If you had to guess which teams would be doling out eight-year deals this winter, the Nationals probably wouldn’t have made the top of your list. Yet on Friday evening, they came to terms on just that: an eight-year extension. The recipient, equally surprising: Keibert Ruiz. The pact is worth $50 million and comes with two club options that could keep the young catcher in Washington through 2032. Full financial terms of the contract have yet to be revealed, but it comes with a signing bonus and is reportedly front-loaded, giving Ruiz a substantial raise for the upcoming season.

In both length and value, this is one of the largest extensions ever given to a player with fewer than two years of service time. Other players to sign similarly large deals with such little MLB experience include Michael Harris II (this past August), Ke’Bryan Hayes (this past April), and Corbin Carroll (this past weekend). Harris and Hayes, though, had longer and/or better track records, and Carroll is an uber-prospect with superstar potential. Ruiz had a fine season in 2022, but he’s yet to demonstrate he can be more than an average player at the big league level. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday afternoon, Washington’s Josiah Gray pitched the first inning of his first spring training game of 2023. He threw nine pitches to mow down the Mets. Five of those pitches were cut fastballs, a new addition to his repertoire. If that doesn’t sound noteworthy to you, maybe you should ask Mark Canha, the player who faced Gray’s first cutter. After the pitch, he stared out at the mound for a long moment.

That is the face of a man who has just seen something he did not expect. Canha struck out (on a cutter), and on his way back to the dugout he stopped to tell Francisco Lindor a little secret. Want to guess what he said? Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Over the course of a 22-year professional career that began in 1997, Jayson Werth appeared to transform from a fresh-faced catching prospect… into a werewolf. Drafted by the Orioles as a catcher, he was clean-cut and even wore glasses, but as the years went on, he moved to the outfield, carved a spot in the majors, and grew increasingly shaggier, with a full beard and hair down to his shoulders.

In truth Werth’s evolution was more than just a visual one. Battling injuries for most of his career, he endured numerous ups and downs while journeying from top prospect to non-tendered afterthought to All-Star. He needed nearly a decade to establish himself at the major league level, and didn’t get 400 plate appearances in a season until he was 29. After playing a key role in the first four of the Phillies’ five straight NL East titles (2007-10) — including their ’08 World Series win and ’09 pennant — he took an even more unexpected step, signing a massive seven-year, $126 million deal with the Nationals in December 2010. An organization that had been something of a punchline looked to him not only to provide middle-of-the-lineup punch but to serve as an impactful clubhouse presence, mentoring younger players (“He’s like an older brother to me,” said Bryce Harper in 2013). By the end of his run, his influence within the organization extended even further. “Ultimately what we have become is a lot to do with some of the things that he brought to the ballclub,” general manager Mike Rizzo told the Washington Post’s Adam Kilgore in 2018. “He was teaching us how to be a championship organization, not only on the big league side but throughout the organization.” Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, did you hear about the free agent who signed on Tuesday morning? Yeah, his name is Core… y Dickerson. So, yeah, not that free agent. Our deal is Corey Dickerson, to Washington, for one year and $2.25 million guaranteed, plus another $750,000 in performance incentives.

This is Dickerson’s third trip through the NL East since 2019, which is pretty enticing as a blind item, but then you realize that he was with the Phillies in 2019 but not ’22 and the Nats in 2023 but not ’19, and he missed the Mets and Braves altogether. That’s something of a theme for Dickerson’s career. He came up with the Rockies and was traded to the Rays in 2016, missing the two seasons in the past decade in which Colorado was good and having to sit through two of the last seasons in which Tampa Bay wasn’t.

But for as much as Dickerson has dodged playing for good teams for most of his career, he does have playoff experience, with the Marlins in 2020 and the Cardinals last year. He’s spent the past decade as an exemplar of a particular kind of player: a second-division starter who can be a meaningful platoon or bench player on a contender. That kind of player gets punted around a lot. Indeed, this will be Dickerson’s 11th big league season and his eighth team. He’s been traded in midseason twice and four times in total. (One of those trades was the deal that sent Germán Márquez and Jake McGee to Colorado in 2016.) Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals have found the left-handed bat that they were looking for. Yesterday, Bob Nightengale reported that Dominic Smith has signed a one-year deal that will send him down I-95 to Washington. Robert Murray of FanSided reported that the deal was for $2 million, with performance bonuses worth up to another $2 million. According to Joel Sherman of the New York Post, those bonuses relate to the number of plate appearances Smith makes. The Nationals 40-man roster is full, so they will need to make a move in order to clear space for Smith.

After snagging Jeimer Candelario on a one-year deal in November, the Nationals have now filled both corner infield spots with free agent bounce-back candidates. In Washington, Smith might finally get the one thing he’s always needed: time. After six big league seasons, the 27-year-old Smith has never had a regular position, and has topped 200 plate appearances just once.

Nightengale also reported what might be the most important part of this story: that Smith will be playing first base for the Nationals. Although the team non-tendered Luke Voit earlier in the offseason, that was not necessarily seen as a certainty. Manager Dave Martinez said during the Winter Meetings that he hoped first base would be the primary position of 2022 rookie sensation Joey Meneses. Over the course of his career, Smith has spent more innings in the outfield than he has at first. It’s at least reasonable to imagine that playing every day at his preferred position could make a real difference to a player who’s never had the luxury of stability. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago at the Winter Meetings, Nationals manager Dave Martinez told reporters that the team was looking to add a veteran starting pitcher. On Friday, MASN’s Mark Zuckerman reported that Washington did just that, making its biggest move of the offseason by signing free agent Trevor Williams. The two-year, $13 million commitment, per The Athletic’s Stephen J. Nesbitt, represents the team’s third-biggest contractual commitment, behind the long-term deals of Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin.

Williams played a significant role with the Mets in 2022, starting nine games while Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer were on the IL earlier in the season and making 21 relief appearances. Given New York’s glut of solid right-handed relief arms, he didn’t make the roster for the Wild Card Series against the Padres. Had he been on the Nationals in 2022, his 0.6 WAR would have been third on the staff, and his 3.21 ERA and 3.88 FIP would have been fourth (among pitchers who threw at least 25 innings).

Williams will immediately become the most reliable arm in Washington’s starting rotation. At Federal Baseball, Patrick Reddington noted that he had a 1.80 ERA against the Nationals in 2022, so if nothing else, they’ve co-opted a former tormenter. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and today’s team is the Washington Nationals.

Batters

If there’s any silver lining for a team that will likely be at the bottom of the division, it’s that this is a fairly decent floor for a last-place squad, unless it faces particularly bad injury luck. There are no projected stars remaining anywhere on the roster, but the Nationals do have a pretty good front line of fringe options at most positions. When we mash-up the ZiPS projections and the current iteration of the depth charts, no individual position combines for three wins, but no position comes in at under a win either. Players like Victor Robles, Joey Meneses, and Jeimer Candelario may not have exciting upside, but they’re at least major league players. I’d be midly surprised to see Washington lose 107 games, which it did last season even with a half-season from Juan Soto and Josh Bell.

ZiPS still sees CJ Abrams as risky and is just about out of hope for Carter Kieboom. There’s a bright spot in the form of Jake Alu, who destroyed pitchers in the high minors, even when you take the 2022 helium out of those numbers in the form of a translation. ZiPS doesn’t see him being a near-star offensive player, but the probabilistic measure I use had him as one of the best defensive minor league players; he’s listed as +5 runs at third base, and if ZiPS had been as confident about the translated defense estimate as it is about MLB defensive measures, the projection would actually be +12. Meneses gets a better projection than similar veteran surprise Frank Schwindel got after 2021, and ZiPS sees Alex Call as a legitimate stopgap corner outfielder of the Anthony Santander variety. Abrams, along with Keibert Ruiz and Luis García, has significant upside, and it wouldn’t take much to see any of these projections blow up in a positive way with some real steps forwards from these youngsters. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals aren’t going to make the playoffs in 2023. They probably won’t even sniff .500; unsurprisingly, the team that traded Juan Soto along with everything that wasn’t nailed down this past season isn’t quite ready to compete for division titles. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to get better, though – when the next generation of Nationals stars reaches the majors, the team would prefer to have some major league pieces already in place, mirroring the vaunted Cubs and Astros rebuilds of the 2010s. To that end, the Nationals made a signing I absolutely love yesterday, snagging Jeimer Candelario on a one-year deal worth $5 million, with $1 million in incentives.

Before the 2022 season, no one would have believed you if you told them Candelario would be a free agent this winter. In 2020 and ’21, he hit a combined .278/.356/.458, good for a 125 wRC+. He backed that up with decent defense at third base; all told, he looked like a comfortably above-average player carried by his bat. Then came 2022, an abject disaster; over 124 injury-interrupted games, he hit .217/.272/.361 and saw pretty much every statistical indicator tick downwards. The Tigers chose to release him rather than go through arbitration, which MLB Trade Rumors estimated at roughly $7 million.

For the 2020 and ’21 versions of Candelario, that would be a bargain. Quite frankly, I still think it would make sense after his poor 2022 season. The Tigers didn’t share my assessment, valuing the combination of money and roster space as more important than retaining his services. I’m not quite sure I understand it – they currently have two open spots on their 40-man roster and no in-house third baseman – but their loss was Washington’s gain. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t too long ago that it was a delightful novelty when position players pitched. When Casper Wells came in from the outfield to chuck batting practice fastballs at the plate, it signified that the game had gone into a zone of silliness. Either the game was such a blowout there was nothing to be gained by taking it seriously, or it had gone on so long that both teams had run out of pitchers. In the latter case, that usually happened well after midnight, with all the slap-happy antics exhausted people tend to get up to.

But seeing a position player on the mound is no longer cause for giddiness and mirth. It’s almost commonplace; so much so that MLB had to institute a rule prohibiting position players from pitching in games where the score is closer than seven runs. Like a Foster the People song, the position player pitching got overexposed and lost its luster. What was once a reason to turn a game on is now a signal that you might as well turn it off.

Why are so many position players pitching nowadays? Well, there’s the serious answer, which has to do with bullpen construction and the proliferation of the max-effort relief pitcher. And then there’s the truth, which is that in baseball, unlike curling, it’s considered indecorous to concede a game you’re going to lose. That’s what the position player pitching usually means now: The game is out of reach, so let’s just get it over with, ideally with as little expenditure of time and effort as is practicable. Read the rest of this entry »

2023 Intern, Baseball Research & Development (R&D)

Location: Washington, DC

Summary:
The Washington Nationals are seeking multiple interns to join our Baseball Research & Development team for the 2023 season. As an intern, you’ll work on developing and applying your data science skills to baseball, performing research on baseball questions under the close mentorship of a team member of Baseball R&D. You’ll likely work on one project at a time, with plenty of time for model exploration and personal development. You’ll have the opportunity to work in a collaborative baseball front office daily at the stadium, watching baseball and engaging regularly with more senior members of our baseball operations group.

Internships are a key way for us to find future full-time members of our department, with many of our senior department members beginning as interns. While a pathway to a full-time position is not assured, many of our former interns have found full-time opportunities with the Nationals or other MLB clubs. While internships ideally span from Opening Day to November 1st, we’re open to candidates that may not be available for this entire period. Read the rest of this entry »