As has become tradition, I'm starting this about a week and a half late (it seems like there's usually some deadline for something in early/mid September that I need to take care of), but now that that's over...let's get this puppy fired up! I'll be posting stuff as it gets done (with the goal of getting caught up to real-time eliminations at some point soon!) but in the meantime let's at least get on the board here with the two worst teams:
It’s always a bittersweet moment when a team decides to sell off its impending free agents. Sure, the sale is borne of a belief that the future can be better, and the writing has usually been on the wall for weeks or months...but there’s a dreadful finality to the fact that a team has intentionally decided to hamstring itself for the remainder of the season in hopes that future years will be better.
That moment takes on whole new level of despondency, however, when the traded player won’t be a free agent until next year – a tacit admission that the team won’t be worth watching next year, either. And that admission becomes particularly plaintive when that departing player won’t be a free agent for two and a half more years.
Ever since he arrived in Washington as a 19-year-old in 2018, Juan Soto has been an offensive force. He’s never finished outside the top-5 in the NL in OBP, never finished outside the top-7 in OPS, and never finished outside the top 9 in the MVP voting except during his rookie year (when he finished 2nd in the ROY voting instead). His 2022 season has been a down year only in comparison to his otherworldly 2020 and 2021; this year he’s “only” OPSed 147, a step down from last year's 177 but still an MVP-caliber number. Oh, and he's still just 23. By all accounts, he’s the sort of player you build a franchise around....the sort of player whom you lock up with a huge, back-the-Brinks-truck-up offer that makes him the centerpiece of the rebuild. And this season, that’s exactly what Washington tried to do, offering him a 15-year deal worth $445 million dollars.
But Soto had every reason to be skeptical of the offer. For one thing, the Nationals are soon to be sold, and Soto worried about committing a decade and a half to a “ghost” owner, as his agent called it. More importantly, though, while $445 million is a lot of money...it might not even be fair market value for Soto; that deal works out to less than $30 million per year, and it’s fairly likely that Soto will command far more than that on the free agent market after the 2024 season. (Plus, if there’s one constant with Boras clients, it’s that they looove testing the free agent market). Soto already makes $17 million after just a single, Super-2 year of arbitration – he stands a good chance of earning more than $50 million in his last two pre-arb years alone.
And so, in one of the most pathetic admissions of futility in baseball history, Washington all-but-announced that they were giving up on the next three years of baseball and traded the young star to the Padres. That the Nationals then traded Soto away is understandable – ever since they committed to a full-on teardown last July, the Nats have made little pretense that they would be a watchable team in 2022, 2023, or even 2024. Nevertheless, for Nats fans who happen to like watching competitive baseball, it was a sad reminder of just how deep the rebuilding trough will go.
Having traded away their last remaining star, the Nationals are now left with a bad, bad, bad baseball team. They’ve either set or are on pace to set all kinds of franchise and league records; their recent stretch of 43 games without a win by a starter was an all-time mark, and they're currently in the lead for the "worst three-year stretch after a World Series victory" crown, surging "ahead" of legendary teams like the 1914-16 A's and the 1998-2000 Marlins. Many words have been written about Patrick Corbin this year (none of them good), particularly in terms of his chase for 20 losses, his pursuit of the all-time worst ERA+ in history (his 64 ERA+ is now probably a bit too "good" to catch the all-time record, but he’s still vaguely in the running againt Jose Lima’s liveball-era record of 62), and his contract (six years, $140 million, running through 2024), but what’s been overlooked is his efficiency – had Corbin lost 20 games this year, he would likely have smashed the record for fewest innings pitched by a 20-game loser. Fortunately for Patrick, his FIP is about a run and a half better than his ERA, so he could see some significant improvement just by the team defense being a bit less clank-tacular, but...his FIP is still around 5, which isn’t exactly worth a $20 million-a-year contract.
All told, the current Nationals’ ERA+ is at 78, which puts them just a few points off of the worst pitching staff in the post-deadball era. The hitting has been surprisingly league-average (even after the Soto/Josh Bell trade), and Bell-replacement Joey Meneses has been a revelation in his short big-league tenure, but when the starters are posting a combined ERA of around 5.80, well, you’re not going to win a whole lot of ball games.
It’s going to be a long road for the Nats. They stand a good chance of finishing dead last in the bigs this year (although they picked the wrong year to do so, now that the top of the draft is determined by a lottery); their farm system is still middle-of-the-pack (even after the Soto trade!); and Patrick Corbin will continue to be a $20+ million dollar anchor for the pitching staff (in several senses of the word “anchor”). Hopefully the fanbase’s memories of 2019 are still fresh, because those are going to have to sustain the Washington faithful through several years of abject futility. In short, the new owners are going to have a lot of work to do.
The Nationals last made the playoffs in 2019.
One of the time-honored maxims in sports is, “If you want a new stadium, make sure the fans have a miserable experience in the current one.”
This year, Oakland clearly took that maxim to heart. After the 2021 season, the A’s did everything they could to make the team less watchable on the field while also making the fan experience more miserable off of it. On the field, nearly every player who might actually be recognized by fans was sent to a team that is better at baseball: Matt Olson headed for the Braves, Matt Chapman went to the Blue Jays, Chris Bassitt and Starling Marte became Mets, Sean Manaea was shipped to the Padres, and essentially the entire bullpen was scattered to the four winds. Even manager Bob Melvin, under contract through 2022, was allowed to leave for San Diego.
Worse, though, the A's decided that now was a good time to make the fan experience as bad as possible. Parking prices went up by 75%, tickets around the park took hefty hikes, season-ticket-holder benefits were cut, innovative services like the subscription-for-standing-room memberships were discontinued, and the sales offices basically gave up on trying to get fans to come to the ballpark. A's fans have dealt with a teardown before, but the middle finger from the fan experience crew added a special new twist to the proceedings.
In fact, nothing could have better encapsulated the A’s open disdain for their own fans than a late-September 2021 season ticket “deal” wherein the A’s hiked their ticket prices, then emailed season ticket holders and asked them to re-up within the next week in exchange for one game in a complimentary suite and....wait for it...a free Matt Olson jersey. Because nothing says "fan relations" like offering a jersey that will be obsolete before it even arrives at the fan's house.
Now, it's not particularly unusual for a team trying to move to a new location to make life as bad as possible for the fans in the current location. In fact, the playbook that the A's are following was essentially written by the Expos in the early 2000’s, when the Montrealers played home games in San Juan and completely removed the Expos from local TV. On some level, it makes sense - if your fans don’t show up, you can claim that you’re just looking for a place where they will, and then you relocate to wherever you want to go.
What is weird about the current A’s situation is that they’re making life miserable for their fans in an attempt to move…to a different part of the same city. Sure, there have been flirtations with Las Vegas, including some entirely cringe-worthy photos of businesslike Dave Kaval surrounded by the tackiest Vegas décor imaginable. But Oakland is still plan 1a, 1b, and 1c. The A’s have zeroed in on the Howard Terminal project, a new downtown endeavor that is slated to house the A’s, revitalize the downtown, and cause mayhem in one of the largest shipping ports in the US. And yet...Oakland is also the city whose fans they're currently at war with. Usually, when a team is trying to move to a new ballpark, the team's actions have an undertone of, "We love our fans, but gosh this ballpark experience is terrible!" The A's, however, seem to have gone straight into "EVERYTHING WILL BE HORRIBLE FOR EVERYONE!" mode. Will those fans forget the madess of the 2022 season when the new park opens? Will the new location attract enough new fans that the antagonzation won't matter long-term? It's not clear what step 2 is for the A's if the new park opens in Oakland in 2025 or 2026.
Oh, and of course 2025 is still three years away, so the A's will have at least two more years of battling with fans and the local Coliseum Authority - the latter of which have basically given up, leading to reports of a stadium with backed-up sewers, colonies of feral cats, mold, a moth infestation, and concession stands so understaffed that the team has resorted to bringing in food trucks.
Unsurprisngly, fans this year have stayed away in droves. The average attendance has been below 10,000 a game, which (if it holds until the end of the season) would be the first time a team has averaged less than 10,000 in a non-covid year since Montreal still had a franchise. In fact, there have been four games so far this year where the announced attendance has been less than 3,000..which means that the A's are sometimes being outdrawn not just by other major and minor league teams but also by many megachurches, symphony orchestras, high school graduations, and perhaps even large college classes.
If I haven’t written much about baseball here, well, there’s not much to write. Fresh off of a bullpen collapse in 2021, the A’s turned over the roster and decided to start over. With Frankie Montas being shipped out at the deadline, the 2022 A's are basically down to a skeleton crew, and they've given a whole lot of playing time to older players whose time has passed (like Steven Vogt, Jed Lowrie, Tony Kemp, and Elvis Andrus - although the latter is having a dead-cat bounce in Chicago), former mega-prospects who have lost their luster (Ramon Laureano, AJ Puk), a whole lot of AAAA filler, and a couple of ringers to help other clubs remember that this is still, in fact, a major league team (like Sean Murphy or Cole Irwin). The farm system, which was weak going into last year and further depleted by the Starling Marte for Jesus Luzardo-and-others trade, is still a ways from supporting the next contender; the offseason trades have since derricked the system up to mediocrity, but there's clearly little major league-ready help on the way. Moreover, owner John Fisher has said (through team officials) that the payroll will not expand until there are "shovels in the ground" - because apparently team performance is just another bargaining chip to use in a real estate battle with the city - which means that there will also be little help arriving from the free agent market.
So...now, we wait. The Howard Terminal project seems to be moving forward, and 2025 or 2026 will come soon enough...but for the near future, it looks like the A's will be a horribly overmatched team in a close-to-condemned stadium with few fans to witness the spectacle.
The A's last made the playoffs in 2020. Their last World Series came in 1989.
It’s always a bittersweet moment when a team decides to sell off its impending free agents. Sure, the sale is borne of a belief that the future can be better, and the writing has usually been on the wall for weeks or months...but there’s a dreadful finality to the fact that a team has intentionally decided to hamstring itself for the remainder of the season in hopes that future years will be better.
That moment takes on whole new level of despondency, however, when the traded player won’t be a free agent until next year – a tacit admission that the team won’t be worth watching next year, either. And that admission becomes particularly plaintive when that departing player won’t be a free agent for two and a half more years.
Ever since he arrived in Washington as a 19-year-old in 2018, Juan Soto has been an offensive force. He’s never finished outside the top-5 in the NL in OBP, never finished outside the top-7 in OPS, and never finished outside the top 9 in the MVP voting except during his rookie year (when he finished 2nd in the ROY voting instead). His 2022 season has been a down year only in comparison to his otherworldly 2020 and 2021; this year he’s “only” OPSed 147, a step down from last year's 177 but still an MVP-caliber number. Oh, and he's still just 23. By all accounts, he’s the sort of player you build a franchise around....the sort of player whom you lock up with a huge, back-the-Brinks-truck-up offer that makes him the centerpiece of the rebuild. And this season, that’s exactly what Washington tried to do, offering him a 15-year deal worth $445 million dollars.
But Soto had every reason to be skeptical of the offer. For one thing, the Nationals are soon to be sold, and Soto worried about committing a decade and a half to a “ghost” owner, as his agent called it. More importantly, though, while $445 million is a lot of money...it might not even be fair market value for Soto; that deal works out to less than $30 million per year, and it’s fairly likely that Soto will command far more than that on the free agent market after the 2024 season. (Plus, if there’s one constant with Boras clients, it’s that they looove testing the free agent market). Soto already makes $17 million after just a single, Super-2 year of arbitration – he stands a good chance of earning more than $50 million in his last two pre-arb years alone.
And so, in one of the most pathetic admissions of futility in baseball history, Washington all-but-announced that they were giving up on the next three years of baseball and traded the young star to the Padres. That the Nationals then traded Soto away is understandable – ever since they committed to a full-on teardown last July, the Nats have made little pretense that they would be a watchable team in 2022, 2023, or even 2024. Nevertheless, for Nats fans who happen to like watching competitive baseball, it was a sad reminder of just how deep the rebuilding trough will go.
Having traded away their last remaining star, the Nationals are now left with a bad, bad, bad baseball team. They’ve either set or are on pace to set all kinds of franchise and league records; their recent stretch of 43 games without a win by a starter was an all-time mark, and they're currently in the lead for the "worst three-year stretch after a World Series victory" crown, surging "ahead" of legendary teams like the 1914-16 A's and the 1998-2000 Marlins. Many words have been written about Patrick Corbin this year (none of them good), particularly in terms of his chase for 20 losses, his pursuit of the all-time worst ERA+ in history (his 64 ERA+ is now probably a bit too "good" to catch the all-time record, but he’s still vaguely in the running againt Jose Lima’s liveball-era record of 62), and his contract (six years, $140 million, running through 2024), but what’s been overlooked is his efficiency – had Corbin lost 20 games this year, he would likely have smashed the record for fewest innings pitched by a 20-game loser. Fortunately for Patrick, his FIP is about a run and a half better than his ERA, so he could see some significant improvement just by the team defense being a bit less clank-tacular, but...his FIP is still around 5, which isn’t exactly worth a $20 million-a-year contract.
All told, the current Nationals’ ERA+ is at 78, which puts them just a few points off of the worst pitching staff in the post-deadball era. The hitting has been surprisingly league-average (even after the Soto/Josh Bell trade), and Bell-replacement Joey Meneses has been a revelation in his short big-league tenure, but when the starters are posting a combined ERA of around 5.80, well, you’re not going to win a whole lot of ball games.
It’s going to be a long road for the Nats. They stand a good chance of finishing dead last in the bigs this year (although they picked the wrong year to do so, now that the top of the draft is determined by a lottery); their farm system is still middle-of-the-pack (even after the Soto trade!); and Patrick Corbin will continue to be a $20+ million dollar anchor for the pitching staff (in several senses of the word “anchor”). Hopefully the fanbase’s memories of 2019 are still fresh, because those are going to have to sustain the Washington faithful through several years of abject futility. In short, the new owners are going to have a lot of work to do.
The Nationals last made the playoffs in 2019.
One of the time-honored maxims in sports is, “If you want a new stadium, make sure the fans have a miserable experience in the current one.”
This year, Oakland clearly took that maxim to heart. After the 2021 season, the A’s did everything they could to make the team less watchable on the field while also making the fan experience more miserable off of it. On the field, nearly every player who might actually be recognized by fans was sent to a team that is better at baseball: Matt Olson headed for the Braves, Matt Chapman went to the Blue Jays, Chris Bassitt and Starling Marte became Mets, Sean Manaea was shipped to the Padres, and essentially the entire bullpen was scattered to the four winds. Even manager Bob Melvin, under contract through 2022, was allowed to leave for San Diego.
Worse, though, the A's decided that now was a good time to make the fan experience as bad as possible. Parking prices went up by 75%, tickets around the park took hefty hikes, season-ticket-holder benefits were cut, innovative services like the subscription-for-standing-room memberships were discontinued, and the sales offices basically gave up on trying to get fans to come to the ballpark. A's fans have dealt with a teardown before, but the middle finger from the fan experience crew added a special new twist to the proceedings.
In fact, nothing could have better encapsulated the A’s open disdain for their own fans than a late-September 2021 season ticket “deal” wherein the A’s hiked their ticket prices, then emailed season ticket holders and asked them to re-up within the next week in exchange for one game in a complimentary suite and....wait for it...a free Matt Olson jersey. Because nothing says "fan relations" like offering a jersey that will be obsolete before it even arrives at the fan's house.
Now, it's not particularly unusual for a team trying to move to a new location to make life as bad as possible for the fans in the current location. In fact, the playbook that the A's are following was essentially written by the Expos in the early 2000’s, when the Montrealers played home games in San Juan and completely removed the Expos from local TV. On some level, it makes sense - if your fans don’t show up, you can claim that you’re just looking for a place where they will, and then you relocate to wherever you want to go.
What is weird about the current A’s situation is that they’re making life miserable for their fans in an attempt to move…to a different part of the same city. Sure, there have been flirtations with Las Vegas, including some entirely cringe-worthy photos of businesslike Dave Kaval surrounded by the tackiest Vegas décor imaginable. But Oakland is still plan 1a, 1b, and 1c. The A’s have zeroed in on the Howard Terminal project, a new downtown endeavor that is slated to house the A’s, revitalize the downtown, and cause mayhem in one of the largest shipping ports in the US. And yet...Oakland is also the city whose fans they're currently at war with. Usually, when a team is trying to move to a new ballpark, the team's actions have an undertone of, "We love our fans, but gosh this ballpark experience is terrible!" The A's, however, seem to have gone straight into "EVERYTHING WILL BE HORRIBLE FOR EVERYONE!" mode. Will those fans forget the madess of the 2022 season when the new park opens? Will the new location attract enough new fans that the antagonzation won't matter long-term? It's not clear what step 2 is for the A's if the new park opens in Oakland in 2025 or 2026.
Oh, and of course 2025 is still three years away, so the A's will have at least two more years of battling with fans and the local Coliseum Authority - the latter of which have basically given up, leading to reports of a stadium with backed-up sewers, colonies of feral cats, mold, a moth infestation, and concession stands so understaffed that the team has resorted to bringing in food trucks.
Unsurprisngly, fans this year have stayed away in droves. The average attendance has been below 10,000 a game, which (if it holds until the end of the season) would be the first time a team has averaged less than 10,000 in a non-covid year since Montreal still had a franchise. In fact, there have been four games so far this year where the announced attendance has been less than 3,000..which means that the A's are sometimes being outdrawn not just by other major and minor league teams but also by many megachurches, symphony orchestras, high school graduations, and perhaps even large college classes.
If I haven’t written much about baseball here, well, there’s not much to write. Fresh off of a bullpen collapse in 2021, the A’s turned over the roster and decided to start over. With Frankie Montas being shipped out at the deadline, the 2022 A's are basically down to a skeleton crew, and they've given a whole lot of playing time to older players whose time has passed (like Steven Vogt, Jed Lowrie, Tony Kemp, and Elvis Andrus - although the latter is having a dead-cat bounce in Chicago), former mega-prospects who have lost their luster (Ramon Laureano, AJ Puk), a whole lot of AAAA filler, and a couple of ringers to help other clubs remember that this is still, in fact, a major league team (like Sean Murphy or Cole Irwin). The farm system, which was weak going into last year and further depleted by the Starling Marte for Jesus Luzardo-and-others trade, is still a ways from supporting the next contender; the offseason trades have since derricked the system up to mediocrity, but there's clearly little major league-ready help on the way. Moreover, owner John Fisher has said (through team officials) that the payroll will not expand until there are "shovels in the ground" - because apparently team performance is just another bargaining chip to use in a real estate battle with the city - which means that there will also be little help arriving from the free agent market.
So...now, we wait. The Howard Terminal project seems to be moving forward, and 2025 or 2026 will come soon enough...but for the near future, it looks like the A's will be a horribly overmatched team in a close-to-condemned stadium with few fans to witness the spectacle.
The A's last made the playoffs in 2020. Their last World Series came in 1989.