Washington Nationals: Trevor Gott in serious risk of losing his roster spot

We move into our second week of 2018 Report Cards for the Washington Nationals as we look at reliever Trevor Gott, who is in danger of losing a roster spot.

The Washington Nationals had hoped for a lot out of Trevor Gott after acquiring him in the Yunel Escobar trade just under three years ago. But he hasn’t looked anywhere close to the pitcher the LA Angels had back in 2015.

He’s now spent parts of three seasons in the Nats organization and has generally just been organizational depth. The right-hander probably has a loyalty card for the Syracuse to D.C. trip with seven separate in-season promotions to the big leagues from Triple-A.

Gott finished the year with a 0-2 record, with two holds, a 5.68 ERA and a 1.526 WHIP. He didn’t really impress at all at the major league level and could now be on the outside looking in for 2019.

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The Positives for Gott

While his major league success was few and far between in 2018, he did at least have a bit of sustained success with the Triple-A Syracuse Chiefs. He ended the year in Syracuse with a 3.68 ERA in 29.1 innings while recording 38 strikeouts to just eight walks. He also got three saves in four opportunities to show he can at least handle high-pressure situations at that level.

While the right-hander did finish with that alarming 5.68 ERA and an even worse 6.21 FIP, there are signs that it was partially bad luck. His xFIP, which we looked at with Erick Fedde, was lower than his ERA at 4.87, which normalizes the HR/FB% to 10.5%. He did this by drastically increasing his groundball rate from 38.9% in 2016 and 35.3% in 2017, all the way up to 57.1% in 2018.

Areas for Improvement

To say that Trevor Gott was hit hard during 2018 would be one of the understatements of the year. According to Baseball Savant, he had the fourth highest average exit velocity in the majors of those with at least 50 batted balls at 91.9 mph. When you look at FanGraphs’ heatmap of his fastball from 2018, you can see there’s a lot of middle-middle pitches and wild misses. That allows hitters to key in on the middle-middle option, and do damage when it’s there.

And those wild misses were also a huge part of Gott’s struggles last season as well. He issued 10 walks in just 19 innings last season, while also only striking out 15 batters. His 1.50 strikeout-to-walk ratio ranked fourth worst on the team among those that pitched at least 10 innings. As a reliever, if you are going to walk that many hitters, you need to be able to K enough and Gott simply doesn’t have the control for that.

The Final Grade

With his ugly performance in 2018, Gott is now in serious danger of being let go by the team before the start of next season. He’s going to be out of options, so if the team deems him not worth a 25 man roster spot, he could quite easily be jettisoned.

Despite the positives he displayed in the minor leagues last season, it’s pretty tough to grade his major league performance that well. Trevor Gott becomes the first recipient of the lowest grade in our report cards after a pretty disastrous MLB stint. F

Remember to keep an eye out for more Washington Nationals 2018 Report Cards during the upcoming weeks here at District on Deck.