When Luis García first debuted back in 2020, he was the youngest player in the majors at just 20 years old. He’s split the past two seasons between Triple-A and the big leagues, and turned 23 just yesterday. Players who make it to the show at such a young age are almost exclusively highly regarded prospects; García was ranked 87th overall on our 2020 top prospect list. Of the 12 players who’ve made it to the majors at age 20 or younger over the last decade, García’s -0.5 WAR in his debut season was the second-worst mark and his total WAR ranks dead last. Despite getting called up at such a young age, he’s really struggled to make an impact at the highest level. But after playing in over 200 games in the majors, it finally looks like he’s taken a step forward in his development.

As a prospect, the biggest knock against García was his extremely aggressive approach at the plate. He has excellent bat-to-ball skills, but he would chase bad pitches so often that when he wasn’t swinging and missing, he was making really poor contact. During his first three years in the league, he ran a 20.4% strikeout rate with a minuscule 3.5% walk rate, the lowest in the majors during that period. After posting identical wRC+ marks of 79 during his first two years in the big leagues, he improved to a 93 last year, driven almost entirely by better results when putting the ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

The ribbon has been cut on the 2023 season and I wanted to push a few prospect updates live to The Board, including a few tweaks to the Top 100 list. This update also includes publication of scouting reports such that every rookie currently on an active roster now has a current record on The Board, and a few additions the farm systems I’ve already audited during this cycle based on things I saw during spring training.

Let’s start with injury-related updates to the Top 100. Phillies top prospect Andrew Painter has a partially torn UCL and is approaching the end of his four-week shutdown period. Rule of thumb: Among a similarly talented group of players, you’d most want to have the healthy guys. Painter slides from fifth overall to 12th, right behind newly minted big leaguers Anthony Volpe and Jordan Walker, who are comparably talented, healthy, and making a big league impact right now. This is just a cosmetic change to the list; Painter’s evaluation hasn’t changed. If it turns out he needs Tommy John, whether or not I slide him any further will depend on its timing. If rest doesn’t work and his surgery is timed such that he also misses all of 2024, that’s the worst case scenario for Painter and the Phillies. We know for sure that Nationals pitching prospect Cade Cavalli needs Tommy John, so in a similar fashion he falls within the 50 FV player tier, sliding from 63rd overall to 99th, right next to Mason Miller of the A’s, with whom he now shares injury-related relief risk.

Tigers prospect Jackson Jobe, the third overall pick in 2021, is going to miss three to six months due to lumbar spine inflammation. This injury is more novel than a TJ, and Jobe isn’t exactly coming off a great 2022. Unfortunately, this situation merits a more meaningful shift, but I still want to reflect the upside of a healthy Jobe, so he downshifts to the 45+ FV tier, where the most talented of the young high-variance prospects reside. Assuming he comes back late this season, he’ll be one of the higher-priority evaluations in the minors. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably seen the jokes. Oh, the Nationals might have traded Juan Soto, but it’s no big deal, because they have Juan Soto’s replacement waiting in the wings. Ooh, intriguing! But of course, it’s mostly a setup to make a crack about how Joey Meneses is on an unsustainable heater — fifteen minutes of fame before an inevitable crash back to just-okayness.

Heck, look at our projections for him this year. Depth Charts pegs him for 602 plate appearances, a 111 wRC+, and 1.5 WAR. That’s not awful or anything, but astute readers will note that Meneses managed 1.5 WAR last season in just 240 plate appearances. From his debut on August 2 through the end of the season, he was 11th in baseball in wRC+. This year, we’re projecting him to be 136th.

That sucks! It really sucks. It’s partially unavoidable, though. We’ve all gotten so used to projections, so used to the fact that how a player does in any given year is only a small part of what we should use to forecast their future, that actual performances largely get lost in the mix. The forecasts are darn good at their jobs in aggregate. It’s easy to listen to what they have to say and tune out that pesky reality that disagrees. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Team USA’s WBC quarterfinal and semifinal victories and Jose Altuve’s injury, then continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the New York Yankees (28:17) with Brendan Kuty of The Athletic, and the Washington Nationals (1:06:41) with Jesse Dougherty of The Washington Post, plus a Past Blast from 1983 (1:47:29), trivia answers (1:52:16), and an initial reaction to a stone-cold classic Japan-Mexico WBC semifinal (1:53:33).

Audio intro: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: The Moaners, “Yankee on My Shoulder”
Audio interstitial 2: Krestovsky, “National Spark”
Audio outro: Keenan The First and RandiVision, “Big Game”

Link to Rosenthal on Turner’s homer
Link to Nightengale on Turner’s homer
Link to Trout reaction GIF
Link to Wainwright quote
Link to Quijada’s pitch
Link to article about Bard
Link to Rosenthal on the mound visit
Link to FG post on Profar
Link to FanGraphs playoff odds
Link to FG payroll breakdown
Link to Yankees offseason tracker
Link to Yankees depth chart
Link to Ben Clemens on Cole
Link to story on in-flight wifi
Link to framing leaderboard
Link to Higashioka analysis
Link to Woodward on back-picks
Link to Brendan’s spring preview
Link to Brendan’s author archive
Link to Rosenthal on Judge
Link to Nationals offseason tracker
Link to Nationals depth chart
Link to Jesse on Cavalli
Link to Jesse on Strasburg
Link to Jesse on Robles
Link to Jesse’s author archive
Link to Ben on Meneses
Link to Svrluga on the Nats
Link to 1983 Pirates article
Link to 1983 Phillies article
Link to baseball exceptionalism wiki
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to trivia answers
Link to Ryan Nelson’s Twitter
Link to Cashner beard article
Link to other Cashner beard article

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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 »