Its been a busy month for me, and i’m only partially paying attention to Nats headlines. Earlier this week, I did notice/hear that Cade Cavalli had been pulled from a start with something related to an elbow, and while it didn’t register with me at the time, eventually the news came out.
Tommy John. Full tear. Out 12-18 months.
Gut-punch.
The Nationals’ starting pitching depth has really taken a beating in the last couple of years.
- Strasburg: thirty IP in 3 years and zero faith that he’ll ever return.
- Corbin has forgotten how to pitch.
- Grey had an ERA > 5.00 and a FIP of nearly 6.00 in the majors.
- Rutledge can’t get any one out in Low-A (and is laughably assigned to AA right now)
- Henry had TOS, the same thing that may be ending Strasburg’s career.
- Adon literally couldn’t get anyone out in the majors.
- Carrillo couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn and is now a AA reliever.
- Irvin is back after TJ but is no where near resembling the 2nd round form he exhibited in College.
- Denaburg returned after lenghly absences and is no longer considered even a top 30 prospect
- Cate forgot how to pitch and was outrighted.
- Romero finally crossed the imaginary line keeping him employed with the team with his latest transgression (not that he was considered a prospect anymore…)
- Lara got lit up in Low A while eating pizza and burgers (anyone believe his listed weight of 180?)
- … and now Cafalli is out for a while.
That’s your 2020 1st rounder, 2020 2nd rounder, 2019 1st rounder, 2018 1st rounder, 2018 2nd rounder, 2017 1st rounder, $60M in payroll, and a couple of significant prospects for whom we dumped Scherzer and Turner. In other words, that’s nearly every top draft pick for four years running, a massive chunk of your current payroll, and every arm we got in return for dumping two franchise players two years ago.
What a debacle.
The Nats have almost zero Arms in the upper minors pipeline at this point who you’d look at as an up and coming replacement. Why? Because multiple years of futility drafting arms has badly caught up with this team. Who sounds promising? 2022 2nd rounder Bennett hasn’t done anything to embarrass or hurt himself yet. that’s good. Parker continues to get people out despite having very little “stuff” as the scouting reports claim. Theophile showed some promise last year before getting promoted. Maybe Susana can amount to something, or Aldo Ramirez. But that’s the entire system. anyone in FCL or DSL is 5 years from making an impact.
It could be a dark, or expensive, 5 years for this team. Consider how many top end offensive prospects we have. If those guys come up and start really cranking … they by themselves can power the team to a 500 record. Kinda like what happened to this team between 2010 and 2011. The team went from 59 wins in 2009 to 69 wins in 2010 to a .500 record in 2011. We all know what happened then. So, unless this team can find more arms somewhere, they may be buying them on the open market to support what could be a pretty good hitting team in a few years.
We havn’t talked much yet about the 2023 draft, but I’ll bet you $1 right now we got back to an all-pitcher draft like we used to do. And that’ll start at the top, where there’s a couple of big-time SEC arms likely for the taking in Chase Dollander and Paul Skenes. Dollander was a 1-1 guy last year, but hasn’t been quite as impressive as Skenes: in 4 starts this year he’s 4-0, 48-4 K/BB and has given up just 8 hits in 24 innings. Ok, so those starts were against Western Michigan, Kansas State, Butler, and Samford, so not that impressive, but still against D1 hitters.
For 2023, maybe we’ll find some gold like we’ve done with Meneses. But man we could use some good news on the pitching front.