Big Rizz Cashes In On Lane Thomas

Around the time of the Austin Hays trade last week, Chelsea Janes of The Washington Post reported that even though Hays and Lane Thomas were both best suited to a platoon corner role on a contender, the Nationals were determined to sell Thomas only if a suitor were willing to pay a starter’s return for him.

“Good luck,” I thought to myself. Thomas is a good player — a 3.1 WAR guy with 28 homers last year. This season, he’s nearly doubled his walk rate and has 28 stolen bases. That’s the third-most in baseball, more than Corbin Carroll and Byron Buxton put together. Thomas is on his second straight season of a wRC+ bumping up against 110 — this is a good player. But it’s also a guy who’s hitting .224/.299/.364 against right-handed pitching, which is most of the pitchers in the league.

Well, we have not because we ask not. Nats GM Mike Rizzo had a weekend to play with before the deadline, and it only takes one team to meet his price. And I’ll be darned, Big Rizz actually pulled it off.

On Monday night, Washington sent Thomas to Cleveland for a bumper crop of prospects: Left-hander Alex Clemmey and infielders José Tena and Rafael Ramirez Jr.

It is, to be frank, a lot of prospect freight. Washington did very well in this deal. But it’s not an irrational overpay for the Guardians — we’re not completely out of the era of one team getting hosed in a trade (I have no idea what the Astros were thinking giving up that much for Yusei Kikuchi, for instance), but the rising professionalism of the front office, along with ideological convergence, has rendered the Frank Robinson-for-Milt Pappas deal rarer than it used to be.

No, this is more along the lines of the Guardians getting a player they need, but maybe paying a little too much to do so. Because Thomas really does help Cleveland out.

Dating back about a decade, even when Cleveland was contending for the pennant every year, offense has traditionally not been a strength for this franchise. And sure enough, that remains the case in 2024. Cleveland is 14th in the league in team wRC+ at 101, which is average. But among the six teams that came into deadline day with 60 or more wins, they’re sixth in offense. Three of those teams — the Yankees, Dodgers, and Orioles — are first, second, and third in wRC+ at 119, 118, and 117.

Cleveland has actually hit lefties better than righties this season, but this lineup, which includes Andrés Giménez, Steven Kwan, and the Naylor brothers, can get a little lefty-heavy. Thomas counterbalances that, and gives Stephen Vogt either a devastating platoon bat or an average everyday starter at a position where he’d previously been unable to find either.

The Guardians are 12th this season in outfield wRC+, which is mostly an artifact of Kwan having a killer year in left. The Guardians have used nine different starting right fielders this season, and their overall right field wRC+ has been just 86. That’s supposed to be a power position, and this first-place team is getting outhit by Jose Siri. Something had to be done. And while Randy Arozarena — to name another corner guy who just got dealt — would’ve been more fun, he and Thomas have been almost exactly equally valuable since the start of 2023:

The rationale for making this trade for Cleveland comes down to this: The Guardians are in pole position for the top seed in the AL, and everyone in their bracket has some weakness that could prove fatal come October. That doesn’t happen every year for anyone, especially not a team with a rookie manager and one of the five smallest Opening Day payrolls in the league. The future is now. The time to make a move is now. The Orioles and Yankees have both traded accordingly, and it’s good that the Guardians are following suit. They can figure out the prospect side later.

Plus, Thomas isn’t a rental. He’s under team control through 2025, which means that Cleveland — unlike Dave Rygalski from Gilmore Girls — can hold on to Lane for more than one season.

And they’d better hold on to him, because, like I said, they gave up a lot.

Longtime readers of my work might remember the name Alex Clemmey — a year ago, he was one of the headliners of my piece on draft prospects from cold-weather states. Back then, he was a big, lanky (6-foot-6, 205 pounds) 17-year-old lefty from Rhode Island, whom the Guardians bought out of a commitment to Vanderbilt with a $2.3 million signing bonus in the second round. Now, Clemmey is 19 (his birthday was two weeks ago, many happy returns), and just as huge and left-handed and hard-throwing as ever: mid-90s on the fastball with a low-80s slider that he’s thrown more consistently in the pros than in high school.

Clemmey is in A-ball in his first full pro season, and in 19 starts, he’s striking out 32.6% of opponents and walking 15.8%. Both of those are big numbers, but again, this is a teenager with levers so long Archimedes could move the world with them. He’s not expected to throw strikes. In his précis on Clemmey, Eric Longenhagen name-dropped another huge left-hander, A.J. Puk. When Puk was Clemmey’s age, he couldn’t crack the weekend rotation at the University of Florida. By the time he was 21, he was (in my estimation at the time) the best college pitcher in the country.

I looked at Puk, as a Gator, and saw the potential for him to become the ginger CC Sabathia. That obviously didn’t happen, but for all the injuries and command problems, Puk is still a valuable high-leverage reliever. It’s kind of the same story for Clemmey. He’s got the stuff you can’t teach: Lefty velo, athleticism, size. If he can refine the rest of his game over the next three or four seasons, he could be a special starter. But even if he doesn’t get all the way there, he still figures to be an effective major league reliever.

Tena is a great get for Washington because he’s someone who’s less useful to Cleveland than almost any other team in baseball. He’s a 23-year-old spark plug who can play second and third base, two positions where the Guardians are several years away from needing someone to fill the position. (I remember doing a radio hit in Cleveland before the draft, and the hosts asked where Cleveland could possibly play Travis Bazzana if he went 1-1. That’s how set the Guardians are.)

Despite his youth, Tena is in his last option year, so the Guardians were going to have to move him no matter what. Even at 5-foot-9, Tena has a power-over-hit offensive profile. He has great bat speed and pull power for a left-handed-hitting infielder, with 17 home runs in 90 games at Triple-A this season. But even for a guy who’s leaning on the underside of hitting .300 in the high minors, it’s a lot of chase and a lot of swing-and-miss. He’s striking out 25.2% of the time in Triple-A, and in 38 career major league plate appearances, he has just seven hits and 15 strikeouts. Still, there’s the potential for a solid big league second baseman if he can cut back on chasing outside the zone a little. As a secondary piece in a trade like this, that’s a coup.

Ramirez, a 19-year-old New Jerseyan (he also just had a birthday), is the third and final player going back to the Nationals. He’s another left-handed-hitting infielder with strikeout issues, but that has different connotations for a player like Tena, who’s basically big-league-ready, than a teenager who’s hitting .187 in Low-A and has some questions about his defense at short. This is a buy-low guy, because Ramirez had great patience and power on the complex last year and drew positive reviews in spring training, but the 2024 regular season has been a struggle. The fact that there’s any potential this deep into the trade speaks to how well Washington did, but it’s unlikely that a teenager with these kinds of contact issues is going to access it.

Trades like this make the world go ‘round. A first-place team gets a necessary upgrade, and maybe the three prospects they traded to get him — two of them 19-year-olds — won’t amount to much. Either way, none of these guys was helping Cleveland get over the hump this year. But because the Guardians are in win-now mode, a rebuilding team, the Nationals, was able to swoop in and pilfer a bumper crop of young talent for a player who didn’t fit their timeline anyway. A useful trade for Cleveland, but a bonanza for Washington. I’m sorry, Mike Rizzo, I should never have doubted you.