Coming into the MLB offseason, you could look at the Washington Nationals and conclude within, oh, three seconds that the last thing they needed to tinker with was their starting rotation.
But now it sounds like general manager Mike Rizzo might do that anyway. And if he does, he could do so in a big way.
First, one word around the campfire has the Nationals linked to free-agent right-hander Max Scherzer, otherwise known as the guy who won the 2013 American League Cy Young. Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports had a conversation with a “prominent agent” about Scherzer’s market, and that conversation led him to put the Nationals at the top of a list of teams that could be interested in the 30-year-old.
Where Rosenthal was only speculating, Chris Cotillo of MLB Daily Dish has heard from sources that the Nationals may indeed be positioning themselves for a run at Scherzer.
…But also that there would have to be at least one corresponding move. If Scherzer comes to Washington, Jordan Zimmermann and/or Doug Fister may have to leave.
That helps explain these tweets from Bob Nightengale of USA Today:
If the Nationals are really a player for Scherzer, this makes sense. As much as they would probably prefer to simply add him to a collection of starters—Zimmermann, Fister, Stephen Strasburg, Tanner Roark and Gio Gonzalez—who posted an MLB-best 3.04 ERA in 2014, that’s a tall task.
It’s going to take a lot of money to sign Scherzer. Nobody knows how much just yet, but Tim Dierkes of MLB Trade Rumors’ projection of $185 million over seven years sounds about right.
That would be an average of over $26 million per year, which would make Scherzer the highest-paid player on the Nationals by about $5 million over Jayson Werth. For a team already projected for close to $150 million in expenditures in 2015, we’re talking about arguably too big of an addition.
And that’s where dealing Zimmermann and/or Fister would come in.
Dealing Zimmermann would clear $16.5 million in payroll room for 2015. Going off Dierkes’ arbitration projections, dealing Fister would clear $11.4 million. As such, the Nationals may not be able to bring Scherzer aboard unless they deal both of them.
Whether Scherzer is worth so much trouble is a question that addresses several scenarios, but it starts with a big one: Just how good is he relative to Zimmermann and Fister?
Let’s keep this simple by looking at what these three guys did in 2014. And while there are dozens of stats we could look at to evaluate who’s better than who, let’s keep the simple motif by looking at the usual suspects plus a couple of ERA estimators in FIP and xFIP and Wins Above Replacement.
Courtesy of FanGraphs, we get:
By ERA, Fister was the best, Zimmermann was second best and Scherzer was the worst. But according to the ERA estimators, Scherzer and Zimmermann were essentially the same pitcher, and Fister drastically overachieved.
There is something to that assessment of Fister. It’s not too alarming that his strikeout rate suffered a drop-off in 2014, but you don’t want to see ground-ball pitchers suddenly stop getting ground balls at their usual rates. That’s something that could come back to bite him in 2015.
Based on that, the absolute best thing the Nationals can do is sign Scherzer and trade Fister. They’d basically be swapping out a faux ace for a real ace and could look forward to an otherworldly Scherzer-Zimmermann-Strasburg trio with which to chase a championship in 2015.
As for signing Scherzer and trading Zimmermann, that’s where things get really interesting.
That the two were essentially equals in the eyes of the advanced metrics in 2014 isn’t misleading. It’s not worth nothing that Scherzer did his thing with more strikeouts and in the American League, but Zimmermann did his own thing to transform into a legit ace.
Zimmermann’s strikeouts experiencing a spike was overdue and not an accident. Brooks Baseball can show how he took to pitching up in the zone with his fastball more often, and how that bought him the whiffs he’d long deserved with his mid-90s velocity.
Take that adjustment and combine it with Zimmermann’s superb command, and he’s just as capable of overwhelming hitters using his stuff and pitching smarts as Scherzer does with his almost unfair collection of nasty stuff.
And that essentially means signing Scherzer and trading Zimmermann would result in the Nationals having basically the same pitcher for an extra $10 million or so per year. On the surface, that doesn’t seem overly logical.
But you have to factor in what the Nationals would be getting back if they were to trade Zimmermann. And in the opinion of Drew Fairservice of FanGraphs, he “surely carries more trade value than any other walk-year National, given his dominant 2014 season.”
Indeed. And knowing that the Atlanta Braves just turned one year of Jason Heyward into four years of Shelby Miller, it’s not hard to imagine the Nationals getting a similar controllable young talent for Zimmermann. Perhaps the second baseman they need to round out their infield, for example.
As for the long-term aspect of signing Scherzer and trading Zimmermann, that would obviously be punting on the idea of signing Zimmermann to an extension. That’s actually not the worst idea in light of what he told James Wagner of The Washington Post.
“If the deal is right, I’ll definitely sign a multiyear deal,” Zimmermann said. “I never once said I didn’t want to stay in D.C. But at the end of the day, the deal has to be right and the deal has to be fair and that’s all I’m asking for. Just pay me what I’m worth and I’ll be happy to stay. If we can’t come to common ground, I guess free agency is the next step.”
In other words: The Nationals need to give him market value. Knowing that Zimmermann is only 28 with a strong track record and one year to go until free agency, “market value” for him may mean something more like Cole Hamels’ $144 million extension than Homer Bailey’s $105 million extension.
As such, a choice between Scherzer or Zimmermann likely boils down to spending a whole lot of money on Scherzer and taking advantage of Zimmermann’s considerable trade value or spending a whole lot of money on Zimmermann and taking advantage of Fister’s lesser trade value.
It’s a tough call, but yours truly thinks the needle tips slightly in favor of the sign-Scherzer, trade-Zimmermann idea.
That leaves just one last scenario: signing Scherzer and then trading Zimmermann and Fister. And compared to the other two, this idea isn’t as easy to get behind.
What the Nationals would be doing is turning a very deep and very good rotation into a not as deep and not as good rotation. By far the club’s biggest strength from 2014 would be gone, and conventional wisdom suggests they’d sorely miss their loaded rotation in the postseason.
However, we just saw conventional wisdom get turned on its head. The Nationals, Los Angeles Dodgers and Detroit Tigers all got bounced from October despite having elite starting pitching. The overarching message sent by their defeats was that a deep rotation is no longer a guarantee of success in October.
The Kansas City Royals stamped that home when they made it to Game 7 of the World Series without great starting pitching, riding a top-level bullpen and inspired overall team play instead. The San Francisco Giants, meanwhile, showed that merely having one excellent starting pitcher can be enough to win it all.
By signing Scherzer and dealing Zimmermann and Fister, the Nationals could conceivably follow either blueprint. The Zimmermann and Fister deals would presumably make them a deeper team around their rotation, and said rotation would still have at least two titans in Scherzer and Strasburg who could lead the way both in the regular season and in October.
So sign Scherzer and trade Fister? You can win.
Sign Scherzer and trade Zimmermann? You can win.
Sign Scherzer and trade Fister and Zimmermann? That’s arguably the best way the Nationals can win.
If signing Scherzer and dealing Zimmermann and/or Fister is truly Rizzo’s master plan, he has a lot of phone calls to make. But knowing what those calls could do for the Nationals, they’re worth making.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked. Salary and payroll information courtesy of Cot’s Baseball Contracts unless otherwise noted/linked.
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