2020 ZiPS Projections: Washington Nationals

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Washington Nationals.

Batters

At this point, Juan Soto getting an MVP-region projection should probably have been expected. Soto didn’t quite meet his 2019 projection — yes, the OPS was close, but offense went up league-wide — but he was still a superstar, and with the departures of Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon in consecutive winters, he’s now undoubtedly the centerpiece of the offense. Mike Trout’s finally gotten old enough that Soto, along with Ronald Acuña Jr., has passed him in rest-of-career projections. Soto’s so terrific that he even managed to play in the majors five days before his debut. Okay, okay, it was a suspended game, but I like to imagine he caused a Star Trek-esque time paradox.

Losing Rendon hurts and while the Nats have made a real effort to try to bridge at least some of the gap with secondary talent, it’s just too tall an order to fully replace that level of production. Replacing Harper was a breeze, but only because the team had developed Soto, which they can’t do every year. (If they did, I’d call for team president Mike Rizzo to be placed on trial for witchcraft.)

Trea Turner, Victor Robles, and Adam Eaton complete the offensive core. The rest of the lineup is more of the cobbled-together variety, with Starlin Castro, Eric Thames, and Asdrúbal Cabrera brought in to be average-adjacent, the last until Carter Kieboom takes over at third base. To platoon with Thames, the team re-signed Ryan Zimmerman, though his position could best be described as beloved mascot, given that Howie Kendrick would be a better platoon partner and the Nats are going to thin when it comes to infielders who can reliably backup at shortstop. I said reliably, Cabrera-stans, if there is such a thing.

Pitchers

ZiPS still gives a very slight edge to Max Scherzer over Stephen Strasburg, but whoever you prefer, the Nats have two legitimate ace pitchers, with another in Patrick Corbin who’s not far behind. Having that top three will do a lot to paper over depth issues in the rotation, a malady from which the Nats suffer. ZiPS is spooked by the 20% strikeout drop from Aníbal Sánchez given his age and the uptake in walks, and like Steamer, sees him as barely above replacement level. The projections are still on the suspicious side when it comes to Joe Ross, who did show increased velocity in a respectable late-season stint in the rotation, but has missed a lot of time due to injury. ZiPS doesn’t like Austin Voth any better.

There are exactly three relievers who ZiPS likes: Sean Doolittle, Will Harris, and Wander Suero. Acquired from the Twins in a minor trade last month, Ryne Harper gets a roughly league-average projection. ZiPS is quite worried about Daniel Hudson, seeing a lot of danger signs balanced against his improved velocity; his swinging strike percentage dropped, the contact against him improved, and ZiPS thinks he was fairly lucky in the homers allowed. Like the rotation, it feels like the bullpen could have used another arm, and with $10 million still remaining before the team hits the first luxury tax threshold, the Nats could still theoretically make a couple of low-key signings.

Prospects

Thankfully, Carter Kieboom is still technically a prospect, or else there wouldn’t be that much projectionally interesting about the top-thin Nats farm system. ZiPS doesn’t see Kieboom becoming a major superstar on order of Francisco Lindor. Instead, it sees him as “merely” hitting .260/.350/.450 a year for a long time and being perfectly capable of playing shortstop. As his position, Kieboom ranks fifth in rest-of-career WAR, when looking at the 26 teams for which I have released ZiPS so far, though of those remaining, I believe only Wander Franco will push him down in that pecking order. On merit, he should take over from Cabrera fairly quickly, ideally at the start of the season.

ZiPS likes Luis García enough to project him to stay at shortstop and eventually hit .260/.320/.420 a year, peaking as a 15-18 home run hitter, though he also with the misfortune of being the third-best shortstop on the Nationals. He’s still very young, so there’s a lot more give, both in terms of upside and downside, than there is with players who have already reached the high minors. The only other Nationals prospect with a 40 FV in the high minors, Wil Crowe, doesn’t interest ZiPS at all; he’s going to be 26 before the end of the 2020 season and he’s walked too many guys for a pitcher with a K/9 under seven.

There’s no more optimism from ZiPS when we talk fringe prospects. Steven Fuentes and Mario Sanchez rank highly in projected WAR, but that’s mainly an expression of ZiPS really only liking six or seven pitchers in the entire organization. Both could be useful fifth starter/swingman types, but ZiPS sees their ceilings as fairly low.

As for the rest, there’s probably a shot that Raudy Read is Stephen Vogt for a few years. Yadiel Hernandez is compelling in a limited sort of way. Hernandez, who signed after defecting from Cuba in 2016, didn’t do much to mash his way onto prospect lists, and as he was already nearing 30 when he signed, he didn’t have a lot of time. Only in 2019, with the offensive explosion in Triple-A, did he finally really hit enough to turn heads, posting a .323/.406/.604 line for Fresno. Again, that’s the Pacific Coast League in a rabbit ball year, so you have to take those numbers with a large grain of salt. But it’s enough to make him interesting and when we’re talking fringe prospects and role players, I’m a huge fan of interesting.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.