{"id":9993,"date":"2014-11-14T12:21:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T17:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9993"},"modified":"2014-11-17T16:06:10","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T21:06:10","slug":"farewell-matthew-purke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9993","title":{"rendered":"Farewell Matthew Purke"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Shocker<\/a>

Shocker release. Photo AP\/Nati Harnik<\/p><\/div>\n

Shocker of a press release today; the Nats have outright released Matthew Purke<\/strong><\/a>, he of the $4M signing bonus in the 2011 draft.<\/p>\n

Thus ends one of the more expensive draft gambits of the Mike Rizzo<\/strong> era; Purke was a former 1st round talent (14th overall pick out of HS to Texas who had his deal nixed by MLB during the ownership crisis there) who blitzed through his freshman year at TCU but who suffered a shoulder issue that pushed him to the 4th round as a draft-eligible sophomore in 2011.\u00a0 The Nats rolled the dice, gave him upper 1st round money and a MLB deal (one of the last of its kind before the new CBA eliminated such contracts).<\/p>\n

His minor league stats<\/a> are a cautionary tale.\u00a0 3 starts in 2012 before shoulder surgery in August.\u00a0 18 total starts in 2013 as he recovered from said surgery.\u00a0 8 awful starts in 2014 before getting TJ surgery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite having another option eligible, the team has decided to cut bait.\u00a0 He had the TJ surgery on 5\/29\/14, meaning he would have likely\u00a0 missed a good chunk of the 2015 season even if his recovery went perfectly.\u00a0 Perhaps the team just decided he was never going to recover, that even a career as a reliever wasn’t in the cards.<\/p>\n

I was surprised simply because of the one remaining option; why not keep him around one more season to see if anything could be salvaged from that huge signing bonus?\u00a0 But we’re not in the GM’s office; maybe his recovery wasn’t on track and 2015 was looking like a lost season.\u00a0 That’s perfectly reasonable.\u00a0 And as we’ve discussed a ton lately, the Nats have more than a few critical rule-5 decisions to make and a full 40-man roster.\u00a0 So looking for room, Purke was one of the first to go.\u00a0 His release reminds me of the shock John Patterson<\/strong> release in spring training 2008; nobody saw it coming and we all thought he still could salvage an injury riddled career.\u00a0 As it turned out, he never threw another MLB pitch.<\/p>\n

Farewell Mr. Purke; i’m pretty confident he won’t be unemployed for long as another team rolls the dice on a non-MLB deal to see if he can turn into something.\u00a0 The lesson here is easy: don’t give out 40-man spots if you don’t have to, because eventually they become pretty tough to work around.\u00a0 If Purke was a normal draftee still on a minor league contract, simply put he’d still be with the organization.<\/p>\n

11\/17\/14 Update<\/strong>: Nats announce that they’ve re-signed Purke to a minor league deal<\/a> with a spring training invite.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 That’s the best possible outcome of this whole situation!\u00a0 Off the 40-man but still in the organization.\u00a0 Bravo Mike Rizzo<\/strong>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shocker of a press release today; the Nats have outright released Matthew Purke, he of the $4M signing bonus in the 2011 draft. Thus ends one of the more expensive draft gambits of the Mike Rizzo era; Purke was a former 1st round talent (14th overall pick out of HS to Texas who had his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[517,166,129],"class_list":["post-9993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-draft","category-minorspitching","tag-john-patterson","tag-matthew-purke","tag-mike-rizzo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9993"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10015,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9993\/revisions\/10015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}