Nationals fire Rizzo & Martinez, All-Star snubs, hot Jays, Yankees slide | Fair Territory

Nationals fire Rizzo & Martinez, All-Star snubs, hot Jays, Yankees slide | Fair Territory

Welcome everyone to the Monday edition of Fair Territory. We are coming off a rather interesting Sunday. Expected developments with of course the all-star announcements and unexpected developments from the Washington Nationals who fired their president of baseball operations Mike Rizzo as well as their manager Davey Martinez. And as I wrote last night in the Athletic, the move itself is not so odd. The moves, I should say, themselves are not so odd. Nationals since winning the 2019 World Series have the second most losses in the majors. Second most, but the timing is rather odd. And not just because this announcement was made on the day that two of Mike Rizzo’s prize acquisitions, James Wood and Mackenzie Gore were named to the NL All-Star team with a third acquisition from the Juan Sodto trade. CJ Abrams, a worthy candidate as well. No, the timing was odd because the draft at the time was one week away. The deadline was less than a month away and general managers, presidents of baseball operations, just generally do not get dismissed at this time of year. I looked it up. The last time I think it happened was in 2016. The Minnesota Twins dubbed Terry Ryan in July 2016, but back then the draft was in June, so he already gotten through the draft. He just had the deadline to go. Couple of years ago the draft was moved to July. So now it’s the draft and the deadline that the interim general manager Mike Dearalo is going to have to account for. Now the draft boards this close to selection day are in relative order. It’s not like the Nationals don’t know who is at the top of the board. The only difference this year from previous years as far as the Nationals are concerned is that they might want to do some strategic operating with the draft. When I say that, what I mean is when you have the top pick or a top five pick, top 10 pick even, you can offer that pick a lower bonus value, lower slot than he would be normally getting, below slot it’s called, and then maneuver with the rest of the draft, give other players more money, so that way your bonus pool is spread out a little differently. The Nationals under Rizzo did not do that with Dylan Cruz in 2023. Did not do it with Elijah Green in 2022. Those were top five picks. They got slot value. Now, the Nationals with Debalo can negotiate and they can figure out some things and operate strategically if they want to. There’s no clear number one pick. So, maybe that’s the way they want to go. It’s not rocket science. But again, this is a major upheaval one week before the draft, less than a month before the deadline. The deadline for the Nationals doesn’t figure to be very active. Kyle Finnegan, their closer, would likely be the one guy on an expiring contract to go, but again, they made this move. Now, they made this move and as I mentioned, it’s not without justification. National’s record this season and the last six seasons is horrible. And I know Rizzo did some things in the front office a couple of years ago to kind of try to improve their player development and international and amateur scouting, but those failures in those areas, player development, amateur scouting, international scouting, three pillars, they go back more than a decade. And as I wrote over a month ago, yeah, the Nationals remain among the Nationals, among Major League Baseball’s bottom feeders despite a lengthy rebuild. and the trade, the great sodto trade could not mask all that. So this move, these moves do not come without again some justification. The problem here, the biggest problem here, as it’s often the biggest problem with franchises, is that the issue starts at the top. When Mark Learner issued a statement yesterday announcing these dismissals, he made no mention, of course, of ownership’s culpability, how they used to run top 10 payrolls and no longer do. That’s part of it. And part of it also is this ownership, as I wrote today, they’ve been indifferent, they’ve been apathetic, they’ve been disconnected, and then all of a sudden yesterday they wake up. It’s just odd. Just odd timing overall. They’re going to name an interim manager today. We’ll see how their draft goes and we’ll see how their deadline goes. Now, continuing on the Allstar announcements yesterday, the roster filled out. Of course, we had some snubs. We always had some snubs. And as Chad Jennings writes in the Athletic, Lauren wrote in the Athletic last night, this is the nature of it. There are always good players who are left out, but of course, I want to focus on some of those players and I want to start with the players ballot. Now, as you know, the fans elect some, the players elect some, and then MLB fills out the rosters. The players, their ballots were due on June 29th. That was a week ago, Sunday. They had five days to vote. They made some curious choices. To me, the most curious, perhaps Alex Bregman. This guy’s been out since late May, and the players named him to the All-Star team. Here’s another curious choice. George Springer left off the team. Julio Rodriguez on. Let’s look at their stats just to start this discussion. Julio Rodriguez is not even close to George Springer. Way below in batting average on base and slugging, slightly below in home runs. They’re not the same player. Now, I know Springer has come on of late, but again, the ballots were due a week ago Sunday. It’s not as if George Springer was kind of invisible out there. So, let’s get into some other ones as well. Now, not all of these snubs were accountable or related to the player ballot. They’re just some that happen kind of naturally. Trey Turner, Philadelphia Phillies shortstop, outstanding offensive season, much improved defensively. I had him on my team and he did not get picked to the All-Star team. Now, Trey Turner could have been the third shortstop with Lindor and Ellie Dela Cruz, but instead MLB in this particular case named Matt Olsen as a third first baseman. Now, Matt Olsen was not good through May 15th, but has been really good since thousand ops or near a thousand. That said, I know Matt Olsen is a hometown guy going to play in Atlanta, but Trey Turner arguably should be the starting shortstop. fans didn’t elect him that way, of course, but he’s a guy who, if you look at his F war compared to the other shorts stops, he is way up there and the other guys are not. So, Trey Turner, he gets snubbed, I’d like to see him on there. The Matt Olsen selection, if you were going to go to a third baseman, well, that also accounts for another snub, and this is one that Cubs fans are screaming about, and rightly so. They screamed at me when I left this guy off my team. National League first base admittedly is a very deep position. You’ve got all kinds of guys, Freeman and Alonzo and Bush and Olsen, others as well. But Michael Bush has really come on and let’s look at his adjusted OPS compared to some of the other players in baseball because right now it is way up there. If you were going to choose a third first baseman, this is the guy you would have chosen. Let’s take a look at this. This is updated through yesterday’s games. judge of course at the top followed by Raleigh Smith, Otani, Michael Bush, fifth in adjusted OPS. Yes, I should have had my my team too. I’ll concede that one. Won’t concede many others. And even if you go down that list further, there’s Juan Sto also left off the all-star team. Now, it’s interesting to me that the players did not vote Juan Sto on. He wasn’t good through the end of May, but he had an incredible June. And I’ll say it again, the player ballots were due June 29th. The players had five days to vote. It wasn’t as if Juan Sodto was invisible in June. Second highest OPS for a calendar month in Mets history, but the players left them off. That’s their choice. That wasn’t as egregious as some and some that we’ve already mentioned, some that we’ll get to right now. Sea Suzuki. This is another guy Cubs fans are screaming at me about and screaming in general about and understandably so. 77 RBI’s leads the major leagues. Problem is he’s a DH. Shi Otani was a leading vote getter. He is the DH of course for the National League, the starting DH. Kyle Schwarber. Now he doesn’t have the RBI’s, but the RBI’s of course are dependent on your teammates to a large extent. When you look at ops, Schwber is way ahead of like um Sey Suzuki way ahead and it’s like 40 points something like that not even close. So Schwarber was in my view the more deserving selection. And Sey Suzuki, however, also deserving. And once the injuries start happening, once the players start dropping off and finding their excuses, some legitimate, some not so legitimate, then I will expect a number of these players will get named to the team, but certainly not all of them. And I want to give you one more before we go. I could do this all day, actually. Fra Valdez. Fra Valdez pitched brilliantly in the Fox game. actually not so brilliantly in the Fox game on Saturday, but he was good. He hung in there despite allowing four runs for the season. I want you to look at Valdez. This guy has had a really good year for a outstanding Astros team. Valdez is 11th in the American League in ERA. He’s second in innings by one-third of an inning to Garrick Crochet and he is sixth in F4. The guy’s an all-star. He should be on the team, period. So, those are the all-star snubs of note. There are others as well. And I just want to say this before I move on to the Toronto Blue Jays. When I published my picks, fans gave me a lot of heat. That’s just the nature of it. That’s the fun part of it. But if you look at my picks, outside of a few misses, they’re looking pretty good. That column was published last week. All right. Before we end the lead segment, I want to talk about the Toronto Blue Jays. And I’ve said this before and maybe Blue Jays fans will start acknowledging that I do not hate their team. I do not hate any team. I have hated at times the way the Toronto Blue Jays have operated, the way their front office has gone about it. But credit where credit is due. My goodness, the Jays are a rocket ship right now. Eight straight wins. They have taken a three-game lead in the American League East. largely fueled by, of course, that sweep of the Yankees last week in Toronto, the four-game sweep. And they’re doing this so surprisingly without major contributions from their offseason additions. Santandere is out. Jeff Hoffman hasn’t been great. Andre Jimenez has been on the injured list, I believe, twice now, and he hasn’t been good, but they’re getting really good contributions from guys like Nathan Lucas, Addison Barger. I pronounced his name wrong last week. and Ernie Clement, the bit guys. And of course, there’s George Springer right there. He has had an incredible comeback season just playing the way he used to play in Houston. So, the Blue Jays have done a lot of really good things and they’re doing a lot of really good things. Now, as we get to the deadline, they’re going to be aggressive. Ben Nicholson Smith on Sportsnet this morning wrote an article about how this front office Mark Shapiro Russ Atkins has generally been aggressive when they are buyers at the deadline. What do they need? Starting pitcher, controllable starter preferable. Sherzer is a free agent after this year. Bassid is a free agent after this year. Gossman and Bereos could leave after next year. So yeah, controllable starter would be of course the priority. They could also use perhaps one impact bat. They’ve got a good offense. They don’t necessarily need a particular position, but if they could find a significant upgrade, good. And also was mentioned to me by someone in their organization last night, a high leverage reliever. Every team wants high leverage relievers. The good news is they are in ample supply. So the Blue Jays, good for them. They’ve had a tremendous run here. That city is alive. The fan base is alive. Toronto Blue Jays in first place. I don’t know that any of us expected that. All right, that is it for the lead. We will be back with the inside dish right after this.
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This has been a June swoon extending into July. I wouldn’t say it’s for the ages, but it’s certainly been a significant downfall. Yankees were swept four games by the Blue Jays last week in Toronto. Lost two of three and the first two to the Mets this weekend when the Mets had virtually no pitchers of any repute on the mound. So, here are the Yankees again, losers of 16 of 23. Aaron Boon tells the players after the four-game sweep in Toronto, according to Jazz Chisum Jr., that we’re the best team in the league. And fans, as they often do, are going nuts about that comment and about Boone in general, as they have in the past, because the perception of many Yankee fans is that Boone isn’t tough enough. He isn’t a guy who holds players accountable enough. At least that is true in his public comments. When you’re looking at this from the outside is going on in the inside, we don’t know. And I want to focus on this today because when fans talk about getting a new manager, we want a new manager. We want a more fiery manager. Well, okay, but guess what? Those managers don’t really exist anymore. Think about this for a minute. Name a manager right now who holds players publicly accountable. I can’t think of any who do that. Ron Washington of the Angels when he’s managing and he’s now of course on medical leave is probably the closest to that. But other than that, they’re pretty much all the same personality. And the reason they’re like that is because if you rip players publicly, you lose players. And when you lose players, then as a manager, you are in big trouble. The best managers, what they do is they keep their teams going. and they keep them playing and playing hard. Now, the Yankees have a playing crisply problem. They don’t play crisply. This goes back to the World Series. It goes back to last season. That is the fairest and best biggest criticism that you could have of Aaron Boone. This team does not play in a Chris fashion. Now, there are reasons for that and we’ll get into those reasons, but you tell me who that fiery manager is that you want to replace, Aaron Boon. Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, Jim Leland, they’re not walking through that door. That’s not the modern manager. Now, you see Boone, he argues with umpires pretty well. He has some pretty colorful arguments with them. And that is only that is the only time with Boone and with other managers. You really see them get excited. You really see them publicly vent their frustrations. Obviously, they have them. So, it’s a different time. It’s a different era in the game’s history. When I came up late 80s, early 90s, managers were, for lack of a better term, more often hard asses. Red asses is the baseball term. In fact, that’s for a hot-tempered individual. And it wasn’t unusual for reporters to get yelled at by managers. It wasn’t unusual for managers to take off on players once in a while, publicly and privately. This kind of thing happened. Game is less colorful now. I would admit that it’s less lively in some ways, but when you’re dealing with players, yeah, this is kind of the way it has to be. And you saw Dave Martinez, he had some comments a couple of weeks ago how the onus is never on the coaches. It’s on the players at some point. And look what happened to him. Didn’t go so well. So, you don’t rip players. You do that, you’re in trouble. You might be in trouble with ownership as Dave Martinez seemed to be. you probably would be in trouble with your own clubhouse. So, you don’t want to lose your clubhouse. And the best way to judge a manager again is not by the way he uses pinch hitters or not by the way he uses relievers, line of construction. All that stuff is, yes, subject to debate. And the reason we all love the game because we can talk about this stuff, but it’s also outcomebased. And outcomes often can go either way. How you judge a manager is whether he keeps his team going. And the Yankees under Boone have generally done that. They had a crazy swoon last year. Went five and 16 in June. And they somehow got through it. Won the AL East, got to the World Series. The 162 game grind is a real thing. and players, managers, coaches, they’re going to have issues with each other from time to time during that, but generally speaking today, they are handled behind the scenes. And it was interesting. I was talking with a Mets official a couple of weeks ago about Carlos Mendoza. He of course was Boone’s bench coach for a number of years. The Mets named him their manager, and he has done an extremely good job as Mets manager. And what this person with the Mets said was that Mendoza is really good at demonstrating urgency while maintaining consistency. Demonstrating urgency while maintaining consistency. And he does that behind the scenes. Carlos Mendoza doesn’t rip players publicly. He But he I’m sorry behind the scenes though is someone who definitely according to this Mets person is holding players accountable. We don’t know if Boone is doing that or not behind the scenes. I would imagine that he is. And in fairness to Boone, for all the Yankees problems right now, he has some players out of position. Jazz Tisum Jr. at third base. Most notably, he has some young players, too. Austin Wells is 25. Vulpi is 24. Admittedly, with almost 1,700 played appearances in the big leagues, Jason Domingo is 22. So, it’s a younger group. Guys get rushed to the majors. Now, when they make mistakes, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Again, Vulpia has been around a while. So, what you can hold Boone responsible for, in my opinion, is the general sloppiness that we’ve seen from the Yankees over the past two years. That is a manager’s responsibility in the end. That comes back on him. Now, again, players out of position, young players, that’s going to come into it. And that certainly has come into it. But there has to be a level of accountability by the players shown by the manager for this kind of play. And the Yankees were good early in the season and they are improved defensively this year. There’s no question about that. But they’ve slipped in this swoon. Now again, they had that five and 16 swoon last year. They came out of it okay. I suspect they’re going to come out of it okay again. This is Aaron Boon’s eighth season. This is Brian Cashman’s. I’ve lost count of how many seasons. Cashman, another target of fan criticism, has never had a losing season. I know there are some things that you can rightly complain about with the Yankees right now. Roster construction that’s on Cman. The job of Cman now is to fix that at the deadline. The job of Boone now is to come out of this and come out of this in a way where the Yankees are again what he called the best team in the league. We haven’t seen it in a couple of weeks now. if we don’t see it again and if the Yankees somehow miss the playoffs or end this season in disappointment, then we can have a discussion about Aaron Boone. But I just want people to keep in mind that no manager, none, is out there ripping players publicly. And when Davy Martinez tried, didn’t work out so well for him. All right, that is it for the inside dish. We will be back with grilling Ken right after this. Kratz, we talk about HelloFresh a lot, but in the same fam is another option for you. If you’re looking to go on your little wellness journey or you’re very picky in terms of what you’re looking for ingredients-wise, you can go Green Chef this summer.
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Ken Rosenthal reacts to the Washington Nationals cleaning house a week before holding the #1 pick in the MLB Draft. Which most-deserving player got left off the All-Star teams? The Toronto Blue Jays are baseball’s hottest team.

Plus, a look at New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone’s role in the team’s recent slide.

Ken takes your live Grillin’ Ken questions in the chat, and via ChatBCC. Join the conversation at foulterritory.chat (it’s free!)

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