In 2024, Alex Anthopoulos reunited the team with a lot of spare parts from years past. Ryan already covered the most noteworthy offensive retread, Jorge Soler, in a previous post. The remainder can be dispensed in one fell swoop. (Well, except for Jesse Chavez, who’s really in his own category.)

In fact, AA brought back so many of our old friends that you probably forgot about a few of them! Here’s the list, by my count: Chavez and Soler, plus Adam Duvall, Luke Jackson, Eddie Rosario, Chadwick Tromp, and Luke Williams.

That’s a whole lot of not very much.

Hitters

The hitters were horrible. In all, they combined for 702 plate appearances with 23 homers, 73 RBI, a 196:53 strikeout to walk ratio, and a .200/.269/.358 batting line.

And here’s what the collective production looks like when you exclude Jorge Soler: 520 PA, 14 HR, 49 RBI, 152 K:29 BB, .186/.239/.315.

That’s what happens when your backup outfielders hit like backup catchers, and it illustrates how expensive cheap players ultimately can be.

I’m lumping all these guys together because they well all much of a muchness, but truthfully, most of them were just bit actors; among them, Duvall and Soler were the only guys who more than 60 PA, and Soler hit but couldn’t field, and Duvall really couldn’t do either, as he was worth -1.0 WAR on the season. (Extraordinarily, Rosario was worth -0.7 WAR in just 84 PA.)

Other than Ramon Laureano, who I wrote up recently, our team’s best offensive pickups were Gio Urshela and Whit Merrifield, who each were worth 0.8 WAR in around 130-160 PA apiece. The trouble is that Duvall got over 300 PA, and the collective failures of the likes of him and Rosario nullified a lot of the positive work contributed by the newcomers.

To be clear, again, this really isn’t meant as a particular dis of someone like Chadwick Tromp, who made just a cameo on the season. He wasn’t the problem, he wasn’t the solution, he was just a known quantity who was the 25th man on the roster for a few weeks. His numbers don’t contribute much to the aggregate. But he fits as part of the overall story.

(A final aside: there was one more retread, Eli White, who I’m ignoring because he was already on the team by the end of the 2023 season. We originally purchased his contract in January 2023, then released him that July, and re-signed him a few days later. He’s mostly been an org player at Triple-A since then, but in his cup of coffee in 2024 he had a .769 OPS in 42 PA. He wasn’t the problem, either.)

Pitchers

On the face of it, Uncle Jesse gave us one last good season while Luke Jackson was unable to recapture the magic. If you split up the season a bit more finely, Jesse hugely outperformed his peripherals to a microscopic ERA through the end of June, and then he started giving up runs in bunches for the last few months, while Luke underperformed his components for the two months he pitched for us, getting most of his work in garbage time.

He posted a 4.50 ERA in 18 innings for us; his 3.72 FIP suggests he wasn’t as bad as his ERA suggests, but he wasn’t that much better, either.

Ultimately, he was relatively easy to hide because our pitching staff overall was performing highly effectively; it was harder to hide the hitters because our lineup was struggling so badly amid a cataclysm of injuries.

The upshot

Alex Anthopoulos chose not to spend major capital retooling the roster on the fly. While Jorge Soler’s salary was not negligible, it meant that he didn’t cost much prospect capital to obtain (with Luke Jackson as another throw-in with an underwater contract), and the other players mentioned in this piece were acquired either as free agents or on the waiver wire. Another way of saying that is that these are the guys who pretty much everyone else in the league passed on.

When you’ve decided to economize as much as possible, it can make sense to target players we previously employed. After all, we’ve scouted them intensively, we know their strengths and weaknesses better than anyone else, plus we have a better understanding of their cultural fit, an important consideration given how often Alex Anthopoulos talks about the importance of team chemistry.

(It’s certainly possible that his emphasis on chemistry is a meaningless platitude that allows him to answer questions without giving up any actual information. Nevertheless, if chemistry were important to him, it could be another reason for him to target retreads.)

But however sound the logic of bringing back our old friends, it didn’t work well this year. It’s a little like what happened with Mike Remlinger: the first time around, he was sensational, but the second time, he was a 40-year-old man who didn’t have it any more.

After the raft of injuries drastically changed our outlook for the season, Alex Anthopoulos more or less made the decision not to throw good money after bad. I disagreed, both then and now, because I thought that our core was strong enough that it made sense to bring in reinforcements to improve our odds for a deep October run, but I respect that Anthopoulos has to take the long view.

This offseason, however, we will need much more than another time around the bend with guys we’ve let go before. We need new blood, we need much more depth, and we need to bring it in from outside the organization.