The regular season for 28-teams gets started next week, and CBS Sports’ Mike Axisa just released a list of the 10 players he ranks as most likely to be traded at the deadline. The 8th name on that list is Josh Bell from the Washington Nationals. Maybe that is great news for Nats’ fans if Bell is already projected as a trade candidate. You have to be good to be №8 on the list, right?
Before reading Axisa’s article, my mind went towards coming up with my own trade deadline list. Of course I put Nationals’ pitcher, Michael Soroka, who is on a 1-year deal in there. Why not put Kyle Finnegan in there. He has been a top trade candidate the past two years. Then my mind came back to thinking that general manager Mike Rizzo could be a buyer at this year’s trade deadline. Maybe the Nationals will be vying for a Wild Card spot.
These articles are great for bragging rights when you nail it. Sandy Alcantara tops Axisa’s list, by the way. Somewhere soon you will be able to place prop bets on some of these names. Max Scherzer did not make the Top-10 but was in the honorable mention category.
With Bell comes the debate of whether the team really needed him with all of the options for the designated hitter role. When James Wood sat out early in Spring Training with quadricep tendonitis and returned as a DH just a few weeks ago, you had to think that maybe he would excel in that spot with Alex Call and Robert Hassell III sharing the left field duties. This was covered earlier in the month within a TalkNats article on the subject of Hassell.
We all like Bell as that smiling and afable guy. The question was always whether he was going to be worth the $6 million in guaranteed money that Rizzo gave him. Bell was a negative WAR contributor last year with a FanGraphs’ -0.1 and a BBRef -0.8. His Marlins numbers were not good with a .699 OPS and somehow they were able to trade Bell to Arizona where he turned in a decent .796 OPS over 41 games and a FanGraphs’ +0.3 WAR. That tells us that Bell was a -0.4 WAR for Miami. Maybe just a bad fit there. And that is obviously why Rizzo saw some value for the 32½ year old slugger.
There could be a silver lining here if Bell can play on that pace he had with the Diamondbacks. That pace would put Bell at about a +0.6 WAR approaching the trade deadline with 82 games played. Yes, there would probably be a team or three that would want Bell if he could be as good as or better than what he turned in with Arizona. Again, maybe that team that would want Bell is the Washington Nationals.
