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And So It Begins…

The 2018 minors is still two days away, but it didn’t take long for an injury to force a recall before the season even started, with Pedro Severino getting a shorter trip from Florida to Georgia to join the big club as the backup catcher.

Yesterday, we learned of more releases – some already known because they were non-roster invites and/or the Nats were dodging the Rule XX-B bonus… and a few more minor-leaguers:
• RHP Jeremy Hellickson, OF Alejandro De Aza (both released then re-signed)
• RHPs Greg Ross, Taylor Hill
• IFs Balbino Fuenmayor, Angelo La Bruna, Reid Brignac, Tyler Beckwith
• OFs Juan Evangelista, Santo Falcon, Ryan Raburn

As mentioned previously, this first week might be a little spotty. Roster releases are expected today and tomorrow but yours truly will be headed to New Orleans (United flight tomorrow night, not the Illinois Central Monday morning rail) for a conference but I’ll do my best to have something for folks to comment on the next three days.

24 Commments

  1. Taylor Hill deserves a proper farewell here after seven seasons in the organization. He was senior draftee out of Vandy with only a $36K bonus but made it all the way to the majors (briefly). Hill had an excellent 2014 season at AAA with a 2.81 ERA and 1.12 WHIP that got him his first cup of coffee. At that time, I thought the Nats might think about trading him and the other Taylor (Jordan) as potential back-end starters for second-tier teams. Instead, they either a) withered on the vine or b) had their vulnerabilities exposed by multiple years at Syracuse, as has subsequently happened with Cole and Voth.

    Anyway, farewell to Taylor Hill, who just turned 29, has a Vandy degree, and will always be a major leaguer.

  2. I’m going to echo everything KW said; Hill appeared in 9 games in ‘The Show’ and can regale his grandchildren someday with tales of his glory.

    Best wishes to him, followed him for 7 years and that counts a lot with me.

  3. I feel the same about Hill. Here’s hoping he gets another shot if he wants to continue. If not, nobody can take away the fact that he is a Major Leaguer.

  4. Meanwhile, Taylor Jordan will play in Indy league this year. This is the guy the Nats insisted on keeping but traded Robbie Ray for Fister.

    What Jordan might have been…

      1. And I agreed with trading Ray instead of Jordan back then. I had very high hopes for Jordan. Just shows what I know.

        Although, IIRC, even Dombrowski said he wanted Jordan but Rizzo refused. Lots of missed that one.

        1. A J Cole is just another Nats “prospect” with a flat fastball and no effective breaking pitch. It is becoming a little disconcerting. Is it due to bad minor league coaching or were these guys just bad? I guess Fedde will be the answer.

          1. Two things
            1) Cole graduated from prospect status last year
            2) Rizzo traded for Cole

            One is obviously my being facetious, but two is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to Rizzo: He is loathe to admit when he is wrong (remember that was the first joke in my April Fool’s post in 2016) so Cole will get more chances than Steve Howe failing a cocaine test.

        2. I’ll admit it — I was another one who thought it was a good thing that they traded Ray instead of Jordan. I had seen Ray get lit up at Potomac like Cole was on Tuesday night and just wasn’t impressed (although Ray was only 20 at the time). You also have to remember that the Tigers traded Ray after a year as well, so it wasn’t just the Nats who didn’t see him as big-time.

          I don’t have particular regret about the Fister trade. The Nats got a heck of a pitcher (who beat Bumgarner in SF in the playoffs) for a guy in Ray who was a lottery ticket. Fister just happened to lose his mojo very quickly. More applicable to some of the guys under discussion here, though, was the Karns trade, which I thought was the absolute model for what they should have done with Jordan, Hill, Cole, and Voth. Karns had a good enough year to establish himself as a marginal MLB starter, and they immediately parlayed that into some return for him. Jordan, Hill, Cole, and Voth profiled pretty similarly to Karns, all with one very good AAA year, but the Nats clung to them until they had no value. They did trade another marginal MLB guy in Pivetta, and they did get an established closer for him, but, um, that one didn’t end so well. But at least they got an established major-leaguer for him.

          The moral of this story is that you HAVE to make decisions on guys and deal them while they have value if you don’t think they’re going to be good enough to be a regular contributor for you. Right now, Cole probably has so little value that he’ll go through waivers unclaimed if/when they DFA him. Sitting on him for as long as they have was/is a huge mistake. So is the blind insistence that he “deserves” a shot as the 5th starter. How does a guy coming off a 5.88 ERA in AAA “deserve” anything?

          1. Well said, KW.

            To pat myself on the back, I was enamored with Ray (though to my discredit I felt the same way about Cole).

            Hopefully this finally forces the Nats to attempt to use Cole as a reliever, where he’s been destined since 2016, and spells the beginning of the Fedde experiment (please, anything to avoid Hellickson).

          2. I was pretty much on the Cole bandwagon through 2015, although even at that time, I was already thinking use him or trade him. He struck me as a back-of-the-rotation guy at best. He went downhill in 2016 and even more so in 2017. At some point in there, they should have moved him to the bullpen, but with so few semi-viable starters in the upper minors to break-glass-in-case-of-emergency, I can sorta see why they kept him out there as a starter. I don’t discount Luke’s thought that it might have been due more to Rizzo’s refusal to admit he was/is wrong about him, though. But keeping a guy around as AAA emergency fodder is one thing; insisting that he deserves a shot in one of the best rotations in baseball is quite another.

        3. It’s more a matter of reminding ourselves that no one is a sure thing. I remember how excited I was for Christian Garcia.

          It’s no different for Bryce Harper. Gotta stay healthy.

          Perhaps we’ll hear from Taylor Jordan again. Nice to see he is working at it still. Hopefully he can draw inspiration from Tim Collins, whom we may see soon in DC.

  5. Very exciting start – both Antuna (starting at short) and Garcia (starting at 3B) to Hagerstown, along with Soto (to hopefully dominate and move up), with Cole freeman making his organizational debut at 2B in low A. So the newcomers must have impressed.

    I have said this before, and it is common sense, but college starting pitchers are already taxed from the season and expectations should be lowered about how they will play after being drafted. I did meet Brigham Hill, who is the opening day pitcher for the Suns this week, and he told me that he was ‘running on fumes” after the 2018 college season, and is now rested and all the more ready for the pro game. Nice guy, another one who is easy to root for.

  6. Anderson Franco to start at 1B, Corredor is back as well and obviously a 1B, Banks stays in Hagerstown in LF, and Armond Upshaw, who starts in CF, is apparently slowly blossoming enough to get the bump up. Tetrault will be in the rotation and Acevedo is back from injury to also be part of the staff.

    Credit to the Nats for slowly retooling their minors with a lot of interesting players in the past two drafts and using the international ranks effectively. The Suns will be a younger team, so good signs abound.

  7. Ha! Steve Howe reference. Well, it will help when there is actually an alternative. With the Nats at 4-1, I am not sour that the team did not sign Alex Cobb or Lance Lynn (or Arietta at that ungodly price).

    As for trades, you trade value to get value. Let’s see how people like Fedde ripen, and how fast, before we conclude that Fedde, at his level of return, should have been parlayed himself.

  9. Where are you seeing the rosters? The official team sites don’t seem to have been updated.

    1. Just checked the rosters on the milb.com website, and at least some of them appear to be updated. For example:

      Hellickson and Milone are on the Cuse (AAA) roster.
      Rafael Bautista, spent the entire 2017 on the Cuse. Nats or GCL roster, but he is now listed on the Harrisburg roster (he was assigned to H’burg on April 2).

      FWIW, Seth Romero is not listed on any roster of a Nats full-season affiliate.

      2. there’s 19 pitchers on the Syracuse website roster.
        so there’s still work to do.

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