Photo by Lynn Grody; Tanner Roark
News broke this morning in a quite public way that Tanner Roark is available for trade which hit Twitter on a tweet from Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan. From the beginning of the off-season’s roster realignments, Roark was listed by us as a question mark as to whether he would be tendered a contract. When Roark was tendered a contract two weeks ago we pointed to creative financing scenarios of “how do you keep Bryce Harper“, and the common denominator was to trade Tanner Roark and save his contractual dollars that are projected to be near $10 million. That is $10 million for a pitcher who has put up mid-4’s in ERA the last two seasons and has struggled with mechanics and command. While Roark is a popular player on the team, he just has not been effective putting the Nationals in the win column. While wins and losses do not fall solely on the pitcher of record, Roark led the Majors in losses in 2018 at 15, and he had 12-games where he gave up 4 or more runs of which seven of those games he did not get past the 5th inning.
The worst case scenario for the Nationals is that they would have to cut Roark and eat approximately $1.63 million of his salary. The best case is they retain him and he returns to “star” form with his new catching tandem of Kurt Suzuki and Yan Gomes. The middle ground is that Rizzo trades Roark and gets a “lotto ticket” on a prospect. You cannot expect much of a return for Roark if at all given his prior two years’ results and his age. Continue reading
