To add more context to this, the person did think Nate was due to regress to his form at the end of his Braves tenure and with the Pirates. I just don't see it. I think Nate is what he is -- bad arm, good range, limited power, good contact, great speed, etc. I'm just not seeing drastic shifts one way or another. OTOH, I could see someone like Chris Davis coming back down to Earth much more.
I was caught off-guard by this because I never really thought of Nate as trade-bait or losing his spot. LF isn't what 3B was for us last year. After seeing all the comments here about him probably being a DH if he were to come up and a 4th OF at best, it sounds like he has his limits
I got beat up by quite a few people in the offseason because I said re-signing Nate should be a top priority, and I would have given him a 3 year deal for 2-3m per.
SO many people have gotten caught up in the bad stats, but if you were actually following his career, there's a lot you'd miss reading the stat sheets. When he first got to ATL he was still hitting as well as he was during his early PIT years, during his 2nd year there he suffered an abdominal tear that not only stole part of a season, but it takes a while to fully recover from those injuries. He also had a concussion (I'm not sure which injury came first and which second, but they were back to back), and we all know how long those injuries will hang with a player. Both are the kind of injuries where you can get back on the field, but takes a while to get back into playing form. People tend to look at stats in those periods and just write players off as sucking, missing the lingering affect of some of those tricky injuries.
When he went back to PIT after ATL non-tendered him, there was a little shell shock since he a) still wasn't fully recovered from that 2nd injury, and wasn't received like the fan favorite he was during his first stay there (he admitted this bothered him a lot later), so when he got caught and the O's scooped him up, they were getting him close to fully back. Hence why it was night and day here and before.
If you looked at his stats from his O's time, they were almost dead on lined up with his all-star years, but people had perceptions that he was just a bad player having a fluke stretch and ignored the good years he had and the injuries he had worked through.
