Every year, the Orioles and Nationals play games against one another, though the number actually varies depending on baseball’s rotational interleague schedule. These meetings are referred to as the “Beltway Series,” paying homage to the defining characteristic of the region: traffic on I-495 (the Capital Beltway) and I-695 (the Baltimore Beltway). While I am (mostly) kidding, I still sometimes wonder why there isn’t a better name for this geographical rivalry.

Set to factor in that series is Renato Núñez. The Orioles’ slugging designated hitter is having quite the year. Through games on Wednesday, he has more home runs than Bryce Harper, having hit 28 through his first 488 plate appearances. There’s not much beyond the power, though. He’s slashing .240/.309/.478 with a 103 wRC+, and due to his defensive limitations, he’s been held to just 0.7 WAR.

As we know, the Orioles are not in a position of contention this season, which is exactly why a guy like Renato Núñez can get play in the range of 150 games. All teams look for players with untapped potential. Not all teams, however, can give these players the plate appearances necessary to grow into the productivity that potential suggests. But the Orioles can, and Núñez is the beneficiary.

Núñez’s seemingly odd season had me hunting for a comp. What might a player with this skillset — good power, not a lot of contact, below-average discipline — look like in the future? What can the Orioles expect from Núñez in three, four, or five years?

To answer this question, I downloaded every individual player season with at least 300 plate appearances over the last five years, including 2019. I filtered my search using three conditions: a walk rate between 7-8%, an isolated power above .200, and a batting average between .230 and .250. In my mind, these three results-based constraints accomplish two goals: they limit my search to just a handful individual player seasons and allow me to find players who have similar intrinsic characteristics to Núñez’s. Read the rest of this entry »

In my mind, Patrick Corbin is an archetype. He’s the idealized sinker/slider guy, pairing the two pitches so masterfully that batters can’t figure out which one is coming until it’s too late. His breakout in 2018 was foreshadowed by a solid 2017, when he upped the percentage of sliders he threw from 26.5% to 38%, and he hasn’t looked back since. After signing with the Nationals as a free agent, he’s delivered another solid season, sinking and sliding his opponents into oblivion, with a few four-seamers thrown in to keep batters honest.

That’s not all he does, though. That’s the business side of Patrick Corbin’s pitching, but sometimes he likes to goof around. Take a look at this ludicrous curveball he threw Manny Machado in June:

That is absolutely nothing like every other pitch Corbin throws. Machado’s not even mad; he’s impressed:

Yes, Patrick Corbin has a slow curve, and it’s a joy to watch. Read the rest of this entry »

Because he is still only 20 years old, Juan Soto cannot legally drink in the United States. And yet, despite his recent pubescence, he’s one of baseball’s best hitters. Last week, he became just the third player in major league history to hit 50 home runs before turning 21. He’s drawn comparisons to Miguel Cabrera. He’s even already received some Hall of Fame discussion, assuming he can stay healthy over the course of what ought to be a long career.

In a piece for MLB.com from early August, Mike Petriello noted something interesting about Soto: his consistency.

There are no cold streaks, so there’s no fevered “what’s wrong with Juan Soto?” think pieces, like we’ve done with José Ramírez. There are no wild, Bryce Harper-esque up-and-downs that demand attention. There’s just steady, regular production, the kind of thing that makes Mike Trout so outstanding, and for all of that, sometimes we consider Trout to be boring.

This paragraph from Petriello’s story piqued my interest. Is there any way to examine a player’s consistency? With Soto, I attempted to do so.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can see where they rank among their new teammates; our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about.
Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached that time of year once again: the day when Mike Rizzo trades several intriguing prospects for bullpen relief. After earlier acquiring Daniel Hudson from the Blue Jays, the Nationals acquired Roenis Elías and Hunter Strickland from the Mariners in exchange for Aaron Fletcher, Elvis Alvarado, and Taylor Guilbeau. The Nats hope Elías and Strickland, who won’t be free agents until 2022, will be a stabilizing force in the middle of their bullpen for years to come, or at the very least a cromulent bridge to the stars of the pen.

As seems to happen every year, the Nationals came into 2019 with a plan to fix the bullpen. They signed Trevor Rosenthal and traded for Kyle Barraclough in the offseason, both interesting arms with velocity to spare and control issues. They also signed Tony Sipp just before the start of the season, promoted Tanner Rainey, who they acquired from the Reds in a Tanner swap with Tanner Roark, and signed Jonny Venters when the Braves released him in May. It’s clear, in other words, that they knew they had a bullpen problem and attempted to fix it.

As Nationals fans already know, they didn’t fix it. The Nationals bullpen has been among the worst in the majors this year. They’ve compiled a collective 5.99 ERA, last in baseball, and an equally horrific 5.07 xFIP (though their FIP is slightly better, at 4.80). As bad as that 5.99 ERA sounds, though, their results have been even worse than that due to poor timing. The bullpen has been worth -7.98 WPA, meaning they’ve cost the team a staggering eight wins on the year. Eight wins is the difference between fighting for a Wild Card spot, where the Nats find themselves now, and having the second-best record in the NL.

It’s safe to say that the team has a clear objective, but the way they’re addressing it differs from past years. They’ve previously traded middle relievers with years of team control left for dominant closers, sending Felipe Vázquez to the Pirates for Mark Melancon and Blake Treinen plus prospects to the A’s for Sean Doolittle and Ryan Madson. Those trades came back to bite the team — Vázquez and Treinen have since been among the most effective relievers in baseball, while Melancon and Madson left in free agency. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hardly a National secret that Washington is in need of bullpen help. Even as the team has put themselves back into playoff position over the the last month or so, the bullpen has a 4.67 FIP and a 5.06 ERA in July. To help in the late innings, the Nationals have acquired Daniel Hudson of the Toronto Blue Jays, as first reported by Scott Mitchell. The return was first reported by Ken Rosenthal and the trade looks like this:
Nationals Receive:

• RHP Daniel Hudson

Blue Jays Receive:

• RHP Kyle Johnston

After a couple solid years in the Diamondbacks pen in 2015 and 2016, Hudson was near replacement-level for the Pirates in 2017 and then worse than that for the Dodgers a year ago. After signing a minor league contract with the Angels in the offseason, he was released near the end of spring training before the Blue Jays guaranteed him $1.5 million. With Toronto, the 32-year-old righty has been solid, putting up a better-than-average 4.21 FIP along with a very-good 3.00 ERA. His strikeout rate is pretty even from a year ago at 23%, with his walk rate up to 11% this season, but he’s only allowed five homers in 48 innings.

He throws a mid-90s four-seamer around 60% of the time and used his sinker about 10% this season, which might help explain some of his homer-suppressing tendencies. As a result, he’s throwing his slider only a quarter of the time, down from more than 40% last year with the Dodgers. This might not be an impact move for the Nationals, but they needed help and Hudson should be an improvement over what they have in-house. Lefty Roenis Elías from the Mariners should help as well.

As for Johnston, he’s a righty who didn’t make the Nationals prospect list before the season. He was a sixth-round pick in 2017 by Washington and his control problems in college carried over to the pros with double-digit walk rates in his first two minor league seasons. He is repeating High-A this year and just turned 23, but he has turned in a solid season. He’s got a 23% strikeout rate and his walk rate is down to 9% on the season in 20 starts. Over 20% of his fly balls have been infield flies, and his swinging strike rate is very good at 15%. As for a scouring report, Eric Longenhagen adds the following:

Johnston sits 89-94, and touches 97, and he can manipulate the fastball to sink or sometimes cut. He also has an above-average slider in the mid-80s, typically 82-85 but sometimes harder. While he also has a splitter, Johnston doesn’t use it often. He’s a potential reliever.

Johnston still has a ways to go, but there’s enough there to think he has a shot as a bullpen arm in the future. That seems about right for two months of Daniel Hudson.

Tampa Bay’s pre-deadline activity — trading bat-first prospect Nick Solak for electric reliever Peter Fairbanks, then moving recently-DFA’d reliever Ian Gibaut for a Player to be Named, and sending reliever Hunter Wood and injured post-prospect infielder Christian Arroyo to Cleveland for international bonus space and outfielder Ruben Cardenas, a recent late-round pick who was overachieving at Low-A — got us thinking about how teams’ anticipation of the fall 40-man deadline might impact their activity and the way they value individual prospects, especially for contending teams.

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, or protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like player redundancy (like Tampa seemed to when they moved Solak) and whether a prospect is too raw to be a realistic Rule 5 target, as well as other little variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or in arbitration, and if there are other, freely available alternatives to a team’s current talent (which happens a lot to slugging first base types).

Teams with an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2020 and with many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that that team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players on waivers or in the Rule 5 draft.

As we sat twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to rain trades or not, we compiled quick breakdowns of contending teams’ 40-man situations, using the Roster Resource pages to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it. The Rays, in adding Fairbanks and rental second baseman Eric Sogard while trading Solak, Arroyo, etc., filled a short-term need at second with a really good player and upgraded a relief spot while thinning out their 40-man in preparation for injured pitchers Anthony Banda and Tyler Glasnow to come off the 60-day IL and rejoin the roster. These sorts of considerations probably impacted how the Cubs valued Thomas Hatch in today’s acquisition of David Phelps from Toronto, as Hatch will need to be Rule 5 protected this fall.

For this exercise, we used contenders with 40% or higher playoff odds, which gives us the Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, Red Sox, and Rays in the AL and the Dodgers, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, and Cardinals in the NL, with the Brewers, Phillies, and A’s as the teams just missing the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

Our Playoff Odds page has a nice little feature that lets you display, for any two dates, the difference between a team’s playoff odds on Date A and its odds on Date B. Around the end of each calendar month, I like to use that feature to check in on which teams most improved their odds over the month that was and which lost ground. It’s a long season, and it’s easy to miss things. Here are the largest changes in playoff odds from June 1 to June 30:

There’s a story there. Let me start it by saying that 17 of 30 big-league teams saw no change at all to their playoff odds in June, or saw a change of less than 2%. Another five saw a change greater than 2%, but less than 10%. Of the eight teams whose playoff odds swung by more than 10% in June, fully half — the four teams at the top of the table — came from the same division: the National League East. To some extent, that kind of clustering is to be expected — when one team rises, another in its division must fall — but the relative quiet of every other division gives us an opportunity to reflect for a moment on what happened in the NL East in June, and what lies ahead in July. Read the rest of this entry »

2018 was the end of an era for the Washington Nationals. After failing to get Bryce Harper to agree to a long-term contract with the organization, his final year in D.C. appeared destined to have something of a valedictory nature, a long farewell to the player who was drafted to be the face of the franchise. The script seemed to be in place for one last hurrah. After all, this was a team that during the Pax Brycetania won the NL East four times in six seasons, with their 555 wins second only to the Dodgers. 2018 would be the year they finally got over the playoff hump and won the World Series, after which the credits would roll, and captions would indicate what had happened to each of our favorite characters.

Oops.

Projected to go 89-73 by ZiPS, the Nats underperformed by seven games, finishing 82-80. Thanks to the Braves misbehaving and butting into contention before their number was called, Washington fell out of the postseason race for good by the All-Star break. There was a silver lining in the emergence of Juan Soto, who somehow needed just a month more seasoning to turn from a South-Atlantic League star into a major league one, effectively becoming better at being Bryce Harper than Bryce Harper. The way forward in 2019 was clear: a full season of Soto and Victor Robles, together with Patrick Corbin, would make up for the loss of Harper, and constitute enough of a gain that it wouldn’t be a major problem that Brian Dozier was a poor replacement for vintage Daniel Murphy. ZiPS even projected the Nats to be better in 2019 than it did in 2018.

Oops.

An 8-18 run from mid-April to mid-May left Washington rubbing elbows with the Marlins in the wastelands at the bottom of the NL East. The team’s gone 20-9 since, but that’s only been enough to get them to the precipice of a .500 season, rather the edge of greatness. At 39-40, they still stand eight games behind the Braves, a team with a lot more prospect currency to trade for short-term improvement at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

For quite some time, it seemed as if the Nationals’ season was going awry.

I could point to a number of games to describe the beginning of their 2019 campaign, but none epitomize it nearly as well as their May 23 matinee versus the Mets. Stephen Strasburg was brilliant for seven innings (three runs, two earned), and after manager Dave Martinez “threw a furious tantrum” in the eighth, the Nationals went on to score three runs to take a 4-3 lead. But in the bottom half, a two-out, three-run home run from Carlos Gomez gave the Mets a 6-4 lead that they wouldn’t relinquish.

This game included all aspects of the beginning of the Nationals’ season. There was a great outing from the starting pitcher. The offense managed to come through at the right time. And, of course, the bullpen blew a late lead. On top of that, the manager let the rumors of his firing get to his emotions, and the team fell to 19-31, a season-high 12 games under .500.

The baseball season is long. Even in spite of the disarray, we put the Nationals’ odds at making the playoffs at 22.2%. That was their season-low. Check out what has happened in the time since. Read the rest of this entry »