San Diego Padres may have no choice but to trade Josh Naylor

We look at whether or not there is a future with the San Diego Padres for outfielder Josh Naylor in 2020 and beyond.

Back in 2016 the Miami Marlins traded their number two overall prospect at the time, Josh Naylor, in a trade to the San Diego Padres for Andrew Cashner and others.

The Marlins selected Naylor 12th overall in the 2015 MLB Draft.

Naylor, listed as a first baseman then, was a top 5 prospect in the Padres’ system. In 2016 he hit .264/.302 with 12 home runs in 481 at-bats between Single-A and High-A.

He remained a top 10 Padres’ prospect in 2017 after hitting .280/.346 with 10 home runs between High-A and Double-A.

They sent him to the Arizona Fall League that year and he hit .304/.337 with 3 home runs in just 19 games.

With San Diego beefing up the farm system during the rebuild, Naylor fell all the way down to being ranked the team’s 15th best prospect in 2018 despite putting up really good numbers.

In that 2018 season he hit .297/.383 with 17 home runs in just over 500 at-bats.

This past season Naylor was crushing the ball at Triple-A hitting .314/.389 with 10 home runs in 223 at-bats. That home run pace would make him a 25 home run hitter in the big leagues.

Well, the Padres called him up and that pace went down hitting just 8 home runs in 253 at-bats to go along with a .249/.315/.403 slashline.

Those certainly weren’t terrible numbers for Naylor’s first time in the big leagues, but FanGraphs still rated him as a negative offensive player.

Going into 2020 a lot of fans and media members believe Naylor can win the starting job in right field. But I’d tamper those expectations.

Where do you put him?

There has never really been a question about Naylor’s bat. Despite the poor showing with the Padres in 2019, I still believe he can be a really good Major League hitter.

Over five Minor League season he hit .288/.351 with a .791 OPS and 50 home runs in 1,742 at-bats.

But the question with Naylor has always been, where does he play?

He came into the league as a first baseman and that’s where the bulk of his playing time has been in the minors.

However, after San Diego signed Eric Hosmer to an eight-year deal, that pretty much ended any chance of Naylor playing first base.

And it’s not like he was a great defender at first to begin with. MLB.com noted that he would likely be a below-average defender at first.

Certainly he does not belong in the outfield either where he put up a – 2.2 UZR in 2019 with 6 errors in 64 games in the outfield.

To put that in perspective, that ranked him with the third most errors among outfielders last year and he played by far the least amount of games as those the others who made the same amount errors.

What do you do when you have a player who can hit but has no position in the field? You make him a DH.

And as for now, at least, the National League doesn’t have a DH even though it sounds like that could be coming soon.