Generally speaking, late Saturday night is not the time for rational decisions. Late Saturday night is when people make the kinds of decisions that they won’t even remember until halfway through their eggs on Sunday and whose logic they’ll struggle to puzzle out for years to come. But just before midnight on Saturday, Jeff Passan revealed that the Nationals and the Mets made a perfectly reasonable swap. The Mets, currently half a game ahead of the Diamondbacks for the final NL Wild Card spot, bolstered their outfield and added a much-needed left-handed bat by sending 24-year-old right-handed pitching prospect Tyler Stuart to the Nationals in exchange for half a season of the resurgent Jesse Winker. After putting up a dreadful -0.8 WAR in an injury-shortened 2023 campaign, Winker is running a 126 wRC+ and has put up 1.3 WAR, fourth-best among Washington’s position players. Winker also spent his early childhood in upstate New York and has been vocal about his appreciation for Mets fans.
Winker got into Sunday’s game with his new team, entering as a replacement and playing left field, though his ultimate destination might be in right. Winker hasn’t played more than 100 innings in right field since 2019, but with Starling Marte out since June 22 due to a knee injury, that seems like the most logical fit. The Mets are currently platooning Jeff McNeil and Tyrone Taylor out there. Against righties, Winker could allow McNeil to move second base, pushing Jose Iglesias, who started out red-hot but has just one hit over his past six games, back into a bench role.
At his best, during the 2020 and 2021 seasons, Winker combined an extremely patient approach with excellent contact quality. He still runs one of the lowest chase rates in the game, but his contact quality plummeted in 2022 and especially in 2023, when back and neck injuries limited him to just 61 games with the Brewers. His exit velocity and hard-hit rate have bounced back some this season. They’re not quite at league average, but combined with his preternatural plate discipline, they’ll work. Winker also got hot at the perfect time. He has a 150 wRC+ since June 14, which marks one of the hottest stretches of his entire career, and by far the best since 2021:
The 30-year-old Winker has battled injuries, back injuries in particular, for much of his career. His improved play could simply be a result of being healthy for the first time in a long time. However, there are some obvious caveats here. It’s important to note that Winker is running a .318 BABIP, which is also his best mark since 2021. His improved contact quality notwithstanding, there’s no real reason to expect that to continue. Second, Winker is benefiting from seeing a lot more hittable pitches this season. His 53.2% zone rate is not just the highest of his career (aside from his a partial rookie season in 2017), but the fifth-highest among all qualified players this season. His 8.6% meatball rate also ranks 12th among qualifiers. Here are the pitches Winker saw last year and this year:
Last year, pitchers stayed away from him with breaking pitches and offspeed stuff. This year, they’re throwing a lot more fastballs right over the plate.
Winker has always been one of the most selective players in baseball. His 18.9% chase rate ranks in the 96th percentile and is just a hair above his career average. The difference is that this season, his swing rate on pitches in the zone has fallen to 62.7%, the lowest of his career. It’s not as if he’s being choosier and waiting for the perfect pitch. His swing rate on pitches over the heart of the plate is also at a career low:
As a result, SEAGER, which measures selective aggression, doesn’t love him like it used to, ranking him in the 47th percentile after three straight seasons in the mid-80s. It’s hard to say whether Winker will keep seeing so many hittable pitches. This could just be a small sample size fluke, but maybe pitchers aren’t scared of him like they used to be, or maybe they’re just sick of walking him. Winker is probably due for a bit of regression in the second half, but he might also be able to sit against lefties a bit more often in New York. Besides, he doesn’t need to keep running a 126 wRC+ to be useful to the Mets during the stretch run.
Now for Washington’s side of the deal. Because I want to spare you pain, I’m not going to make you read a list of all the players the Nationals have traded away over the last four seasons. I won’t even make you read a list of the bounce-back candidates they’ve signed to one-year deals for the express purpose of flipping them at the deadline. But this is what they do. They pump, they dump, they repeat. It is their strategy. This year, it worked with Winker and seems to be working with Dylan Floro, but not with Joey Gallo or Nick Senzel. The real question is whether this might be the strategy’s last hurrah. The Nationals are on pace for their best record since 2019, and, thanks to the implosion of the Marlins, their first non-last-place finish. Management has been making noises for two years now about how close the team is to finishing its rebuild. We’ll find out in a few more months whether all this means that they’ll finally sign a player they’d actually like to keep around for more than four months.
As a 6-foot-9 right-hander with one of the thickest necks in professional baseball but without great fastball shape, Tyler Stuart was destined to end up with the Nationals. The Mets selected Stuart in the sixth round of the 2022 draft out of Southern Mississippi. A converted reliever, he earned a promotion to Double-A last season. According to MLB.com’s Jessica Camerato, Stuart’s combined 2.20 ERA led all qualified pitchers in the minors. So far this season, he’s running a 3.96 ERA and 3.28 FIP.
Eric Longenhagen ranked Stuart 27th (as a 35+ FV) in the Mets system back in May, and he seems likely to be a back-end starter. Stuart doesn’t have great velocity or stuff, but he fills up the zone, and is currently walking 5.6% of batters and running a 47.5% groundball rate; per Eric, his durability and command give him a high floor. As Eric wrote in May, “He is mostly going to live in the low 90s with both a two- and four-seamer while commanding an average slider to his glove side.” Stuart is still working on developing a decent offspeed pitch, and his future seems to be dependent upon whether or not he can crack it. If he can’t figure it out, he’s more likely to end up as a fastball-slider reliever.
