Peacock Still Tearing Up Double-A

One of the things an organization needs to take a step forward in the overall talent rankings is for fringe guys to turn into prospects and for deep prospects to emerge as top prospects. It's not enough to just have the first round picks work out--you need to find breakthroughs elsewhere.

This is especially true for a team like the Nationals, who haven't won in years and even after drafting first overall two years in a row are still in the bottom half of baseball in most of the organizational talent rankings

Thing is, it's hard to find top talent even with those first round picks. The out-of-the-blue type breakthroughs just don't happen very often, and often it comes down to luck.

The Nationals had one big breakthrough a couple years ago with Derek Norris, who was drafted in the 4th round back in 2007 but emerged as a top 50 prospect with big seasons in 2008-2009. They may have another such pleasant surprise in Brad Peacock.

As a converted shortstop drafted out of high school in 2006, Peacock has been a bit of a project. But his velocity has steadily improved as well as his secondary offerings. Last year he took a big step forward and earned a mid-season promotion to AA.

This year he's really putting it together. Tonight, Peacock went 7 innings against the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, allowing 1 run on 2 hits to go with 7 Ks and 3 BBs. He lowered his ERA to 2.03, and for the season he now has 82 strikeouts and 13 walks in 62 innings.

Going into this season, there were concerns about his ability to retire lefties and talk of moving him to the bullpen, where he pitched in the Arizona Fall League. But so far this year lefties were doing even worse than righties, hitting just .133 against Peacock.

Soon, Peacock should earn another promotion, maybe even to DC at some point this season. He's passed just about everyone not named Strasburg or Zimmermann as the top pitching talent in the organization. And looking down the road, it's not hard to see him as a #2 starter by 2014.

I might be getting a little ahead of myself, but the Nationals desperately need some big wins in the player development side, and the emergence of Peacock is one of the very best things that could have happened for the Nationals so far this season.

Maybe They'll Finally Protect Catchers

After Buster Posey became the latest victim of a collision at home plate, we're suddenly hearing an outcry that the rules need to change to protect catchers. Buster Posey's agent called for the rule change today, and Buster Olney (showing his infamous Buster favoritism) led the way with a post on ESPN.com.

Nationals fans will remember Jesus Flores being taken out by Chase Utley, who launched himself into Flores's knee in a move more appropriate for a pro wrestler than a baseball player. There wasn't much outcry then.

Carlos Santana suffered a season-ending injury last year on a similar play--that's arguably the two best catchers in baseball going down in consecutive seasons in completely preventable injuries.

It's irritating to me that a star athlete has to get hurt to put this issue on the radar, but if this finally prompts a revision of the rules (or more accurately enforcement of the runner interference rules already on the books), that will be a good thing.

There was a time, early in the last century, when baseball was truly a contact sport. Pitchers threw at hitters. Baserunners would sucker-punch shortstops rounding second base. What we call "breaking up a double play" today would have been considered pansy stuff back then.

Today's game has changed, but one artifact of the old days remains. It's still perfectly acceptable for a catcher to block home plate and for a baserunner to plow into him head first.

First basemen can't block the bag on a close play, and runners can't try to block the first baseman from catching a throw. But for some reason when it's a close play at home, baseball turns into ultimate fighting.

The rule should have been changed a long time ago, and hopefully now it finally will.

Fire Lee Kuntz

Once is a mistake. Twice is red flag. Three times is a serious problem. I don't know what to call this, because I lost track long ago of how many times a Nationals player has suffered cascading, preventable injuries while playing through pain.

We all know the pattern so well that the joke tells itself. When team says a player is day-to-day, it's just a matter of time before they hit the DL. When they go to the 15-day DL, it's as predictable as the sun rising in the east that sooner or later we'll learn the recovery is taking longer than expected.

The latest is incident is Adam LaRoche, who was told that he could play the whole season with his sore shoulder, originally diagnosed as a slight labrum tear. Then he personally insisted on a second opinion only to learn that the torn labrum was much worse and that his rotator cuff was torn to boot.

What role did LaRoche playing through pain cause in the injury? When did the rotator cuff tear? Is it possible that he could have avoided surgery and shortened his DL time with rest and therapy if the injury had been diagnosed earlier? (We're told he might still avoid surgery, but who believes that?)

Who knows. But at this point it shouldn't matter. The point is that the docs got it wrong. Again.

Ryan Zimmerman. Chad Cordero. Jordan Zimmermann. Craig Stammen. Garrett Mock. Jason Marquis. Ross Detwiler. Jesus Flores. Now Adam LaRoche.

No trainer can prevent all injuries. But when players lose consistently lose extra time to injury because of late or wrong diagnoses, that's not ok. Someone should be held accountable, and Lee Kuntz is the most obvious fall guy.

Nationals and the Year of the Pitcher Redux

It's well documented that the Nationals can thank their pitching for keeping them within spitting distance of .500 for much of the first third of the season. And indeed, they've come a very long way since last season.

In 2010, the Nationals were last 12th in the NL in overall runs allowed per game at 4.58 (league average was 4.35). The starters were 14th in the league with an ERA of 4.61, while the relievers were 4th at 3.35--even though they pitched more innings than any bullpen in the league.

This season, the Nationals' runs allowed per game are down to 4.07 (before tonight's game against Milwaukee). The bullpen has improved on their excellent 2010 performance, lowering their collective ERA to 2.97. But the really big improvement has been with the starting pitchers--they've cut their ERA by more than half a run to 4.05 while pitching 6.07 innings per game, a huge and very much needed improvement from the awful 5.49 innings per start last season.

But the reality is that a lot of that improvement is a function of the dramatic drop in scoring league-wide--NL runs per game have fallen from 4.35 to 4.13--the lowest since 1992.

That's not to take anything away from the team's accomplishment rebuilding the pitching staff. Remember what a disaster the bullpen was when Mike Rizzo took over. And he's made some savvy moves to upgrade the rotation--in particular flipping 5 o'clock slugger Mike Burgess for Tom Gorzelanny and signing Jason Marquis to a reasonable two-year deal that is finally paying dividends.

Still, allowing 4.07 runs per game just isn't what it used to be. In 2009, that would have been good for 5th best in all of baseball, just .01 behind the San Francisco Giants staff led by Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum. As good as the starters have been, they don't have anyone in the top 50 qualified starting pitchers for xFIP--Jordan Zimmermann is the best at #57.

That's a big part of why, for all their seeming progress, the Nationals after tonight's loss to the Brewers are 21-26, a .447 winning percentage that puts them on pace for just 72 wins, and for that matter why things are very unlikely to get better any time soon.

Welcome Cole Kimball

The Nationals' #7 BA prospect Cole Kimball made his MLB debut a minute ago, and he looked every bit the part. Jim Riggleman wasn't afraid to use Kimball in a one-run game, and you could see why.

Kimball sits at 93 and touches 95 with his fastball. He has a curveball and a real knockout of a splitter. He struck out 31% of batters faced in AA last year, and 24.5% in 13.2 innings at AAA this year.

Bob Carpenter credited the Lerners' spending for Kimball, but he must have been thinking of someone else. Kimball was drafted in the 12th round back in 2006--one of Dana Brown's patented New Jersey/New York pitching finds (see: Lannan, John; Bergmann, Jason), and the Lerners had nothing to do with it.

There's only so much a relief pitcher can do to help your team, but if the Nationals can count on two cost-controlled plus-relievers in Drew Storen and Cole Kimball for the next 5-6 years, that would go a long way to stabilizing their bullpen for the long-haul.

And with Brad Peacock absolutely tearing up opponents in Harrisburg (8:1 strikeout to walk ratio isn't too shabby), we could see yet another pitcher from that 2006 draft debut pretty soon as well.

Most Nationals fans wrote off the 2006 draft a long time ago as a total wash, with Chris Marrero and Colton Willems fizzling and second-round pick Sean Black (also from NJ, by the way) going unsigned after the draft. If they get a solid reliever and a back-end starter out of it, that would at least save some face.

Gregor Blanco, Rick Ankiel, or a Red-Hot Poker?

First question: When did the Nationals become the landing pad for washed out Kansas City Royals? Isn't that what Pittsburgh is for?

As replacement-level free talent goes, you could do worse than Gregor Blanco. The advanced metrics say he's below average in the field but can handle LF and CF without hurting you too badly. I only saw him play left when he was with Atlanta, but I don't remember anything to contradict those numbers. At the plate, he takes a lot of walks but has no power at all. If he's plan B for the failed Mike Morse experiment, you can think of him as a poor-man's Ryan Langerhans. (Zing! I really burned Rizzo there didn't I!)

It's a tough question now--at this point what should the Nationals do in the outfield? After deciding to trade Josh Willingham for whatever they could get (a move that I supported), failing to sign any kind of starting-caliber stop-gap free agent (Ankiel doesn't count), and dumping Nyjer Morgan (a move that I guess had to happen), the Nationals were left with the motley group of Morse, Ankiel, Laynce Nix, Jerry Hairston, and Roger Bernadina to cover two-thirds of the outfield. None of those guys have been any better than you'd expect.

One decision seems pretty easy: give Bernadina regular playing time. He's at least kind of young-ish, and he was better last year than Ankiel and Morse have been.

After that? Going into the season I'd kind of hoped that Corey Brown might work his way into the picture, but he's whiffed 37 times in 87 ABs for Syracuse. There isn't anyone else in the system anywhere near ready or good.

I suppose it'll be Ankiel as soon as he's healthy, since he's the guy making $1.5 million. But why not Blanco? The Nationals have a huge OBP problem. Today they ran out a line-up that had five guys with OBPs under .300. That's more than half the line-up my friends. And the rest of the lineup included Adam LaRoche and Jerry Hairston at .310 and Danny Espinosa at .313. The other guy was Bernadina, who'd only had 8 plate appearances at the start of the day and went 0-4. He'll catch up to the rest by the end of the Atlanta series.

Bottom line, this is another one of those situations where the problem isn't really the moves the team is making now to fill their holes. It's that the player development system hasn't produced a single starting-caliber option in the outfield since Ryan Church. Now they're left scrambling for other team's cast-offs to fill two key spots, and the results are unlikely to be anything but ugly.

Right Track/Wrong Track Results... And a New Poll!

In April, my first month running the poll in about 8 months, 68% of Nationals fans say the team is on the right track. That's not awful, but it's down from the 80+% levels of optimism that the team maintained for the entire period after Stephen Strasburg signed. Here are the results over time (the section in red is the period no polling was done):



A new poll is live on the right hand side of the page. Lemme know how you're feeling this month!

Steve McCatty's Package

Steve McCatty on Henry Rodriguez:

“I’m not discouraged by it,” pitching coach Steve McCatty said. “It’s part of the package you get with a guy who can throw 100 miles per hour.”

Wrong. It's part of the package when you have a guy with lousy command. Ask Michael Pineda, Stephen Strasburg, Aroldis Chapman, or Justin Verlander whether throwing 100 mph means you can't have any clue where the ball is going.

Moreover, if 100 mph means Rodriguez loses all command, then he needs to learn to dial back. Throwing 92 with command is far better than 100 without.

I sure hope this isn't the advice McCatty is giving Rodriguez as a coach. And I hope Rodriguez doesn't read the paper.

Brad Peacock Makes the Hot Sheet

Baseball America's Hot Sheet--their weekly report on the hottest prospects in the minor leagues--includes Harrisburg's Brad Peacock. Here's what they said:

Team: Double-A Harrisburg (Eastern)
Age: 23
Why He's Here: 1-0, 0.00, 7 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 8 SO
The Scoop: The Nationals spent a combined $3 million in the 2010 draft to secure righthander A.J. Cole and lefthander Sammy Solis. While Cole and Solid are young, low-minors arms with upside, Peacock has the stuff and control to be a mid-rotation starter. Plus he's far closer to realizing that potential. A 2006 draft-and-follow from the 41st round, Peacock's stuff has gotten better since signing out of Palm Beach (Fla.) CC. He now sits at 92-94 mph and touches 96 with a hard downer curve. His location has also been superlative, as he owns a 1.16 ERA, 36 strikeouts and four walks in 31 innings this season.

Bryce Harper is on there too, but that's nothing new.

Jim Bowden Joins Harper on the Sweet Spot Network

JimBo is officially a blogger. Who wants to tell Jim that Rob Neyer asked me to be a Sweet Spot blogger a couple years ago, and I declined?

I'll start the game: every time he name drops a player he is connected to, gotta drink. In this post, we get to take only one shot (don't worry, there will be many, many more). On Alfonso Soriano:

He has an NL-leading 11 home runs and is presently on pace to hit more than the 46 home runs he hit for me in Washington back in 2006.

Zimmerman's Surgery: Why Now?

I wasn't surprised to learn that Ryan Zimmerman's injury was lingering. Core muscle injuries (abs, obliques, etc.) tend to linger, and it's tough for a baseball player to do all the twisting motions involved in hitting and fielding until an injury like this is completely healed.

I wasn't, however, expecting to hear that Zimmerman needed surgery--not after three weeks on the DL and two months since the injury was first reported. (I won't repeat the details--Mark Zuckerman does a good job recounting the sequence of Zimmerman's injury here.)

I'm not a sports medicine expert, but the question has to be asked: why didn't Zimmerman get surgery immediately after the ab tear on April 9, which may have saved four weeks of missed time? And why wasn't he ordered to fully rest the injury when it first occurred during spring training, which might have prevented any DL stint at all?

Will Carroll--previously known as the injuries guy at Baseball Prospectus, now better knows as SI's less-attractive version of Stephania Bell--says the team is annoyed at Zimmerman for not being forthright with the team about the extent of the injury. And if Zimmerman hid the injury, they should be annoyed.

But this pattern--playing through pain, leading to a cascading injury, followed by a longer-than-expected DL stint, followed by surgery--isn't new for the Nationals (see: Cordero, Chad; Stammen, Craig; Zimmermann, Jordan).

I haven't seen anyone ask head trainer Lee Kunz, who has been with the team since 2007, why this injury was allowed to linger so long and why the surgery prognosis came so late. But it's a question that should be asked. Because if the botched handling of the Zimmerman injury turned a 2-week DL stint into three months, that's a big, big mistake.

Zimmerman's been a 7-WAR player over the last two seasons, and so this could be a 3-win error by the training staff. Since 3 wins above replacement costs about $12 million on the free agent market, that's a pretty expensive mis-diagnosis.

Riggleman's Awful Inning

I realize that it's been a couple days and this is kinda old news, but Jim Riggleman on Saturday made some of the worst decisions I can remember any manager making in a long, long time.

The situation was tie score, top of the seventh, two outs, runners on second and third, John Lannan pitching, Giants' backup catcher Eli Whiteside due up, and Aubrey Huff on deck. And Jim Riggleman chose to intentionally walk Whiteside.

Walking Whiteside decreased the Nationals' win expectancy from 48.5% to 46.5%. It almost tripled the Giants' run expectancy from 0.22 to 0.57. This isn't a close call--the intentional walk clearly made a Giants victory more likely.

Maybe I'm making this too obvious, but lemme try to really break this down simply. With first base open and two outs, the Giants had to get a hit to score a run (barring a balk or wild pitch). With the bases loaded, a walk or HBP gets the go-ahead run home.

Across baseball last year, hits occurred in 22.3% of plate appearances. Walks and HBPs occurred in about 9.4% of plate appearances. So after the walk, about 32% of the likely outcomes of any given at bat get the run home, as opposed to just 22%. If you look at the rates of these events in the National League and in 2011, when offense is sharply down, these numbers are even more skewed against issuing the walk.

But this only scratches the surface of Riggleman's stupidity. Consider that Whiteside is a career back-up catcher with a career .233 / .284 / .366 line. He's 31 years old, and he's never gotten more than 140 plate appearances in a season ever. The reason is because he's a bad hitter, so his own team goes out of their way to make sure he hits as rarely as possible.

Aubrey Huff on the other hand ranked 7th in the MVP voting last season with a .290 / .385 / .506 line. He was the best hitter on the team that won the World Series. It's true Huff is scuffling in the early going this season, but if Jim Riggleman is deciding based on a 27-game sample size that Eli Whiteside is a superior hitter to Aubrey Huff, he's gone stark raving mad. This is like walking Wil Nieves to get to Ryan Zimmerman.

But FJB, you say, by walking Whiteside, Riggleman gained the platoon advantage! Alas, as bad as Whiteside has been against righties, here's his career line against lefties: .167 / .219 / .267. No, that's not a misprint. Jim Riggleman intentionally walked a .167 hitter in a situation where only a hit would get a run home. And in case you were wondering, Huff has basically no platoon split. He hit .296 / .378 / .506 against lefties last season. And I could pull John Lannan's relatively small platoon splits, but my head is starting to hurt.

Riggleman is so wrong here, that you almost think maybe he got confused and thought he was walking Aubrey Huff to get to Eli Whiteside. Now THAT would have been a justifiable move.

Finally, after all that, we find out during the post-game press conference that Riggleman would have pulled Lannan, except that Lannan might have gotten the win(!) if he got out of the jam and if the Nationals managed to score a run in the bottom of the seventh and if the bullpen managed to hold that lead:

The right thing probably to do was just bring (Tyler) Clippard in to face Whiteside," Riggleman said. "Every now and then, you make a decision for your starting pitcher. If I pull John there, he's got a no-decision or a loss. If I let him try to work through it, he's got a no-decision or a win. It didn't work. The right decision to make was to just bring Clippard in, and whether Clip gets him or not, that's the way we go with that. I should have done that. That's one that's on me.

I'm just speechless. Maybe I shouldn't be. Managers manage to the stats all the time. Pretty much every manager in the league puts a higher premium on getting saves for their anointed closer than winning baseball games. But to admit openly that he believed that changing pitchers would have given the Nationals the best chance to win, but that he instead chose to hurt his team's chances of winning in favor of the infinitesimal chance that John Lannan would pick up a stat that even the BBWA Cy Young voters don't think matters anymore?

Personally, I think Riggleman's quick hook is a problem for this team, and I would have left Lannan in regardless. He only threw 93 pitches, and yeah he was struggling with his command a bit, but hell pitchers struggle with their command sometimes.

But this is a case where it doesn't matter whether he made the right decision or not. The REASON he made the decision was so bad, so completely misplaced, that this decision alone is nearly a firing offense.

And while this is a particularly egregious situation, this isn't the first time we've seen Riggleman manage to the win stat. Don't forget--the manager works for the GM, and it's up to Mike Rizzo to call Riggleman into his office and tell him to cut the crap. The fact that this keeps happening doesn't just reflect poorly on Interim Jim. Ultimately the buck stops with Rizzo.

Will the Starting Pitching Save the Nationals?

As I've written a number of times, the one thing this Nationals team absolutely can't withstand if they want to avoid another top-5 draft pick is a prolonged injury to Ryan Zimmerman. But it's looking like that's exactly what's happening.

The good news is that since Ryan Zimmerman went down April 9, the Nationals have not fallen apart. In fact, they've managed 9 wins in 19 games, a better winning percentage than I or most other people predicted for them even with Zimmerman. At the same time, they went 2-4 against the lowly Pirates and Mets and have scored just 3.84 runs a game (in 2009, when they lost 103 games, they managed 4.38 runs per game).

So what is it, exactly, that Nationals fans should expect from here on out?

There's one reason why losing Zimmerman might not mean a return to the dark days of 07-08: starting pitching. It's starting to look like they may get best-case (or near best-case) seasons from Jason Marquis, Livan Hernandez (again), John Lannan, and Tom Gorzelanny.

Now, all four of these guys are due for some regression--they all have xFIPs at least half a run higher than their ERA. Hernandez continues to enjoy the good luck of an unsustainably low HR/FB rate, which for a flyball pitcher like Livan creates an especially large distortion. This year he's allowed homers on just 3.4% of flyballs, while 44% of his balls in play have been flyballs. No pitcher can maintain a HR/FB rate much below 11% without the benefit of extreme park effects, so once that number starts to catch up, things will get ugly fast.

That said, Hernandez his only walking 2.31 batters per 9 innings, which is an exceptionally low number but not out of line with his career performance. If you're not handing out free passes, you can get away with a few more homers. Still, we're talking about a profile that will produce an ERA around 5, not in the mid-to-low 3s.

Marquis and Gorzelanny's performances are more easily attributed to repeatable skill. Gorzelanny is whiffing 7.54 batters per 9 while walking about half as many. He's never going to be a great pitcher, but an ERA in the mid-4s is totally reasonable. I liked that trade at the time (and Michael Burgess has only continued to prove his doubters right), and I'm glad to see it work out for Rizzo.

Marquis' numbers give us even more reason for optimism. He's getting the 56% groundball rate that has always been his bread-and-butter, but he's elevated his K-rate to over 6 per nine innings (which he hasn't done since 2004) and dropped his walk rate to 1.31, which would make him one of the best command pitchers in baseball.

I don't expect the K and BB rates to continue, but he can give up quite a bit of ground on those rates and still be worth more what the Nationals are paying. And if those rates did continue--if he somehow has figured out some new skill set--he'd be on track for easily the best season of his career. Again, I liked the Marquis free agent signing at the time, and it's good to see the team rewarded for good decision-making.

And John Lannan is basically the same guy he's been for the last four years. Lots of groundballs, not too many walks. Barring a return to the lucky BABIPs he got in '08 and '09, he'll finish the season with an ERA in the mid to high-4s.

I haven't mentioned Jordan Zimmermann, because he's the one guy who's actually underperforming. I'd like to look a little closer at him, but he obviously is the most talented pitcher on the team and could also provide a boost.

The odds of all five of these pitchers coming through for the Nationals in this way is extremely unlikely. But so far, there are good reasons to think that's what's happening. Losing Zimmerman is still the biggest blow this team can take. But if they can survive this without a prolonged jag of losing, this will be the reason.