Selling Is the Right Move for the Nationals

This post has been updated to reflect the Washington Post’s latest report about Harper’s availability.

Last week, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that the Nationals, who at the time were 50-51, “might need to win three of its next four games in Miami to stave off growing internal pressure to sell.” While the team trounced the Marlins in the series’ first two games, they lost the final two, capped by a two-hit shutout by Jose Urena and three relievers on Sunday. Now 52-53, they’re 5.5 games back in the NL East and six back in the Wild Card race. On Monday night, MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reported that they’ve made it known that pending free agent Bryce Harper is available:

[Update] On Tuesday morning, via the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo proclaimed the team’s intention to keep Harper:

Mike Rizzo just reached out with this message:

"Bryce is not going anywhere. I believe in this team."

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) July 31, 2018

Harper, of course, is not having his best season. Though he’s first in the league in walks (84) and second in homers (25), he has struggled like never before when it comes to hitting against infield shifts; both his .240 BABIP and 42 wRC+ in such situations are career lows. In all, he’s hit .220/.369/.473 for a 121 wRC+, down from a 139 career mark, and his 1.6 WAR in 103 games is less than half of last year’s 4.9 in 111 games.

Even before Janes’ report, FanCred’s Jon Heyman suggested that Rizzo may not have been earnest about moving the 25-year-old slugger:

That jibes with Rosenthal’s report, which suggested that money is at the root of the Nationals’ concerns, but that not all of the team’s decision-makers were onboard (a situation that may have changed in the ensuing days):

“According to sources, ownership is pushing Rizzo to sell, particularly with the Nationals projecting to be over the $197 million luxury-tax threshold. That ownership preference, first mentioned by MLB Network Radio’s Jim Duquette, is shared by some in the front office who believe it might be time to retool. Rizzo, however, is not inclined to concede, and other sources suggest ownership is simply ‘riding it out’ and waiting for Washington to play better.”

Per Cot’s Contracts, the Nationals’ payroll for luxury tax purposes is $208,548,348. As second-time offenders, they would pay a 30% penalty on the amount over the threshold, which comes to all of $3.46 million, about what they’re paying Howie Kendrick this year — peanuts, by major-league standards. For the sake of comparison, the Dodgers paid $36.2 million in taxes and penalties last year, the Nationals just $1.45 million.

Last week, the Nationals were reported to have begun preparing for the possibility of selling — and realistically, they probably should sell. While injuries to key players such as Sean Doolittle, Adam Eaton, Kendrick, Daniel Murphy, Anthony Rendon, Stephen Strasburg, Matt Wieters, and Ryan Zimmerman help to explain the failure to live up to the lofty expectations that come with four NL East titles in six years, all of the aforementioned except Doolittle (whose toe and foot problems only landed him on the disabled list on July 10), Strasburg (who returned to the disabled list after one start), and Kendrick (who suffered a season-ending Achilles rupture on May 19) are now back. Yet the team has gotten little traction. After a dismal 9-16 June, they’re 10-14 in July and 4-5 since the All-Star break. Neither Harper nor Trea Turner have been as productive as expected, and the surprise contributions of players such as 19-year-old rookie sensation Juan Soto and first base fill-ins Matt Adams and Mark Reynolds haven’t papered over their other problems.

The killer hasn’t been the lineup — though the Nationals’ 94 wRC+ is just seventh in the league — but the rotation. During the 19-30 swoon that began in June, every starter save for Max Scherzer has been torched for an ERA of 5.40 or higher:

After missing six weeks with shoulder inflammation, Strasburg lasted just 4.2 innings in his July 20 return before being sidelined again by a pinched nerve in his neck. Despite their rotation woes, the Nationals were on the sidelines as J.A. Happ, Cole Hamels, Nathan Eovaldi, and Lance Lynn changed teams in the past week.

On Monday, the New York Post’s Joel Sherman tweeted that the Nationals “don’t want to blow it up, not with inexperienced #Braves #Phillies ahead of them in the NL East.” Nobody is suggesting a full teardown is in order, but a dose of realism is warranted.

Entering Monday, our playoff odds showed the Nationals with a 33.7% chance of winning the NL East and an 8.8% chance at the Wild Card, largely because of their players’ strong projections and the relatively weak ones for the Phillies and Braves, both of whom are seen as likely to play sub-.500 ball for the remainder of the season:

A 42.5% chance at the playoffs seems overly optimistic, to say the least. But by how much? Via the Baseball-Reference Team Winning and Losing Streaks Analyzer, I pulled the results for every team though the first 105 games of the season (to match the Nationals’ total) from 1996 onward to get a sense of how often teams in the Nationals’ predicament have made the playoffs. First, here’s a breakdown since 2012, the period with two Wild Card spots in each league:

Just five out of the 42 teams rebounded to make the playoffs, a success rate of 11.9%, roughly a quarter that of our odds estimate. Here are the five teams:

Only one of the five, the 2015 Blue Jays (who actually met up with the similarly resilient Rangers from the same year in one of the most memorable playoff series of recent times), topped 89 wins. That team had actually outscored opponents by 103 runs through 105 games — yes, nearly a run per game – by far the most of the 42 teams in this group. They were lagging about 9.3 wins behind their .593 Pythagorean winning percentage through their first 105 games; they went 40-17 (.702) the rest of the way. Of the other four teams, only the Mets (+8) had outscored opponents; last year’s Twins had been outscored by 72 runs.

As for the larger set, dating back to 1996, I went through the standings each year to determine who would have won the second Wild Card spot in each league. In several cases, that meant awarding one-half or one-third of a spot due to a two-way or three-way tie (since I had no way of breaking it, lacking the power to reconvene the teams for a playoff game), but oddly enough, none of those fractional spots went to teams in the 50- to 54-win range. So here is the breakdown:

Of the 162 team in the 50- to 54-win range, only 4.3% wound up winning their respective divisions and only 8.0% either claimed a Wild Card spot or would have, had a second spot been available in each league. That’s a 12.3% chance at making the playoffs, not much different than in the actual two-Wild-Card era. Only seven of the 162 teams reached 90 wins; the 12 Wild Card teams averaged 89 wins.

Maybe the Nationals’ +38 run differential (460 scored, 422 allowed) suggests they’re too good to be in this rut. But even if we hone in on the teams in the 50- to 54-win range with run differentials that were within 10 of the Nationals (+28 to +48), just one — the 2004 Astros, who were 53-52 with a +45 differential and finished 90-73 — won a Wild Card spot. Two other teams, the 2000 and 2005 Indians (both 54-51, with differentials of +46 and +36, respectively) would have claimed the league’s second Wild Card spot.

That’s three out of 18, or 16.7%: not great, Bob, and not anywhere close to the 42.5% from our odds page. They do align quite well with the version of the odds based not on projections but on season-to-date stats which “uses current season stats, weighted more heavily towards the most recent games, to calculate the winning percentage of each remaining game in the major league season.” Thus the underperformances that have come, with or without injury, may be what the Nationals are in for.

Harper’s subpar play relative to his own high standards is a big part of the hole in which the team finds itself; he’s about three wins shy of last year in a similar number of games. Add three wins to the Nationals’ total and their outlook improves just a bit; as Dan Szymborski calculated via his ZiPS projections last week, the difference between this year’s Harper and a Harper on a six-win pace adds up to a 10-point gain in their chances of winning the NL East (from 5.1% to 15.2%) and nearly that much again in boosting their Wild Card odds (from 6.7% to 15.5%).

Harper will command a hefty price in return, though perhaps not quite that which Manny Machado fetched, but then the DOA Orioles had no plausible reason to keep their young star. The Nationals aren’t dead yet, and so it would make sense to obtain, say, a club-controlled starter who could help offset the aforementioned showing of Disasterpiece Theater in the rotation. Regardless of what Rizzo seeks, Harper won’t lack for suitors, though both the Dodgers (who reportedly checked in) and the Yankees (who just lost Aaron Judge for a few weeks due to a wrist fracture), two of the most likely ones, are trying to stay below the $197 million competitive tax threshold. The Nationals would like a shot at re-signing Harper, and trading him would probably deal a blow to their chances, particularly if he goes to a clubhouse that’s less dysfunctional than the Nationals’ current one reportedly is. The dismissal of manager Dusty Baker on the heels of 95- and 97-win seasons followed by Division Series exits in favor of Dave Martinez, their fourth skipper of the past six years, simply hasn’t paid off, and it’s not hard to see why the revolving door would turn off any potential free agent.

Beyond Harper, the team has no shortage of other pending free agents: Adams, Gonzalez, Murphy, Reynolds, Wieters, and relievers Joaquin Benoit, Kelvin Herrera, Shawn Kelley, and Ryan Madson. The two part-time first basemen are having strong seasons, but nobody from that group is a game-changer, and Murphy (making $17.5 million this year), Gonzalez ($12 million), and Wieters ($10.5 million) are relatively pricey. Nobody there is going to bring back a blue-chip prospect in trade, particularly if the Nationals’ primary goal is saving money, not eating it to improve the return package.

Weeks ago, trading Harper would have been unthinkable. Even now, it’s a bit hard to believe. But after so many other dominoes have fallen in the trade market, the lingering prospect of his sudden availability and the Nationals’ potential reversals of course should spice up the countdown to 4 pm ET on Tuesday.