• Wang.  If he can ever regain his form when he was winning 19 games for the Yankees, then he absolutely has to be in the conversation.  But, in reality he’s no closer to returning to the majors now in August than he was when we signed him in February.  And that’s ridiculous.
• Marquis.  What the hell is wrong with this guy?  4 runs before recording an out??  $15M absolutely flushed down the drain so far.  I was certainly a proponent of this signing but you have to wonder at this point if he’s just mentally forgotten how to pitch and compete.  But, he’s signed for next year at a high figure so he has to be part of the conversation.
• Olsen.  I can see them non-tendering him again and then subsequently seeing him signing elsewhere.  I have a feeling he’s going to get really pissed if the Nats cut his starts to save money.
• Livan.  I can see him being a post-trade deadline waiver wire trade.  No way anyone is claiming him, even given his numbers.  He’s a tough case; he doesn’t overpower people but he gets results.  He’s like the next version of Jamie Moyer.   He’s absolutely been our Ace this year but will he even get offered a contract for next year?