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1. Commissioner Bud Black Beltre Hillman Posted: January 08, 2013 at 02:21 PM (#4342072)You have Harper/LaRoche/Span... all left-handed batters where Harper could fill in. If you face two lefties a week and he pinch hits, that's 400 ABs for the year, not even counting him filling in for someone getting injured. There's a very good role for him that maximizes his abilities, minimizes flaws in some of those other players, and improves upon what they'd otherwise do: plug in Tyler Moore. (ugh)
If they end up trading him for a LOOGY, when they very well could've had JP Howell for $4 million cash, I'll be really annoyed.
Can't say how happy I am to see LaRoche back with the Nationals for next year. It wasn't even his bat that was so valuable...it was his GLOVE. The thought of having to watch Morse (likable oaf though he is) butcher plays at 1B was not a pleasing prospect. LaRoche, on the other hand, made Desmond and Zimmerman (who are both superlative defenders in terms of their ability to get to tough grounders, but occasionally make wonky, errant throws) look much better.
Incidentally, I wouldn't mind seeing Morse go for a reliever at all -- it just depends on the reliever. Morse should be able to bring back a bullpen arm significantly better than J.P. Howell.
I'm going to miss him a lot when he's gone. No more singing "Take On Me" by a-ha during his late-inning at-bats. No more Beast Mode. Thanks for all the fish, Mikey.
What I have read is that the $2 million is the buyout, not the amount of the option.
Fact is, it's musical chairs and the Nationals are just so deep right now that they have more deserving players than available seats.
2 starts a week is about 50 starts - 200 PA. Add in 50-75 pinch hitting appearances, and you are still nowhere close to 400 AB. Only you'd get to 400 PA is if one of the other guys was hurt and Morse took over for a while.
The Nationals have literally no more needs on the MLB team to fill at this point (except, as mentioned above, a lefty reliever), so the goal here is to try and do some restocking of the shelves on the farm. The Gio trade with Oakland emptied the cupboard.
The Orioles and Mariners both seem like plausible destinations, and the Rays and Yanks are also connected to trade talks right now. Morse is a fit with all of them (and it's no accident they're all AL teams).
It's a bit of rosterbation, I know, but I think Morse to the O's for Brian Matusz plus prospects makes a fair bit of sense.
Think the Nationals would really deal with the Orioles? That would be like dealing with the Phillies.
I sort of agree with Chris here. The Nationals really don't have to trade Morse. There is a role he can fill on this team, even if it's not the high-profile role he might want - and their areas of need (bullpen depth, maybe a backup 2B/3B type better than Lombardozzi, assuming there's one out there) aren't the kind of thing that you need to trade someone like Morse to acquire. Washington's best approach at this point might just be to stand pat and wait to see what happens come March.
-- MWE
Morse: 16/97
Chris Davis: 37/169
Adam Jones: 34/126
He'd fit right in.
It would cost talent to acquire him. He would only be on the team 1 year, versus 3 years for Napoli.
It still might make sense to get Morse, but those are the reaons against it.
A search on 2012 NL, guys with 350 to 450 PA, played at least 30% of games at 1B, LF, or RF turns up 17 names. One of those is Mike Morse. A few of these don't fit the role -- e.g. they had starting roles but sucked -- but it still looks like 12-14 or so, nearly one per team.
Remember, there really aren't very many true full-time players. In the 2012 NL, at least 30% of games at 1B/LF/RF, there were only 26 qualifying players, only 16 of them with 600+ PA. Across those three positions and the handful of DH games, the Nats have to fill up about 2100 PA. The chances that their three starters will amass substantially more than 1700 are fairly small, very unlikely they'd amass more than 1800. As noted, add in that Harper can cover CF and Morse is also eligible for the backup CF PAs. Of course that includes another unlikely assumption that Morse gets every one of those extra PAs, is always healthy himself, etc.
Anyway, you couldn't guarantee him more than maybe about 60 starts but chances are he'd get more than that. (And isn't it more like 4.5 PA per game average?)
Atlanta won the 1B/LF/RF health sweepstakes last year with Prado at 690, Heyward at 651 and Freeman at 620. Uggla also had over 600. Nobody on Atlanta's bench had more than 205 PA and that was Francisco who was always intended to give Chipper lots of time off. Milwaukee also did well with Braun, Hart and Aoki. 7 NL teams (inc the Astros) had no player reach 600 PA at 1B/LF/RF. The Nats had LaRoche and Harper just missed.
The Yanks could trade Robertson and re-sign Soriano, but Robertson's the heir apparent to Mariano's throne. If Mariano were clearly healthy, I could see it, but not now.
I don't know what the Nats options were, but signing an old player who just had his first year with a bWAR over 2.0 doesn't strike as the finest move one might make.
LaRoche, bWAR, career, 2004-2012:
1.0, -1.0, 1.4, 1.2, 1.1, 2.0, 0.9, -0.3, 4.0
Who doesn't Seattle have at DH?
It's not a crazy amount of money, and it's not a long deal. Even if he completely craters, it's not like this deal ends up crippling the team. It's not a great signing, but it's not one worth getting all that worked up about either.
0.7, 2.2, -0.1
Morse posted 6.2 oWAR during that span, but coughed up more than half of that on defense (-3.4 dWAR). He needs to get to the AL as quickly as possible.
My theory on free agents is that it usually takes one year too many and 20% too much AAV to land a guy. That would put an appropriate deal for LaRoche at 1 year/$9.6M, which sounds about right to me. The Nats have Tyler Moore to help if LaRoche craters early, so they'll manage. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Wilson Ramos taking grounders occasionally at 1B this spring, since Davey Johnson seems enamored with Kurt Suzuki behind the plate.
I'm relatively surprised that the Cubs haven't yet signed him as major league depth, given that Ian Stewart would appear to be the fallback plan if Vitters posts another 123/193/203 line...
Yeah, it's OK. Ignore his injured 2011 -- and he was so horrible when he did play that I'm pretty comfy ignoring the whole thing given he's shown he's healthy -- then he's a league-average 1B and those cost about $12. It's a short contract and if a better option comes along, he'll be movable or if he collapses then you're not out much money. I'll grant that it's not obvious LaRoche at 2/$24 is better than one year of Morse then figure out something for 2014 but it's a low-risk move. And Morse doesn't have a sterling track record either and brings the same negatives as LaRoche. Uninspiring signing, probably unimportant signing but a perfectly meh signing.
This is what I thought of right away. I'd be thrilled with this return, and it would be a good fit for Tampa as well.
Laroche was huge for the Nats last year- the most consistent offensive player, if not the best, and a great glove as well. Happy to have him back, particularly on this time frame where it is easy to shift Zim to 1B in two years.
I'm sure I'm not the only one reminded of Nick Johnson. But the similarities are highly superficial. They both are sort of goofy-looking, that's one.
I always envisioned a fat David Morse.
He always ends with a bang:
1st half: 768 OPS
2nd half: 886 OPS
in 4700 total PA. For guys with a good number of PA, I'd guess that's one of the larger gaps you'd find. He had an uncharacteristically bad August in 2012.
His primary defensive skill was/is his ability to pick just about anything thrown his way by the rest of the infield, and this made him a uniquely valuable guy for the Nationals because of Ian Desmond and Ryan Zimmerman: two guys with plus gloves but a proclivity for the occasional Knoblauch-ian throw. LaRoche saved countless plays from being errors with his ability to dig pretty much anything out of the dirt and extend his body Gumby-like distances off the bag to haul in off-target throws. None of the Nats' other 1B options were remotely as good at that. In that sense LaRoche wasn't just good on his own terms, he was a keystone that turned the Nationals' infield defense (LaRoche, Espinosa, Desmond, Zimmerman) into one of the most impenetrable in the National League.
I wouldn't trade McGee for Morse. McGee is a really awesome reliever, and just because he's left-handed and now being used in the pen he shouldn't be put in the same category as Sean Burnett or Jerry Blevins. In fact I don't see how he's less valuable than David Robertson. He's arguably a better pitcher with 5 years of team control vs Robertson's 2. For all I know McGee can be converted back to starter. Looking at it in WAR terms, McGee had 1.8 rWAR in 2012, and Morse has 1.8 rWAR per 600 PA in his career. If the Nats managed this, it would be highway robbery.
The Nationals have literally no more needs on the MLB team to fill at this point (except, as mentioned above, a lefty reliever), so the goal here is to try and do some restocking of the shelves on the farm.
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The Nats are looking like an OOTP team where even the reserves are 4 or 5-star players.
Both of these points are even more amazing when you consider what the Nats were like as recently as 2010.
I would even be happy to see the Nats throw in a lottery-pick prospect or two in a Morse-for-McGee trade. I'm a big fan of his, and I love the five years of cost-control as well.
But so many of the other core players just managed to 'put it together' miraculously, often after years of scuffling. Ian Desmond was, as recently as 2011, little more than an aging busted prospect seen as having little chance of holding onto a career until, suddenly, he was the best shortstop in the Major Leagues. Ross Detwiler was a similarly disappointing draft pick, a middle-inning reliever at best, until he locked down a rotation slot and proved he could bring the goods under major competitive pressure. Adam LaRoche was universally thought to be a 'marking time' fill-in at 1B, and his putrid injury-ridden first season didn't disabuse anyone of that. I'm sure Mike Rizzo would claim he saw the potential in all of these guys, and no doubt that's technically true, but the way they've suddenly matured all at once has been wonderfully serendipitous.
As a man of sub-modest athletic skill in general but the ability to pick just about anything thrown my way ... might I suggest that the difference here probably has less to do with LaRoche's picking ability (this is not hard, most 1B are quite good at it) and more to do with the Nats apparently crappy throwing ability giving him opportunities. Late career shifts aside, you don't get to stay at 1B if you can't pick throws.
Now, I've not seen LaRoche enough to judge him personally and not at all in the last few years. I do note the Nats 2B/3B/SS made 59 errors in 2011 (LaRoche being hurt most of the year) and only 52 in 2012 ... and I have no idea how many were throwing as b-r isn't nice enough to tell me that I can find. They made a whopping 74 in 2010, almost half of them Desmond. 7 errors saved would be a good number, probably adding up to 5 runs a year.
Bear in mind that dWAR now contains the positional adjustment, which is making up the majority of that -3.4 number. He rates at about half a win per year below average relative to position. While he would benefit from a shift to DH, it is likely to be marginal, e.g. David Ortiz has -3.7 dWAR over the past 3 seasons. If you adjust those numbers for playing time, Morse is accumulating 1.47 dWAR per 150 games, and Ortiz 1.45. And as we have seen, not everybody takes to the DH well, so there is some risk there also.
See above. He is rated 8 runs above average for his position last season.
Hey, you're forgetting about Smiley Gonzalez! Can't a brutha get a little love???
Morse is a heckuvan actor. Lead villain in several movies that were good, not great. Had his own tv series that was good, but not quite good enough. A zillion character roles. HOVG. Absolutely convincing in anything he did, and used his height to real advantage.
Actually, bbref has that info under advanced fielding:
For 2b-3b-ss 2010 74 errors, 6 catch 36 field 32 throwing
2011 59 errors 4 catch 31 field 24 throwing
So maybe LaRoche did save a bunch of errors
By the way "catching" errors involve catching throws, not batted balls.
Heh, I thought you were talking about Michael Morse and was like how the #### does he have 20 year old kids?
@63 - thanks, but you need to add 2012 to see LaRoche's impact. In 2011 the Nationals had a variety of players at 1b (mostly Morse, LaRoche and Marrero)
numbers are catch, field, throw for 2b,3b,ss
2010 6/36/32
2011 4/31/24
2012 0/25/27 (12 throws by Zimmerman, who had some shoulder issues)
http://mlb.sbnation.com/2013/1/9/3854818/nationals-sign-adam-laroche-contract-mlb
If so, why is the option even part of the contract? Is it for luxury tax or revenue sharing purposes? Because then every player has a de facto mutual option at the end of their contract; i.e. if both parties agree, they can sign a contract.
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