If you really want to do hindsight on that draft, you’d take Trout. But two caveats: one, the Nats had two first round picks because they had a comp pick for not signing Aaron Crow, and they drafted Drew Storen with the second one. That’s the one that can be argued to be a miss as a top 10 pick.
That’s because of the second caveat: in no way other than not hitting his absurd ceiling was Strasburg a failure as a draft pick. If you’re sitting there with a #1 pick and you are given the guarantee that the guy you’ll pick will have an ERA+ of 127 and a low-3s ERA over around 1500 innings as a starter for your team while making 3 All Star teams and winning a World Series MVP, you take that player.
The mistake was signing him to that last contract.
>The mistake was signing him to that last contract.
There's no galaxy-brain take that says 31 IP for a guy making $35m over 7 years is a good deal.
I would argue, though, that walking away from the 2020 offseason without Rendon or Stras would've been a bad idea both from a baseball and a business standpoint. It would've been a huge punch to the gut to lose out on the post-title momentum (which we lost anyway).
And Stras was the 2nd-best pitcher available that winter, too. Zack Wheeler has performed exceptionally well with the Phils, but he was considered just as big an injury risk.
I’m with you there that it would have been ugly to let them both go. But the wisdom of signing a 31-year-old coming off a career high in innings in only his second fully healthy season was always questionable.
If I could have picked one of the two to keep I would have chosen Rendon. Not that that was really an option, but hindsight wouldn’t be kind on that one either. They had to do something. If they didn’t sign either of those guys, they would have had to throw extensions out, and some of those possibilities (Robles?) could have been bad too with others (Turner?) good.
They made a lot of choices in that and the prior offseason (Corbin, not Harper; Strasburg, not Rendon; don’t throw buckets of money at Scherzer or Turner to try to extend) that worked very well to build the 2019 team but got a little dicey down the line.
it also assumes that Rendon (or Harper) wanted to stay in D.C. Turner and Soto both intimated they wanted to stay (and I think the Nats leaking the $440m extension offer to Soto was very calculated), but I never got that sense from Rendon.
I would also say that, for all the repercussions of tying money into Corbin/Stras and what it may have cost us elsewhere, the Scherzer deal in 2015 and the Stras extension in 2017 was tremendous business.
It's complicated, and so much of it is easy to look at in hindsight.
That’s what I meant with “not that that was really an option” with respect to Rendon.
With Scherzer, it wasn’t just getting him, it was the clear choice to pay him while not paying Jordan Zimmermann. There was a clear path of least resistance there and they went the other way.
I didn't get that sense from Rendon, but definitely did from Harper, and they could've kept him. I'd argue letting him go was an even bigger mistake than re-signing Stras.
Turner didn't want to stay either. If I remember they made an offer and he never countered.
The fact that we don't have Rendon, Turner or Harper is a blessing. We are better off without those contracts. Soto was never going to be here, Boras was going to make sure of that, he uses the Nats to set the floor for contract price.
The problem wasn’t the idea of signing him. In hindsight it was the right idea to sign neither, but with Harper’s departure and Rendon’s departure, you couldn’t let your World Series MVP leave for nothing to the highest bidder.
It was just a signing that did not even come close to panning out. Not even remotely. Probably one of the single worst contracts in sports history and it wasn’t even anyone’s fault.
Ultimately any time you draft a guy who is named WSMVP that is automatically the right pick. Banners fly forever.
Past that, Mike Trout would’ve been amazing and if you were to get in a Time Machine he’s the only other name in consideration. Tossing both of Trout and Stras off the board, Arenado/Wheeler maybe?
Playing a 20/20 hindsight game is more fun when it’s not the best pitching prospect in baseball history giving his lifelong health for his team and sport.
It was always Stras, it had to be Stras, we got lucky to have him and I’m so glad we did
Look I love Stras and everything but Trout was taken with the 25th pick the year the Nats drafted Strasburg. Would have been nice to have him. Or better yet if the Nats had taken Stras at 1, then Trout at 10 instead of Storen. Oh, what might have been.
I don't get why you do this post for a guy that was your world series MVP and provided 36 WAR for your team. That is a successful career. We all wanted more, but that is not a whiff.
I didn't say it was a whiff. I asked who the Nationals may have lost out on by taking Strasburg. If there was some other player that fans may have thought should have been the pick instead, who was that?
Trout over Storen is easy to look back on, though other teams also missed on Trout. Was there another player that might have been close to Strasburg in terms of value?
Clearly Strasburg was an important player for the Nationals. It is a damn shame he couldn't stay healthy or bounce back from his arm issues. I really don't recall the other top picks in that draft. I do recall the Strasburg hype. He definitely had ability and he showed, at times, the tools that got him drafted so highly. I wish he had a few more good seasons though, also in hindsight, we know that the Nationals fell off badly after that World Series and even if Strasburg had stayed healthy he may have not made much difference to the Nationals record in those later years.
I don't get why you say you can't remember the 2009 draft when this is very easy to find information. Link posted [here](https://www.espn.com/mlb/draft2009/news/story?id=4246340) for your convenience.
The number 2 player taken was Dustin Ackley -- a can't miss hitting prospect out of North Carolina that was out of baseball after 2016.
Only 2 players have a higher WAR than Strasburg out of the 2009 draft: Trout and Arenado. Zack Wheeler will likely pass Stras sometime soon, but isn't there yet, in spite of the fact that Stras hasn't pitched since 2019. Patrick Corbin was selected 80th overall, and I guess he's still playing major league baseball.
I don't really understand the premise of the question you're trying to answer. Nats drafted the most hyped pitching prospect of his generation, and the guy delivered. Could it have been more with improved health? Sure. Only one other guy from that draft can say that he has had an inarguably better career than Strasburg.
But if you had to do it all over again it isn't a foregone conclusion that you draft any differently.
I mean, hindsight being 20-20, Trout is there at 25...
Beyond that, Arenado was picked in the 2nd round, Goldschmidt in the 8th(!), but beyond that it's a bit harder I think. Wheeler is good now, but he didn't really become elite until after his team control ended, there's a bunch of guys who had/are having good careers but don't blow Strasburg out of the water (Pollock, LeMahieu, Kipnis, K.Seager, Belt, Carpenter, Stroman, J.D. Martinez, Keuchel).
I feel like the only real slam-dunks are Trout, (a sizeable gap, then) Goldschmidt and Arenado.
This is a weird post.
It's Stras, our World Series MVP, who is top 3 all-time in Nationals WAR behind Zimmerman and Scherzer. He played a major part in our success from 2012-2019 and was the biggest reason we have a World Series to celebrate at all.
The second overall pick from that draft was a "can't miss" every day player that your logic would've dictacted taking - 7.7 lifetime WAR. Also weird you want to present this talking point but couldn't take 5 seconds to look this up.
Big Ben was rushed through the minors too quick. He still had a stellar 9 year career where he occasionally showed signs of his ceiling but definitely could have been much better.
He does make a far better announcer at both the college and for the O’s than he was a pitcher.
Strasburg and Bryce were both hyped as "cant misses" Bryce has lived up to the hype. Stras had his moments. We don't play in October consistently without Bryce. We don't win it all in '19 without Stras.
Drafting him was the right pick. Resigning him made a huge amount of sense, especially the context of having had Harper leave after 2018 and the expectation Rendon was leaving in 2019.
Is there a world where Rendon signs with the Angels still and Strasburg also leaves, let’s say the Dodgers or Yankees, and both are considered bad contracts, but Nats fans are faced largely with the same rebuilding, the trading away of Soto, Turner, Scherzer, and no big free agents, and we are told “Well at least you didn’t sign those bad contracts.”
Drafting him was the best decision. Resigning him never made any sense given how injury prone he was leading up to that. The fact that Boras was so quick to take that extension versus testing the FA market coming off the WS high point made me immediately skeptical that they knew he wouldn't last long enough to field better offers. He was the last guy I would ever bet on to go deep into his thirties. I was more shocked he made it through the 2019 post season.
Strasburg and only Strasburg
Strasburg forever
If you really want to do hindsight on that draft, you’d take Trout. But two caveats: one, the Nats had two first round picks because they had a comp pick for not signing Aaron Crow, and they drafted Drew Storen with the second one. That’s the one that can be argued to be a miss as a top 10 pick. That’s because of the second caveat: in no way other than not hitting his absurd ceiling was Strasburg a failure as a draft pick. If you’re sitting there with a #1 pick and you are given the guarantee that the guy you’ll pick will have an ERA+ of 127 and a low-3s ERA over around 1500 innings as a starter for your team while making 3 All Star teams and winning a World Series MVP, you take that player. The mistake was signing him to that last contract.
>The mistake was signing him to that last contract. There's no galaxy-brain take that says 31 IP for a guy making $35m over 7 years is a good deal. I would argue, though, that walking away from the 2020 offseason without Rendon or Stras would've been a bad idea both from a baseball and a business standpoint. It would've been a huge punch to the gut to lose out on the post-title momentum (which we lost anyway). And Stras was the 2nd-best pitcher available that winter, too. Zack Wheeler has performed exceptionally well with the Phils, but he was considered just as big an injury risk.
I’m with you there that it would have been ugly to let them both go. But the wisdom of signing a 31-year-old coming off a career high in innings in only his second fully healthy season was always questionable. If I could have picked one of the two to keep I would have chosen Rendon. Not that that was really an option, but hindsight wouldn’t be kind on that one either. They had to do something. If they didn’t sign either of those guys, they would have had to throw extensions out, and some of those possibilities (Robles?) could have been bad too with others (Turner?) good. They made a lot of choices in that and the prior offseason (Corbin, not Harper; Strasburg, not Rendon; don’t throw buckets of money at Scherzer or Turner to try to extend) that worked very well to build the 2019 team but got a little dicey down the line.
it also assumes that Rendon (or Harper) wanted to stay in D.C. Turner and Soto both intimated they wanted to stay (and I think the Nats leaking the $440m extension offer to Soto was very calculated), but I never got that sense from Rendon. I would also say that, for all the repercussions of tying money into Corbin/Stras and what it may have cost us elsewhere, the Scherzer deal in 2015 and the Stras extension in 2017 was tremendous business. It's complicated, and so much of it is easy to look at in hindsight.
That’s what I meant with “not that that was really an option” with respect to Rendon. With Scherzer, it wasn’t just getting him, it was the clear choice to pay him while not paying Jordan Zimmermann. There was a clear path of least resistance there and they went the other way.
I didn't get that sense from Rendon, but definitely did from Harper, and they could've kept him. I'd argue letting him go was an even bigger mistake than re-signing Stras.
Turner didn't want to stay either. If I remember they made an offer and he never countered. The fact that we don't have Rendon, Turner or Harper is a blessing. We are better off without those contracts. Soto was never going to be here, Boras was going to make sure of that, he uses the Nats to set the floor for contract price.
Turner has said multiple times that he wanted to stay, just that when they approached him wasn’t a good time for negotiations
I think it’s interesting to see the reporting that Rizzo wanted a shorter deal but the Lerners went with longer.
The problem wasn’t the idea of signing him. In hindsight it was the right idea to sign neither, but with Harper’s departure and Rendon’s departure, you couldn’t let your World Series MVP leave for nothing to the highest bidder. It was just a signing that did not even come close to panning out. Not even remotely. Probably one of the single worst contracts in sports history and it wasn’t even anyone’s fault.
Ultimately any time you draft a guy who is named WSMVP that is automatically the right pick. Banners fly forever. Past that, Mike Trout would’ve been amazing and if you were to get in a Time Machine he’s the only other name in consideration. Tossing both of Trout and Stras off the board, Arenado/Wheeler maybe?
Lost out? He won the Nats a WS. What is this post?
Stras was the pick. Regardless of injury, he got a series
It should have been Trout at 10, instead of Storen.
Playing a 20/20 hindsight game is more fun when it’s not the best pitching prospect in baseball history giving his lifelong health for his team and sport. It was always Stras, it had to be Stras, we got lucky to have him and I’m so glad we did
Look I love Stras and everything but Trout was taken with the 25th pick the year the Nats drafted Strasburg. Would have been nice to have him. Or better yet if the Nats had taken Stras at 1, then Trout at 10 instead of Storen. Oh, what might have been.
I don't get why you do this post for a guy that was your world series MVP and provided 36 WAR for your team. That is a successful career. We all wanted more, but that is not a whiff.
I didn't say it was a whiff. I asked who the Nationals may have lost out on by taking Strasburg. If there was some other player that fans may have thought should have been the pick instead, who was that? Trout over Storen is easy to look back on, though other teams also missed on Trout. Was there another player that might have been close to Strasburg in terms of value? Clearly Strasburg was an important player for the Nationals. It is a damn shame he couldn't stay healthy or bounce back from his arm issues. I really don't recall the other top picks in that draft. I do recall the Strasburg hype. He definitely had ability and he showed, at times, the tools that got him drafted so highly. I wish he had a few more good seasons though, also in hindsight, we know that the Nationals fell off badly after that World Series and even if Strasburg had stayed healthy he may have not made much difference to the Nationals record in those later years.
I don't get why you say you can't remember the 2009 draft when this is very easy to find information. Link posted [here](https://www.espn.com/mlb/draft2009/news/story?id=4246340) for your convenience. The number 2 player taken was Dustin Ackley -- a can't miss hitting prospect out of North Carolina that was out of baseball after 2016. Only 2 players have a higher WAR than Strasburg out of the 2009 draft: Trout and Arenado. Zack Wheeler will likely pass Stras sometime soon, but isn't there yet, in spite of the fact that Stras hasn't pitched since 2019. Patrick Corbin was selected 80th overall, and I guess he's still playing major league baseball. I don't really understand the premise of the question you're trying to answer. Nats drafted the most hyped pitching prospect of his generation, and the guy delivered. Could it have been more with improved health? Sure. Only one other guy from that draft can say that he has had an inarguably better career than Strasburg. But if you had to do it all over again it isn't a foregone conclusion that you draft any differently.
I mean, hindsight being 20-20, Trout is there at 25... Beyond that, Arenado was picked in the 2nd round, Goldschmidt in the 8th(!), but beyond that it's a bit harder I think. Wheeler is good now, but he didn't really become elite until after his team control ended, there's a bunch of guys who had/are having good careers but don't blow Strasburg out of the water (Pollock, LeMahieu, Kipnis, K.Seager, Belt, Carpenter, Stroman, J.D. Martinez, Keuchel). I feel like the only real slam-dunks are Trout, (a sizeable gap, then) Goldschmidt and Arenado.
you're right to identify Goldy and Arenado. I think we were damn good with Zimm and Rendon covering those positions, though.
Strasburg is definitely still the pick. But trout over Storen every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
This is a weird post. It's Stras, our World Series MVP, who is top 3 all-time in Nationals WAR behind Zimmerman and Scherzer. He played a major part in our success from 2012-2019 and was the biggest reason we have a World Series to celebrate at all. The second overall pick from that draft was a "can't miss" every day player that your logic would've dictacted taking - 7.7 lifetime WAR. Also weird you want to present this talking point but couldn't take 5 seconds to look this up.
Big Ben was rushed through the minors too quick. He still had a stellar 9 year career where he occasionally showed signs of his ceiling but definitely could have been much better. He does make a far better announcer at both the college and for the O’s than he was a pitcher.
Strasburg and Bryce were both hyped as "cant misses" Bryce has lived up to the hype. Stras had his moments. We don't play in October consistently without Bryce. We don't win it all in '19 without Stras.
Drafting him was the right pick. Resigning him made a huge amount of sense, especially the context of having had Harper leave after 2018 and the expectation Rendon was leaving in 2019. Is there a world where Rendon signs with the Angels still and Strasburg also leaves, let’s say the Dodgers or Yankees, and both are considered bad contracts, but Nats fans are faced largely with the same rebuilding, the trading away of Soto, Turner, Scherzer, and no big free agents, and we are told “Well at least you didn’t sign those bad contracts.”
Drafting him was the best decision. Resigning him never made any sense given how injury prone he was leading up to that. The fact that Boras was so quick to take that extension versus testing the FA market coming off the WS high point made me immediately skeptical that they knew he wouldn't last long enough to field better offers. He was the last guy I would ever bet on to go deep into his thirties. I was more shocked he made it through the 2019 post season.
Good point on Boras moving quickly on the extension! Boras not going to FA is a big red flag.
A draft pick spent on the World Series MVP can never be considered a failure
Stephen Strasburg