Just a week into the season and we already have arrived at a point where both of the top position player prospects in all of baseball could, nay, should be called up to the big leagues. For entirely different reasons, the time is now for Bryce Harper and Mike Trout to get called up.
In Washington, the Nationals are making everybody who picked them as dark horses before the season look good. They are 5-2 and on top of the NL East. It is still obviously very early, but the Nats have to be feeling good about their early success. However, all is not well in DC. Last year’s breakout star Mike Morse has been out since spring training with a torn lat and recently re-aggravated the injury, putting him on “total shutdown” for at least six weeks. For a team that was already struggling to fill out their lineup before the season, this poses a big problem. Fortunately, the solution isn’t hard to find.
Before the season began, the Nationals were concerned about their vacancy in center field and considered breaking camp with uber-prospect Bryce Harper in right field with Jayson Werth in center. They ultimately decided against it, in large part because of the defensive issues such an alignment would represent. But with Morse out for the foreseeable future, the Nats have another opening in the outfield that Harper can fill without creating defensive problems.
The other reason Harper started the season in the minors is that Washington wasn’t sure he was ready for the Majors. Based on his .609 OPS in the very early going in Triple-A, the Nats may have been on to something. However, it is clear that they are eager to audition him at the big league level. They now have the perfect opportunity to do so. By calling up Harper now and handing him the left field job, they can give him a relatively low-pressure trial in the Majors. If after six weeks Harper looks clearly over-matched, they put Morse back in left and return Harper to the minors no worse for the wear. But Harper makes good on his immense promise, then they have what we like to call a good problem. Either the Nats can revisit their plan to move Werth to center or they can shift Morse to first base, where he would make for a fine and potentially very necessary upgrade over Adam LaRoche who is scuffling badly to start the year. Really, it is a no-lose situation for the Nationals.
Meanwhile, in Anaheim, stud prospect Mike Trout should also be in line for an early promotion to the majors. While Harper is showing his youth in Triple-A, Trout, who is just 14 months older than Harper, is laying waste to the Pacific Coast League. In just eight games, Trout boasts a .389 batting average, .981 OPS and three stolen bases. Yes, that’s a small sample size, but he very much appears to be a man amongst boys in the PCL even though he isn’t even old enough to drink.
What Trout does have in common with Harper is that his team also needs him in left field. Much to the chagrin of the Halos, Vernon Wells is their incumbent left fielder and he looks every bit like the trainwreck he was last season with just a .609 OPS and a slew of awful at-bats to his credit so far. The Angels’ problems are bigger than Wells though. Despite spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars this off-season, the Angels have stumbled out of the gate at 2-4 and their lineup just isn’t clicking, even with Albert Pujols now prominently involved. What the Angels really need is a spark in their batting order and Trout’s unique blend of plate discipline, power and blazing speed could be exactly the catalyst they need to get their offense on track.
The risk here is that the Angels don’t have the safety net that Washington has. If they promote Trout, they are essentially telling Wells that his Angel career is over since they have no place to put him. With Vernon owed over $63 million for the next three years, they better be awfully sure that he’s washed up and that Trout is ready. All signs indicate both of those statements to be true, but the Halos must tread with caution since they would be going past the point of no return.
Calling up either prospect at such an early point in the season may seem like an act of desperation since the teams could have just had their respective prospect on the Opening Day roster, but that was a week ago and sometimes that is all it takes.
