The razor between winning and losing is incredibly thin. Very good teams don’t win. There is a lot of randomness in playoff baseball. The Nats won the World Series by literally the thinnest of margins, a comeback win in Game 7. It’s likely that changing anything would have resulted in a different outcome. Especially on a team whose success was attributed at least partly to a unique clubhouse culture.
The fact is the Nats did, in fact, win the World Series. And Adam Eaton did, in fact, play a significant role. I think if we are arguing counterfactuals, the burden of proof is going to be pretty high for arguing that you win without Eaton.
And if that’s the case the question should be, would you give up last year’s trophy to have 2020 Giolito?
Very good teams win. You have to be a good team to win. You can say that changing anything has a different result, but what if Giolito pitching lights out in Game 4 and Bryce Harper hits monster home runs, and we end up winning in 5 games at home? See how dumb this is? The crux of this argument is that, somehow, getting a worse player in Eaton, magically made the team better. And that's an impossible statement to even deal with, because by that logic, we should trade Juan Soto right now for someone half as good, and we'll magically be a better team.
Obviously no one is saying that they would trade a WS trophy for 2020 Giolito. But the idea that somehow Eaton as this lynchpin to a WS victory is pretty laughable, especially when we had him for most of the year before and couldn't make the playoffs. Getting a very good third pitcher in the rotation had far more to do with that than Eaton's 107 wRC+. I mean, let's think about this rationally: Are we saying that if we had traded Giolito for Christian Yelich, we wouldn't have won a WS?
Lucas Giolito was absolutely awful in 2018 and famously had the worst ERA of any starting pitcher that year. Yet the White Sox trotted him out there every 5 days. Why? They could. They were a rebuilding team and wins and losses didn't matter. In fact it helped them get the #3 pick in the draft that year, which they used on a can't-miss 1B prospect to eventually replace Jose Abreu. In fact, they're still trotting Reynaldo Lopez out there regularly despite now being a WC contender, since he is still showing enough flashes of brilliance each time he gives up 6 runs.
Would the 2018 Nationals, a team fighting for a playoff spot, have continued to trot Lucas Giolito of the 6.13 ERA out every 5 days? No of course not. He would at best have been sent to the minors, or even tossed out of the organization for far less than 1 season of a healthy Adam Eaton. Reynaldo Lopez would be gone for sure. Dunning might be the only the only person to actually still be on the 2020 Nationals in this hypothetical universe and his ceiling is mid-rotation at best.
Most MLB teams are bad at identifying talent in the draft. Just look at all the superstars who weren't drafted #1 overall. Developing talent via the draft is a tough business. Rizzo built a team that contended for almost a decade by doing some of the best free agent signings of all time (Scherzer, Murphy) and having an almost supernatural ability to sign winners from the Dominican Republic. The Nationals have consistently gotten amazing performances from veteran FAs who seemed past their prime when they arrived, and during the Dusty Baker years at least also consistently got amazing performances out of backups. This team is good at a lot of things under Rizzo.
The Nats were never a contender in 2018 and never should have treated it that way. Also, after 2018, the White Sox worked to transform his mechanics. The question is not, would the Nationals have let him start? The question is, why didn't the Nationals catch on to all of the issues with Giolito's mechanics and work in the offseason to fix them? This isn't an individual case here. Who exactly have the Nationals developed? Why do the Indians develop Clevinger (4th rounder) and Shane Bieber (4th round)? Why is other teams get Blake Treinen and turn him into an elite reliever?
Tanner Roark is the best developmental pitching project of Mike Rizzo's tenure. If you're going to say that foundation of your organization is starting pitching, then this cannot happen.
