This isn't about Phil Wood; let's get that out there front and center.  Phil seems like a fine guy -- whip-smart and probably the best-looking Old School Washington Baseball Enthusiast alive today.  Furthermore, Phil actually knows stuff about the current Washington Nationals, whereas I only know some stuff that doesn't really involve the Washington Nationals.  So keep his perspective, and my lack of perspective, in mind when I add some comments on this:

I won't pretend to know exactly what happened, but my hunch is that Mr. Kasten decided early on to give Jimbo as much rope as he needed to hang himself. Would it make Stan look bad in the eyes of some? Sure. But, inasmuch as I was told by multiple sources in 2006 that Stan intended to fire Bowden within an hour of getting the club - and then was blocked from doing so by ownership - I believe that Stan decided to bide his time. It took longer than he expected to get shed of Jim, but Rizzo was his guy all along.

Okay.  The Lerners won the Nats-grab contest in the spring of 2006, becoming installed as owners not too long after that.  Kasten was, from appearances, their white knight; he brought with him the sweet smell of baseball success with the Braves, plus he's a real pro on the business end of things.  Everybody smiled and mugged for some cameras and recommended the brisket, and then they got to stuff with substance eventually.  Kasten wanted Bowden out, but, Phil states (and he's certainly not the only one to do so), the Lerners insisted on keeping the guy. And so Kasten waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.

Continue reading this post »

It's almost the close of the season -- hurry up, close of the season! -- and the next loss will be the one hundredth.  Again.

Surely, better times are ahead.  How can they not be?  On the Die Hard scale, we're about at the point where John McClane drags himself into the bathroom and picks glass out of his bloodied feet.  You don't think it can get too much worse than that, and any additional bad news, like the FBI taking over things, is more an annoyance than a calamity.  What does it matter if the building is running on backup generators when you're extricating large shards of plate glass from your arches?  Fists with your toes, indeed!

But Die Hard also teaches us that just because you've picked the glass out of your feet doesn't mean that other bumps in the road can't happen.  You could run into a bad guy set on revenge, or you could be forced to repel down a high-rise roof with only a fire hose at your disposal, or you could find out that even though everyone else is safe your wife has been taken hostage.  All is not necessarily roses just because you've hit bottom.

Using such sage source material as a guide, let us begin with the premise that not all will go smoothly starting next year, even if things might not seem as bad as they have been this year.  Do not fall into the trap of thinking Karl is really dead just because you've strangled him and left him to withstand a major explosion.  Let me, your buddy Reginald VelJohnson, pump a few bullets into that idea.  Um, so to speak.

So here's a list of potential perception pratfalls for 2010.  Note that some of these perceptions will bear fruit next season.  I'm not denying that.  But reliance on most of these positions will prove quite frustrating in the end, and reliance on all of them is just plain nuts.   

Continue reading this post »

He's going to sign, people.

 

This isn't directed specifically at anyone -- not at anyone here; not anyone at Natty Farm Authority; not anyone at Chico's place; not even at our two Nobel laureates in the television broadcast booth, Mssrs. Carpenter and Dibble -- and surely I know how the game of anticipatory news is played, but, really, people, it's a lot more fun just to let midnight approach gracefully.  In the meantime, do something good in this world.  Take that elderly old widow across the street to the grocery store.  Hug an abandoned kitty.  Maybe even do some work.

And, if it turns out that he doesn't sign, you have my reluctant permission to toss rotten tomatoes at, say, Chris Needham.

I spent perhaps ninety seconds flipping through the unabridged Webster's Third New International Dictionary collecting dust here on my office bookshelf looking for a word descriptive of our Washington Nationals, specifically the bullpen.  I settled for a noun, ghorkhar.

Ghorkhar (noun):  a wild ass of northwestern India believed to be identical with the onager.

I spent no further time on the project, and, consequently, have no idea what an onager is.  Ghorkhar seemed sufficient to me at the time, however, what with its definition's reference to a "wild ass."

A wild ass:  that's the Nationals bullpen.  Or, if you prefer to express the thought as a pseudo-adjective, the Nats have a wild-ass bullpen.

Continue reading this post »

This is my final post.

I would love to depart with a precious little theme, like As the Nationals truly commit to the future with the Jack McGeary signing, I realize there is not much left to say, nay, to criticize, and so I pack it up and walk into the blogging sunset humming an optimistic tune and bearing a broad smile on my countenance. Actually, that precious little theme would be layered with all kinds of cheese, so I am fortunate it is not based in reality.

In fact, my earliest resolve to give up blogging came last November. My resolve did not sufficiently bond or otherwise become strong enough to pull the trigger until early June, when I notified the good folks at Sports Blog Nation that I could not continue up to the network's expectations. And, if I could not continue up to the network's expectations, then there was little sense continuing on the network's blog. One cannot imagine anybody really cares why I made this decision, of course, and I do not expect you the reader to respond with any particular interest. There is no fascinating or lurid reason. I just couldn't maintain it; something had to go, and blogging was it. I agreed to post sporadically until a new blogger could be found, and found a new blogger was.

As you can tell, the new Federal Baseball blogger is e chigliak, formerly of DC Daily. I wish him the very best in his new endeavor, and I will continue to be a Federal Baseball reader.

* * * *

I'm going to make a token attempt not to drag out this last post - I promise - but I do have something on the order of thirty-one months' experience at Nationals blogging, both here and at the former Nationals Inquirer. This is certainly not the longest tenure in the so-called Natosphere; it might not even be in the top five. But it is a goodly amount of time. A kid born in January 2005 could, by sitcom logic, drive expertly by now; if I had held out six or eight more months, the kid could be performing special ops missions or inventing a hilarious refrigerator magnet. Oh well. At any rate, I figured I could use my remaining time here to impart some final reflections. For your benefit, I won't even reference Die Hard!

See you after the jump.

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I'm not sure what else to say about the Bonds thing, so I might as well resort to the old Homer J. standby. You should try it some time: Don't you hate pants? It rolls off the tongue and is strangely metaphorical. I remember reading on some idiot screenwriter's blog about how he thought "Snakes on a Plane" was this deceptively telling phrase, indeed worthy of mantra status. That's pushing it, but Don't you hate pants? The "pants" could be any of society's ills or any individual's bugaboos.

No, really.

Ah hell, I'm here now, so I might as well flesh this one out. And by that I mean I simply don't care.

Well, that's not entirely true. I care about Hank Aaron. I don't think he has any sort of entitlement to sit on top of a record list in perpetuity, but I have absolute respect for what he has accomplished in life. True story: Parker Field, the old park here in Richmond, closed its doors one night late in 1984. I was eight years old, and I was at the ballpark the night of Parker Field's last game. So was Hank Aaron, who at that time worked in Atlanta's front office. Aaron served as the dignitary for that final game, and during pregame introductions he walked up one of the aisles and shook the hands of several Parker Field patrons. I was one of them; I shook the great Hank Aaron's hand. I was all of eight, but did I know who he was? Hell yes. He was Hank Aaron.

Harry Caray was by far my most exciting childhood baseball brush with greatness, but similarly Hank Aaron was by far my most proud.

As for the Bonds factor, I find myself indifferent. Look, I'm not a child anymore; I've regressed, and so I'm an attorney. There are a few types of attorneys. There's the ridiculously overzealous hyper-prosecutor/hanging judge, the meely moral relativist, the unconscionable scourge of ethical unscrupulousness, and the unremittingly maddening sophist. On my good days, I am none of the above; on most days, I tend to resemble the last.

I could construct an argument about how this all doesn't really matter, about how baseballdom's relentless and childlike obsession with quasi-mythical numbers and hierarchical lists is utterly sophomoric, about how if you want to regard Hank Aaron (or Babe Ruth before him) as the Home Run King then by all means do so. Whether Bonds surpasses Aaron on a list of raw home run totals really needn't diminish what Aaron was as a player or is as a baseball legend. I could waste my time doing that.

I could.

But I won't. It's pointless. Instead, I'm going to direct a quick flash of trademark condescension at every single announcer who has indicated the weight of the world is on his shoulders for the horrible burden of maybe, maybe having to call Bonds's record-breaking homer. Screw you, fellas. I'm not going to name-drop, but I have some idea of what your job entails. You are among a very elite fraternity of voices of this game, in some ways the noblest stewards of the National Pastime. Your job is not easy. Granted.

But get off it, you jerks. You're living the dream of countless people: calling games played by people who live the dreams of all those aforementioned people from back when they were dreaming as kids. You're a lucky man, Ted Leitner. Stop taking yourself so damned seriously.

As for the rest, check out McCovey Chronicles. You won't regret that.

This is what Jim Bowden told Barry Svrluga after the Nats in fact did not trade anyone prior to this afternoon's non-waivers trade deadline. The statement is true, quite literally true.

If the team didn't have to trade Alfonso Soriano, a prospective free agent, one year ago today, then it certainly did not have to trade Chad Cordero and Jon Rauch, who are under club control for another three years. What Bowden said is correct, of course. If the offers out there for Cordero or Rauch were insufficient -- and, from today's deadline coverage, it certainly appeared the Mets were not willing to expand a deal for Cordero -- then Bodes and company were under no compulsion to trade either of the two relievers. A team always has options at the trade deadline, and the Nats were definitely no exception.

Nevertheless, I am vaguely disappointed. I'll get to that feeling in a second, but first I need to put something out in the open, to stipulate it, if you will: it's hard enough to evaluate a trade that's consummated, but it's doubly hard to evaluate a trade that was never made. It's not something that should be too arrogantly done by bloggers -- if such restraint is feasible for bloggers -- because, when the flop hits the fan, we lack a firm grasp of the flop and are obscured by the fan.

Such was the case last year -- has it ever been resolved what exactly the Nats were offered for Soriano? -- and such is largely the case this year. Granted, the details are a bit firmer this time around. Nats.com, for instance, provided the straight dope of what was offered for Cordero. Or at least it appears to be the straight dope, or at least decidedly non-crooked swank:

• Cordero for Phil Humber: Thanks but no thanks.
  
• Cordero for Carlos Quentin: Never on the table.
  
• Cordero for Carlos Gonzalez: Asked and answered, and the Snakes said no.

So there.

But wait, there's more! It turns out -- admittedly somewhat inconceivably -- teams were looking at the Nats' prospects. Yeah, I know; the Nats' prospects suck. Except they don't, or at least some of them don't, and a few among them are actually quite promising. Colton Willems and Glenn Gibson are both 19, both doing quite well at Low-A Vermont, and both on the radar of some other clubs, according to Nats.com, according to sources.

Now, progress is nice, but the time is not exactly ripe to go high on the hog here, if you'll pardon the inartfully mixed metaphors. For instance, I submit for your perusal this recent Nats.com article, in relevant part:

(emphasis added)

Uh, yeah -- filled. Let's see: there's Lannan, who's performed a nifty four-level rise this season; Ballester, who's making fine progress; Mock, who's been injured and disappointing so far but has some untapped potential; and the three guys at Vermont. Yes, I know there are a few guys I didn't mention, but those are the pitchers in the minor league system with the most promise at the moment. (Not to discount from Chico, who's holding his own in the bigs.) Is that a system filled with quality arms? Get off it. It's two guys who have made it through the trials far enough to be on the precipice -- or, in Lannan's case, the recipient of a preliminary look -- of the majors. The Vermont guys are doing great, for sure, but the emphasis should be placed on "doing." They're in medias res, and much closer to the start than the finish; we won't know anything truly significant about them for quite awhile, and that's on the order of years rather than months. "Filled"? No way.

Willfully childish characterizations aside, the general point is that the organization's pitching depth is improving. And, Nats.com reported, other teams wanted a shot at the Vermont guys. This is a time to enhance that organizational depth, not relinquish it.

So, let's say we get to 3:45 this afternoon, fifteen minutes prior to the deadline. And let's say -- and, trust me, I'm just spitfiring here -- some of us are, you know, really pining for some trade news. Where's the trades? Why haven't there been any trades? Is everybody alright over there, because I don't see any trades? Hey, are they going to make any trades? Again, I'm just going through the motions of an exercise here, you know. But let's say we were thinking such things fifteen minutes prior to the deadline. We might have even heard rumors of what was offered, what was rejected, and what was under final, frantic consideration. But I guaran-Nats-an-tee you we wouldn't have known other teams were saying, "Sure, we'll trade; just give us Colton Williems." Or we wouldn't have known -- and, in fact, we didn't know until Bowden's comments after the deadline were passed on -- that the team had a suitor for Dmitri Young that backed off before a trade was consummated. (Hello, Minnesota Twins!) It's hard enough to frame a cogent argument when we have the necessary info placed before us; it's somewhat pointless when we're blind to relevant facts.

Nevertheless, nevertheless . . .

And finally we reach my vague disappointment. The Nats have, by Bowden's own admission, been "treading water" in terms of player development acquisitions for the past month. The problem is that July is normally a pretty good month for player development acquisitions if you're motivated to grab some talent. This isn't to say you can snap your fingers and gobble up a Grade-A prospect or two on demand. You have to have some talent to offer in exchange, and, as Bowden argued, other teams are more reticent to give up top young talent these days. But if you need to enhance your organizational depth -- and, rosy soundbytes aside, this is something the Nats desperately, vigilantly, comprehensively, and tirelessly need to do -- then you have to put in a good faith effort to that end and then some.

Instead, at present, the Nats have received nothing for Ronnie Belliard, nothing for Dmitri Young, nothing for Jon Rauch, and nothing for Chad Cordero. That's a lot of nothing. Granted, the first three guys weren't going to bring in a tremendous stock of talent, but they would have fetched something if the Nats had been willing to sell. Instead, they brought the team nothing.

Again, Bowden is right, and let's be clear about that: Washington didn't need to trade anyone. Rauch and Cordero, as mentioned, are under team control; Belliard and Young, you might have heard, are recent recipients of surprising multi-year deals. There's only one guy who really needs to be traded, but that's Ray King, and he doesn't really need to be traded, not yet. Hello, August 31 deadline.

But still, but still . . .

This isn't like last year, when the Nats knew (some new CBA trepidation aside) that they'd get two picks for Soriano. The Nats have one prospective free agent now, and that's King. I haven't exhaustively researched the matter, but I'm presuming he won't bring any compensation to the dance. And that's that. No deadline prospects, no compensation draft picks. These young talents, these prospects, that the Nats need don't grow on trees, spontaneously combust, or hang ten in Kamino's surfy oceans.

Is this organization really at a point where it can tread water in terms of acquiring young talent? My, that was quick.

Personally -- and this is one of those "bloggers sticking his neck out fruitlessly" moments -- I believe the Nats should have moved Rauch. What Bowden says about Rauch's salary and club control status is correct, of course, but what are the chances Rauch is chuggin' along as the team's setup man when it comes time to contend -- I mean really contend, not '05 contend -- in, you know, three or four or whatever years? I don't know much about this game of baseball, but I know you don't do a few things when projecting players. You don't plan on things as simultaneously ridiculous and mundane as backup catchers of the future, and you don't etch into stone the identity of your eighth-inning pitcher years in advance. Bowden's quote, as pertaining to Rauch, sounds like a bit of an etch job. Let's say the Nats are ready to contend in 2010 -- this scenario involves a heavy infusion of talent, obviously, especially among position players. Is Rauch still around? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he's long become ineffective by then; maybe, after hitting the arbitration game, he's long priced himself out of the team's plans. Remember where guys like Rauch, Colome, and Rivera have come from, and that where is nowhere in particular. Why pay millions upon millions for middle relief, unless you're the Baltimore Orioles of course?

So yeah, I guess I'm quibbling here. Rauch wouldn't have brought a championship-caliber prospect, if that's the standard Bowden is setting forth in these discussions, but he would have brought something. And that someone representing the something might, just might, be around come 2010 or 2012 or whenever, whereas Rauch might or probably will not be. You could apply that same principle to Belliard or Young or maybe even the Chief, too, but I'm not going to press my luck.

One more thought occurs to me, and it's that we could be seeing a change of course for this team. Guys are remaining rather than departing. In some cases, the stated reasons for standing pat are, if you'll pardon, a bit moronic:

Just think about that for a second. Prior to this year, the Nats were concerned about Nick Johnson's health, and they had nothing at first base. (Well, Larry Broadway; with apologies to the Broadway family, that's pretty much nothing.) One of Bowden's greatest strengths is his ability to cast a line and find bounce-back guys. He found a good one in Young, and now it's time to quell his ambition for reclamation projects? Meaning no offense to Dmitri, who has been pretty much awesome so far, I just don't see why the team wouldn't try to rinse and repeat the process for 2008. (As for the rest of 2007, well, who gives two craps?)

Unless, that is, the Nats are in the midst of a course correction and, instead of picking at some marrow off the proverbial carrion, they are loading for bear. So they keep Belliard, keep Young, keep Rauch, keep Cordero, keep anyone and everyone who can contribute in the very near term.

That would be an interesting way to go, but let's be clear about something: it would take a hell of a lot of loading to get anywhere. They'd need a centerfielder, a bona fide slugger, a real leadoff man, and something on the order of three to four reliable starting pitchers. We're talking about a very active and expensive offseason.

Is that possible? As intriguing as the prospect may be, I'd guess not. More than likely, the plan -- to the extent there really is a plan, as in "The Plan" -- remains roughly the same. It will just take time and perspective to see how today fits in that vision.

But we've got time for that perspective to materialize. After all, as Bowden says, they didn't have to trade anybody.

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a Ronnie Belliard re-signing to post? Or it takes a Ronnie Belliard re-signing to laugh, it takes a Dmeat-Train re-signing to cry? Whatever. The Nats inked Ronnie B. to a two-year extension today, and here I am taking time out of my busy schedule and crazy social calendar to make a note of it.

So sayeth Das Svrluga. By happy coincidence, Nats 320 posted an interview with Belliard today. Belliard indicated he enjoyed playing in Washington and for Manny Acta, which cannot really be considered a surprise. (Sometimes, if for no reason other than novelty, I'd love to see a player, when asked about his host city, reply, "Dude, that place is the slimiest mudhole this side of Dagobah" -- or, you know, words to a less dorky effect.) Anyway, Belliard also said quite a few interesting things, like an explanation for why he plays second base while positioned in the opposition bullpen.

I cannot decide whether Belliard's signing says more about the malleability of the organizational plan (hereinafter, of course, "The Plan") or says nothing about The Plan, or whether the two are functionally the same thing when discussing The Plan. Is it overly cynical to postulate that just about every transaction, statement, manuever, or movement will be construed by some as not only in light of The Plan, but also in furtherance thereof? Hell, I swear Stan Kasten could announce tomorrow that he's going out for the role of the King of Siam in a community production held at the local middle school and a sizable contingent would note he's doing so as a calculated measure to gain in-roads in terms of Far East talent accumulation. Does signing Belliard to a two-year contract extension say anything at all about team-building? Must it?

It doesn't, and it needn't. All it means, as the preliminary Nats.com article notes, is Belliard won't be traded prior to next Tuesday's deadline. Or at least it means he more than likely won't be.

The article also states that the extension additionally means Belliard will be a part of the Nats' long-term future. Keeping in mind I'm a mere outsider -- and keeping in mind the phrase "long-term future" can refer to varying terms of, uh, longness -- I'm not so sure about that. The extension means the Nats now hold Belliard's rights through the 2009 season. But, pursuant to the metaphorical "bundle of rights" a property-owner holds, the Nats by and large dictate what to do with those rights. They could well keep Belliard through 2009; on the other hand, barring the extremely unlikely event the contract extension contains a no-trade clause, they could also trade Belliard along the way. It is not as though Belliard will accrue ten-and-five rights during the life of the contract.

Let's return to those salary figures for a moment: $1.6 million next year, $1.9 million in 2009. Those are correct? They're all we have at the moment; we'll presume they're correct. [Whoops, Nats.com has $3.5 million now. That's correct.] Either Belliard is an extraordinarily charitable chap, or in a moment of extreme clairvoyance he saw his professional demise and decided to get what he can while he can. From where I'm sitting, this seems like below-market -- or at least below what the market for Belliard will be in a matter of months. Granted, he settled for an NRI and $850,000 prior to this season, but the guy is hitting above .300 and has established he can fill in at all infield positions. Belliard has had to have reclaimed a good bit of value.

You can look at that two ways. First, you can say -- correctly -- the Nats have re-signed a quality contributor, a guy who can at worst fill in at a couple infield positions and provide a nice bench bat, for a relatively de minimis cost. Belliard doesn't need to continue hitting .300 for his contributions to be worth $1.6 to 1.9 million these days, even after considering much of his value lies in his batting average. It's quite possible Belliard has indeed been locked into the Nats' long-term future.

But that needn't be the case and, as a second matter, the contract extension would seem to accentuate Belliard's trade value next season for the same reasons the Nats themselves would find him valuable. Let's presume Belliard continues to hit and is indeed hitting well next season. A contender comes along and notes not only is the fellow the type of guy who could help in '08 but, hey! -- he's signed through '09, too. And for less than two million?

Come next July, Belliard will be viewed as neither a rental nor a millstone. Not that he could haul in a Grade-A prospect, of course, but he could stand to be an attractive trade bait. All he has to do is continue performing.

* * * *

The other thought Belliard's extension invokes -- and it is noted a bit in the Capitol Punishment post linked above, which you've no doubt read already, of course -- is whether the move impacts Felipe Lopez's future with the club. I guess it's too early to say. What we do know is that:

• Lopez is arbitration-eligible at the end of the season;
  
• Lopez can play both short and second; and
  
• Lopez is better at second than short.

Oh, and we also know Cristian Guzman is signed through '08, and he's a shortstop.

I'd imagine the club hopes Lopez finishes this season with a strong kick. To tell the truth, I'm inclined to write off this season as bad campaigns for both Lopez and Austin Kearns and hope for bounce-backs next season. So, I'd say the club should pay Lopez his due in arbitration (Kearns, of course, is signed long-term), although I understand it isn't my money at play, and the Lerners don't seem too excited about ponying up any more of their money than absolutely necesary.

But Belliard's continued presence does give the team unanticipated options for next year and beyond. The Nats could maintain the status quo (ante-Guzman injury), employ Belliard as a bench presence, and get decent value out of that kind of contribution. Or they could trade Lopez for what they can. Or they could even non-tender Lopez. The last option seems unlikely, though one could argue Lopez has backed into a discussion on that on the merits.

At any rate, this is an interesting development. And hey, if Belliard is dealt next July 31 for prospects, you can always say that's about The Plan, too.

It's July, which means a few things. High gas prices. Old men modeling the latest in knee-sock and Hawaiian shirt fashions. NFL talk on sports radio. And, yes, baseball trading season.

All of these topics seem germane to a blog post, except it seems Stan already has the Hawaiian shirt angle covered and, seeing as it's been nearly three weeks since I posted anything and it could be eternity until I post again, perhaps it would be best to talk about baseball, which means talking about trading season, especially as applied to Our Washington Nationals. As it is, there seems to be a lot of Nats trade talk going down. I'm way behind the curve when it comes to Natosphering, but it seems much of the discussion focuses on our Husky Triumvirate of Dmitri, Ronnie, and Burger.

I'll simply refer you to the usual sources on such discussions and leave the Fat at that. I appreciate the discussion, but I find it overwrought. This is not to say I don't think Dmitri Young has not reclaimed his trade value, because I really think he has. And it's not that I think Ronnie Belliard can't help a contender, beause I suspect he can. And it's not that I think Ray King could be a useful pitcher, because I don't. That's all fine, but this kind of discussion overlooks our most transactionally-mobile player -- the man, history suggests, who is most likely to change teams out of all of Washington's stars.

Tony Batista.

I'm not really sure Batista's appeal demands much exposition, but just in case, I've prepared a Brandeis brief on the matter. If you haven't realized it before now, you will certainly recognize it now. More than any other commodity, Tony Batista is not long for this team.

The Historical Appeal

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man who replaced Cal Ripken. Forget your Ryan Minor references; when Cal walked away, he handed the positional torch to Tony Batista.

Upon Ripken's retirement at the conclusion of the 2001 season, the Baltimore Orioles faced the hugest of holes to fill at the hot corner. How would the O's cope? Fortunately, they had one Leocadio Batista on hand. And they didn't miss a beat. Batista bopped thirty-one homers (twice as many as Cal had in his final season!), and he made the transition incredibly seamless. The O's didn't even lose a spot in the standings!

The Professional Appeal

It is no surprise that a player of Batista's historical stature would be such an accomplished professional. One of the hallmarks of professionalism is the ability to adapt to changes in conditions, a trait that enables an individual to thrive in a myriad contexts. Batista has amply demonstrated this skill.

When he first established himself in the major leagues, he found himself in a game typified by power. In 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were captivating our nation with their long ball exploits, Batista was wowing devotees of the expansion Diamondbacks with his potent bat. Batista clubbed eighteen homers in barely a half-season of at-bats, and his power ability was only enhanced when he moved on to Toronto the following season. He bashed seventy-two homers over the next two seasons, including an astounding forty-one in 2000.

The baseball world took notice of Batista's long ball ability, and he soon became known as one of the tactic's finest practitioner. In that monstrous 2000 season, Batista earned an All-Star berth. Two seasons later, when Batista took the positional baton from a legend, Tony whomped thirty-one more homers and earned a second All-Star berth. You can count on one hand the number of American League third sackers from the last decade who have had earned multiple All-Star appearances -- perhaps two hands, but obviously the point stands with just as much force.

But Batista did not rest on his laurels. In the years 2003-04, he averaged just about thirty homers per campaign. He was an elite power hitter.

By 2006, when Batista returned to the States, America's game had changed. Power-hitting was sooooooo 1998 (-2004), and good old-fashioned hittin'-'em-where-they-ain't was back in vogue. Ozzie Guillen's SmartBall reigned supreme, and Tony Batista no doubt realized he needed to change his approach to fit in with the changing times. To everthing there is a season . . .

So Batista adapted. One thing traditional baseball fans tend to like is a nice ribbie-to-homer ratio. If you're an Adam Dunn type and drive in two or three runners per homer, then you're just not a sound baseball player. Tony Batista used to average three ribbies per homer, but guess what? Upon his return to America the Beautiful, he's averaged over five ribbies per homer. His current ribbie/homer ratio is mathematically indistuishable from that of the great Ozzie Smith in 1987!

The man is a professional at this game, no matter how the game is played.

The Aesthetic Appeal

Not only are Batista's career numbers intriguing, but so is his approach at the plate. When you see Tony Batista at the plate, you know Tony Batista is at the plate.

Bill James once commented that you can identify greatness by locating uniqueness. Which players are truly similar to, say, Babe Ruth or Willie Mays or Barry Bonds? Very few, if any. And whose batting stance is similar to Tony Batista's? Indeed.

The stance typifies intelligence. His left foot, flared from the batter's box, resembles that of a jab step in basketball. Truly, the man sets himself in triple-threat position. He might swing. Occasionally, he might make contact. Sometimes -- once in awhile -- he'll let the pitch pass by. The pitcher doesn't know what to expect; the hurler is intimidated.

But we, as fans, appreciate. We realize his approach is designed to strike the ball at an optimum angle, not unlike the winning strategy in Nintendo Golf lo those years ago. In Golf, the successful player did not strike the ball straight-on. No; the experienced player knew the key was to employ an extreme fade. So he positioned Mario well off-center, aligned far to the left of the target. A position, you might have noticed, not at all unlike that adopted by Tony Batista.

Hit 'em high and far, Tony!

The Popular Appeal

Given the many stops that Batista has made throughout his career (see below), and given his abilities noted above, it is no surprise he has attracted legions of fans. Crowds line up to see Tony's batting practice exploits, or just to see him lean against the rail during pre-game warmups. With Tony Batista, it's all good.

One undeniable fact is that he draws throngs of young fans. Our future stars and Svrlugas love him, as attested by this picture I lifted off the internets:

[Young autograph-seekers mob Tony Batista prior to a July home date. (Photo Courtesy M.L.B. Advanced Media.)]

Given Batista's popularity, it's no wonder so many teams have clamored to acquire him. Speaking of which . . .

The Demand Appeal

Not surprisingly, Batista has found his services in significant demand. It seems everyone wants a shot at this premium talent!

Tony started with Oakland way back when. Billy Beane may be a smart guy, but he missed the boat on this one. To be fair, Beane isn't alone in this regard. From Oakland, it was on to Arizona. From Arizona, it was on to Baltimore. Nevertheless, the peak demand for Tony Batista had not yet developed.

By 2004, the demand for Batista's services had reached international proportions. The Montreal club had a third base hole, and they were willing to pay international fares to get a particular third sacker's attention. The move paid off -- too well, as it were. Thirty-two homers and a hundred-ten ribbies speak loudly, and the folks in Japan were listening. By 2005, Batista had become an intercontinental superstar!

Tony returned to the United States the following season, but the club who called him back, the Minnesota Twins, soon learned not even they could not hold on to him forever. From Minnesota, it was on to Washington. Along that journey, Batista even drew the attention of a minor league team, the Columbus Clippers.

Simply put, it seems like everyone wants to employ Tony Batista. It only seems logical to conclude this behavior will continue.

Sorry, Nationals fans. Let us enjoy Tony Batista while we can. A player like him doesn't come along every day.

When I was in middle school and high school, there was this guy a year ahead of me. He was really good at sports -- baseball, basketball, football, and looking like he could kick anybody's ass -- so we'll call him something authentic like Jock. They used to say all kinds of things about Jock, as they tend to do about anybody of such school-yard stature. They said he was related to an all-star forward (which was almost certainly not true). They said college scouts used to come out to see him when he was in the eighth grade (definitely not true). They said he roomed with A-Rod while on some amateur all-star team (perhaps true). And, according to sites like Baseball Reference and the Baseball Cube, they say he's the only player in the history of my high school to be taken in the MLB draft.

This is all to say Jock was a pretty big deal around my town. As it turned out, he wasn't a top pick, but word is he got a nice bonus. By my recollection, his pro career got off to a decent start but stalled out in low-A ball, when he first couldn't find a position and then couldn't hit. Jock is more of a memory these days; I haven't seen or heard of him in years, and the only reason his professional career is a matter of public record is because teh internets makes damn near everything a matter of public record.

But people still remember Jock in my town. Just a week or two ago, I was standing in line at Firestone -- a nearly interminable line, as it were, which gave me ample opportunity to strike up a conversation with the guy behind me. I noticed he was wearing a golf shirt bearing the name of the baseball team of the other high school in my town, which just happened to be the state champion and a top ten team in the country this season. He was the coach. Great guy -- a little nervous about his car passing inspection, but a really gracious sort and with ample knowledge of area baseball. Oh sure, he remembered Jock. If you were familiar with sports in my area, you'd certainly remember Jock.

And that's what Jock is, in context. He's nothing much on a broader scale; maybe he would even be considered something of a disappointment, if any of the front office or scouting types of the big league club that drafted him were still around, which they more than likely aren't. Jock's forgotten, and if you had no reason to care about him, then you wouldn't. But if you invested some pride in him and his accomplishments, then you would remember him. And you would be proud.

* * * *

In their own way, those are our Washington Nationals at the mid-way point of the 2007 season. If you have no reason to care about the Nats, then you might not recognize the significance of this season's performance, might not understand their fans have a special sort of pride in their efforts, and might not fathom how Boz could put the word "boast" in the same sentence as "32-43 record." Well, perhaps that last item is a bit unfathomable, especially when underscored by the team's 1-5 week following that column's publishing date. But when people don't invest much interest in something, their memories tend to be short. How many people who shrug at the Nats' 33-48 record remember back to three months ago, when many national pundits predicted heavy, "historically bad" losses?

Such predictions are something of a two-way sword. On the one hand, as Loverro implied the other day, a 120-loss prediction is tantamount to a competitive get-out-of-jail free card. For this reason, Loverro contends the Nats should be "thankful" for such predictions, because they in essence preemptively reframed expectations for a team that is, on the whole, performing at a 96-loss pace. On the other hand, those national predictions are just as relevant today as they were in mid-March, which is to say not very relevant at all. As we have explored numerous times, it's mighty hard to spot an historically bad team in advance, and it was just as presumptuous to predict this team to be one. On their own merits, the Nats are a bad team, and you'd surely recognize that from afar, but they are also a competitive team capable of good baseball, and that's something we can surely appreciate from a far more attuned posture.

So, with another three months left, here we stand. They're our group of Jocks. We will remember this team, even if no one else will. And we'll remember it fondly and, yes, with some pride. We'll know, on a broader level, the team isn't much at all. But -- if I may be so bold -- to us, the 2007 Nats are something. We'll recall this team fondly, even if our reasons, like the reasons for my hometown's fondness for Jock, are mainly provincial.

* * * *

A quick review of what the first half of the Nats' season has established:

Manny Acta Is Good At This Managing Thing

It's tough enough evaluating a manager. There are a lot of factors to consider -- lineup selection, in-game strategy, pitcher usage, and demeanor, to say nothing of won/lost record -- and getting a firm grasp on a manager's effectiveness is often hard enough before one really dwells on how much the manager actually influences the team's performance. This is particularly true of Acta. One wonders how he could have possibly been a failure in this first season of such low expectations.

But, whatever expectations could realistically be placed on Acta, I believe he's far exceeded them. Acta draws an occasional eyebrow, like most managers do, but he's a steady, positive guy. I'm not claiming any inside knowledge (far from it, of course, since I'm decidedly an outsider), but everything I've read about the team's clubhouse indicates Acta has the team's respect. And, it has been said, gaining the players' respect is the one, non-negotiable ability a manager must possess.

Acta is firm when he has to be, affirming at all other times. Judging by the postgame interviews, he's occasionally and appropriately blunt. He offers a realistic appraisal of what must be appraised, and I can only infer he does in private what he does in public. Acta started out his managerial career 9-25, but not once did he appear to hang his head.

His team is one game over .500 since that 9-25 start, which, if you'll pardon the digression, is a tidbit I consider fraught with potential inanity. It's one of those tidbits you could classify under the general banner of Sports Hearsay. This is to say, in the law, hearsay is considered "bad" when it's offered for the "truth of the matter asserted." Something similar is true here. If you say "the Nats are one game over .500 after a 9-25 start" for the purpose of asserting the Nats are pretty much of .500 quality (after that bad start, of course), then I'm going to object. In all likelihood, it's a baseless statement and one, I must observe, that attempts to render that 9-25 start entirely irrelevant. It's too convenient, too caught in the moment, and too ignorant of the various ebbs and flows that constitute a baseball season. But if you make that same statement for another purpose -- say, to express your state of mind concerning the team -- then the statement is far less perilous.

And so it is with Manny Acta's leadership of this team. His team started out 1-8 -- remember, it took a week-and-a-half just to get an in-game lead -- on its way to a 9-25 mark in early May. But Acta didn't fold out, didn't panic, and didn't lash out. He remained steady, showed some tough love when appropriate, and rode out a lot of injuries. And this Nats fan's state of mind is emboldened by how the team has responded to Acta's direction.

"Jim Bowden" And "Character Reference" Are Not Mutually Exclusive

There's a flip side to this "Jim Bowden and his Gang of Former Reds" thing, you know. We usually explore the more cynical side of things, as bloggers. So, yeah, there's the part about lacing the organization with guys who couldn't play, guys who couldn't manage, and guys who don't really make good studio analysts. But the flip side of this deal is that when Bowden vouches for a guy, he's vouching on the basis of prior experience. Unless his judgment is entirely not to be trusted, then his experience is potentially wortwhile.

This is all fluffy introduction to perhaps this season's most gratifying revelation, Dmitri Young. I'm not sure if more people laughed or revulsed when the Bowden signed Young. Dmitri seemed sort of washed up, and he did have a personal issue that certainly seemed revolting. But Young insisted medical issues rendered him something other than himself last season, and he insisted he merely needed a second chance. Bowden bet Young would make-good. Granted, it wasn't much of a bet -- there was no commitment involved, and Young would merely serve as placeholder for an injured starter -- but it was still a gamble.

One thing I love about baseball is how perceptions can change if you just take the time to watch the games and invest yourself in a team. Last season, I grew to love Alfonso Soriano. The 46 homers certainly didn't hurt, but there was something thrilling about watching him play independent of the 40-40(-40) status. Young is nowhere near as explosive a player, but he has put a face on a baseball cliche; he is, in a very real sense, a "professional hitter." And who, after reading about his travails last season and watching him jumble all over the field, would have guessed "professional" would have described Dmitri Young in any sense?

But that's what Dmitri is, and now he's added "2007 All-Star" to the list. He's undoubtedly a temp, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. But I'll enjoy watching him represent the Curly W, just the same.

It's Still Basically Ryan Zimmerman And A Thousand Guesses

Let's brush aside the obvious as quickly as we can: Zimmerman has been touched with the dreaded sophomore slump. He's lost about 40 points off his batting average, a bit more off his on-base percentage, his OPS+ is a chilly 90, and his defense has alternated between spectacular and unreliable at times. Whatever. He doesn't turn 23 until late September, and as Needham (who, by the way, is away for a week to stand in line for Transformers or something) has mentioned enough times already, Zimmerman will look like a 30+ homer guy once the team moves into the new park. In some ways, it'll be his new park. Zimmerman is the centerpiece, the franchise, and to this point really the one-man gang.

Aside from that, Matt Chico has established he's a pretty resilient guy, though I think it's far from certain he's built some solid ground as of yet, and Chad Cordero has re-affirmed he is indeed Chad Cordero, a pretty good closer given the right circumstances. Otherwise, we've seen Jim Bowden exploit the fat guy market inefficiency and this club extend starting invitations to nearly ever living pitcher since Howie Koplitz. And we've been told Stan Kasten prefers "the plan," uncapitalized, over "The Plan," capitalized, which might be a good thing, since "The Plan" sounds so rigorously pretentious and, meaning no offense to these fine gentlemen, any master plan cannot seriously be made to include Jason Simontacchi, Mike Bacsik, and Micah Bowie as rotational cogs in it, even for a nanosecond's worth of attention.

What else? Well, can Felipe Lopez and Austin Kearns still be considered part of this team's future? It's a legitimate question, and right now the answer seems to be trending toward the negative. Kearns is locked up, of course, but it's possible Lopez would be a non-tender candidate but for his past all-star appearance and the cache that type of thing brings. We'll see. Ryan Church demonstrated he could cover some ground in center, and then he went into a May/June tailspin that demonstrated he quite possibly is stretched as a regular. Kory Casto demonstrated nothing, which shouldn't necessarily harm his organizational status, insofar as he wasn't really given the opportunity to demonstrate anything. The team is still spinning its wheels in the outfield, and just about the only sure thing we could conclude in that regard requires no real conclusion: Nook Logan, Ryan Langerhans, and Brandon Watson are so far from the answer in center that the question cannot even really be composed necessitating the answer. Logan and Langerhans might have depth utility. I like Watson and feel bad he was sent down, but he doesn't even have a solid defensive rep upon which to hang his hat.

I could go on, but the future of this franchise is Zimmerman and a bunch of uncertains. That much hasn't changed. Even the partial first-half rotation breakouts, Shawn Hill and Jason Bergmann, are uncertains by reason of the specter of injury -- and for that reason, it might even be optimistic to label John Patterson an uncertain at this point. It's still Zimmerman and the uncertains, even if the uncertains have changed. They've changed via the draft (Detwiler and Smoker and Burgess and Zimmermann and that Stanford chap, McGeary, who will be a tough sign), and it's changed via 2007 movers and shakers. Who even knew who John Lannan was prior to the season? Now, he's a step away from the majors. Who thought Zech Zinicola would stall in his rapid pursuit of the majors?

And so forth. Zimmerman is the constant, so far.

Still, if the tone of this post is positive, please don't feel compelled to adjust your settings. There's not much point to this 2007 edition of the Washington Nationals, but don't tell that to the guys out on the field. Dmitri and fellow fatster don't care that this season is basically a fly-by until the new park opens; they're looking to reestablish their value, and it seems they're succeeding, especially Young. Don't tell Chico that the main reason to buy season tickets this year is to reserve a spot for next year, when the real fun begins; he's out there now, trying to make a name for himself. Don't tell Simontacchi and Bacsik that they don't belong because they stink; they mainly do stink, but they're putting in their all to stink a little less and stick around awhile longer, because awhile longer is all they have in this game.

It's not a good team, certainly, and it's not even an entertaining team. There's no power/speed combo fulcrum like Soriano. But there's a roster full of guys scratching and clawing and, yes, being scrappy on occasion. With a few notable exceptions, they've played hard all season and, with a few more notable exceptions, they've played smarter than past Nats teams did under Frank Robinson. They're on exactly the same pace the '06 Nats were, which means nothing to me in particular, but it seems a source of pride to some fans and to the guys in the MASN studios. And, to tell you the truth, I've got no problem with that attitude.

It's entirely possible this team still loses 100 games, but I'm ready to cheer on the drive to 72 wins.

It was the darnest thing. I've been away at Club Fed, just lounging around, working on selling off some of my MS Paint art, basically not thinking about Levale Speigner's WHIP, and Ian from Bless You Boys tracked me down. Ian runs a heckuva blog, and Detroit's an interesting team, and I've seen people compare the Nats to the Tigers (and not just in the prospective "historically bad" sense), so I immediately thought Ian had a capital idea: exchange five questions and answers.

Ian beat me to it, as it were, and my responses to his questions can be found here.

And, in turn, here are Ian's answers to my questions below. His responses are very thoughtful, and it's interesting to piece together how Detroit got from there to here. Come to think of it, given tonight's debacle, I sure wouldn't mind if the Nats hurried up progressively from here to there!

* * * *

1. The Tigers have come a long way, baby -- from 119 losses in '03 to a World Series three years later. How did this happen? Was it the result of long-range planning or massive amounts of serendipity?

I'm glad you asked this because I've been thinking about it quite a bit. The short answer is "both," but I think it's more of the latter. That's not to say Dave Dombrowski shouldn't get credit for having a plan, especially in regards to building a pitching staff. For instance, Jeremy Bonderman was a "player to be named later" in the Jeff Weaver trade back in 2002, but Dave Dombrowski had designs on him eventually developing into an ace. Joel Zumaya was drafted the same year. Justin Verlander was drafted in 2004.

But luck and good fortune have also been major factors in the Tigers' resurgence. Carlos Guillen, arguably their most important everyday player, came to Detroit only after two things happened: 1) Guillen was originally going to be traded to Cleveland, but Omar Vizquel failed a physical, which voided the deal. 2) Rich Aurilia, who the Tigers hoped would play shortstop for them, opted to sign with Seattle, thus making Guillen expendable and available in a trade. There have also been a few free agents who chose to sign with other teams, which turned out to be fortunate for Detroit. Carl Pavano is one example. Steve Finley is another.

However, the Tigers have also benefited from acting decisively to fill holes on the roster. When Dombrowski saw a lack of veteran presence for a young team, he convinced Pudge Rodriguez (albeit with a lot of cash) to come to Detroit and provide some leadership - especially to a young pitching staff. The Tigers needed a closer, so Ugueth Urbina was signed. Then he traded for Kyle Farnsworth. He signed Troy Percival. Finally, Todd Jones was brought in. Once it became apparent that Omar Infante couldn't be an everyday second baseman, he traded Urbina for Placido Polanco. When the starting rotation needed a mentor, someone to shepherd the younger pitchers along, he signed Kenny Rogers. And last October, just weeks after losing the World Series largely because their lineup had no pop, he traded for exactly the type of slugger (and patient hitter) the batting order needed.

One more important thing the Tigers did this off-season was begin to lock up their young talent to long-term contracts. Brandon Inge was given a four-year deal and avoided arbitration. So did Jeremy Bonderman. Even a player like Carlos Guillen, whose injury history should call any long-term agreement into question, has become so important (and at a key position) that the Tigers had to keep him around. So he was signed to a four-year extension, as well.

2. For a decade or so, it seemed like the Tigers were viewed as "small-market" cousins with the Royals and, depending on the years, the Twins, Indians, and even White Sox in the AL Central. Setting aside the sometimes ridiculous "big market/small market" distinctions, there didn't really seem to be much juice for the Tigers. Attendance was near the bottom of the league in the final years of Tiger Stadium, and it only briefly hit the mid-point of the AL in the first season of Comerica. But now the team is winning, attendance is in the top-five, and the Tigers are jumping in to grab hot properties like Andrew Miller and Rick Porcello. Do you envision the Tigers being players in the long-term?

Last year was eye-opening for the city of Detroit and the Tigers organization. I think everyone underestimated just how voracious the appetite was for a good baseball team. We'd heard people talk about how big baseball used to be in Detroit, and how it was a sleeping bear just ready to be poked awake. But the Tigers have completely taken over this town. The sports culture has completely changed, with winning teams like the Pistons and Red Wings moving down the totem pole. You see it in the newspaper and TV coverage, as well. Even during NBA and NHL playoff time, the Tigers got much more attention than they would have in past years. They're the team Detroit sports fans really care about right now. And even if they stumble a bit over the next couple of seasons, there's enough young talent for fans to follow for years to come.

On the ownership side, I think Mike Ilitch was hesitant to sink a lot of money before 2004 into player payroll for a couple of reasons. 1) He was heavily in debt for Comerica Park. And until Ilitch could get out from under that, most revenues were going to be steered in that direction. 2) He didn't trust his general manager, Randy Smith. Smith was a slick salesman who made plenty of trades to give the appearance he was making things happen, and drafted players who showed promise, but none of his moves ultimately translated into success on the field. And until Ilitch got results, he wasn't going to invest more money into the payroll. When it became clear that Smith was just making stuff up as he was going along and didn't have a real plan, Ilitch brought in someone who knew how to run a baseball team. Once he saw that Dave Dombrowski actually had a plan to build a team, and produced some results in player development, Ilitch felt comfortable shelling out money for free agents. And now that he's seen how the fans have responded, he doesn't want that to end.

3. Which pitcher has the better future going forward: Bonderman or Verlander?

You know, if you'd asked me this question a week ago, I might have said Bonderman because he was tabbed as the staff ace before the season and has thrived in that role. But I think I'd forgotten just how good Verlander can be, which sounds ludicrous, given that he was the AL Rookie of the Year last season. Part of that might be because Bonderman seemed more able to put up noticeable strikeout numbers and could go eight or nine innings if needed. Verlander, meanwhile, often pitches to contact and tires out after six or seven innings. But he's also not as far along in his development, either. He's only in his second full year, while Bonderman has had four seasons in the majors.

"Upside" might be one of the most over-used words in sports these days, but it applies here. The ceiling for Verlander is higher. He's still trying to figure out how good he can be, still building arm strength and stamina, still developing his repertoire of pitches. Bonderman is almost a fully formed product now, other than learning to develop another secondary pitch with the change-up. He's making the transition from prospect to veteran.

Ultimately, I think Verlander has shown he's the more talented pitcher and a year or two from now will be considered the staff ace. He's the guy who other teams won't want to face, who can shut down an opposing lineup, who fans will come out to see.

4. Last season, it seemed like Detroit's bullpen was close to unbeatable. I thought it telling that the team's closer, the guy in the glory role, was maybe its fourth- or fifth-best member. Guys like Zumaya and Rodney were studs. Now . . . well, not so much, it seems. Will the bullpen be the primary focus of improvement around the trade deadline? If the Tigers were to look at a guy like Chad Cordero, what could they realistically offer?

The bullpen will be Priority A1 for the Tigers at the trade deadline. The concern is already at Threat Level Orange. First base is another position they might want to address, though Sean Casey's been hitting pretty well lately (power numbers notwithstanding). But the Tigers aren't losing games because of their play at first base. The bullpen isn't only costing them games that they won last year, but - as we saw last night - it's also turning decisive margins into nail-biting outcomes. Even eight-run leads aren't safe right now, and that becomes draining for a team. It's a huge issue, and if the Tigers don't take care of it, they can probably kiss a playoff spot goodbye.

The problem is that every other team in the majors is looking for middle relief help, too. So it's going to be a brutally competitive market up until the deadline. A lot of fans want the Tigers to get Eric Gagne, Brad Lidge, or Chad Cordero, but then names like Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller are mentioned, and those same people say, "No way!" And I agree with that. There are some prospects that should be untouchable, especially if you're talking about getting a three-month rental in return. But the Tigers have some other highly regarded pitching talent that will probably have to go if it means getting some bullpen help (and keeping it away from division rivals like Cleveland).

What could the Tigers offer Washington in exchange for Cordero? Well, we know Jim Bowden wanted Maybin last year in a package for Soriano, which turned out to be a deal-breaker. I don't know if Bowden can reasonably expect that in return this time around, but he surely has to ask. And the answer from Dave Dombrowski would probably still be no. But if Bowden wants starting pitching prospects, the Tigers have plenty to offer. And if the Nationals are still looking for answers in their outfield, the Tigers might have a prospect or veteran (Craig Monroe? Marcus Thames?) that could help them out.

5. To close, a fun one. ("Fun" depending on your point of view, I suppose.) Which happens first: Pudge draws his tenth walk of the year, or Sean Casey's slugging average reaches .400?

Oooh, that's a good one. This past weekend, it looked like Casey might be able to give his slugging average a boost in Philadelphia, but just couldn't manage enough extra base hits (let alone his first home run of the season). You would think Casey could rack up plenty of doubles in Comerica Park's huge outfield gaps, yet he doesn't really have the speed to make that turn at first and occasionally stretch out a longer hit. That also presumes that Casey would have the power to generate some extra base hits, and he just doesn't seem to anymore.

Yet Pudge goes up to the plate and is just straight hackin'. He rarely works the count to three balls in an at-bat, and often seems to be down 0-1 or 1-2. I think the only time he draws a walk is if a pitcher can't find the strike zone.

This is going to be a long, protracted slog of a battle. And there might be times when it looks like neither batter will be able to reach this arbitrary goal we've now established for them. But I think it will come down to opportunities. Pudge isn't coming out of the lineup except when he gets his one day a week off. Casey might sit against a tough left-hander, or if he slumps, Marcus Thames will spot him at first base. And there's also the possibility that he won't play at all if the Tigers feel the need to upgrade at that position. So I'm going to (reluctantly) give the nod to Pudge. It might take until September, however.

* * * *

A quick addendum: Notwithstanding Casey's limp bat thus far, Ian predicted the Mayor would homer in the top of the third of the middle game of this series.

Amazing!

For those Natosphere completists out there, I've been off since Thursday and posts will be pretty infrequent until further notice. Things intervene. But one thing you should know, regardless of any situation or predicament, is that an email from my buddy Todd Webster at the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network always piques my interest. Always. And so I could not pass up commenting on this EXCITING PRESS RELEASE!!!111!!!!

Super Slo Mo? That's pretty wicked awesome. Reminds me of 1994 newspaper articles reminiscing about the advent of slow motion replay a generation or more earlier. So Super Slo Mo must be cutting edge. Or am I overly cynical in concluding this is all one giant euphemism writ large for "Up to Industry Standard"? I could think of someone who would say no.

Anyway, as great as this innovation is for MASN viewers in this oh-so exciting season, I can't help think what it would be like if Super Slo Mo were at their baseball watching disposal back in Nats Year One. Not that it mattered a wit or a twit, seeing as I think the only guy who could even tap into MASN back then was that Kristof guy from The Truman Show, but it would have been nice anyway.

And so I wonder, do I wonder . . .

As an added bonus, here is what all three color commentators in MASN history would have said about that play in Super Slo Mo:

Don Sutton: "And that's what happens when you try to pull a low and away changeup."

Tom Paciorek: "Woah. Glruugh."

Ron Darling: "{. . .}"

Ah, cheap attempted humor.

* * * *

I caught a few minutes of Johnny Holliday doing play-by-play while Bob Carpenter was off publishing more scorebooks or going through de-St.Louisization or learning how to judge a fly ball in RFK Stadium or whatever it was he was off doing. You know what? I must say I enjoyed Mr. Holliday. He called a steady, easy ballgame and generally got along very well with Sutton despite it being the first time the two had ever teamed up (and the first time Holliday had called a baseball game in . . . well, however long it's been).

I have a notion -- just a notion. Disagree if you wish. But if Holliday's old legs can sustain it, MASN should really switch Holliday and Carpenter. Put Bob in the studio and see if he can out-happy Ray Knight. At the very least, it would set up a different kind of Battle of the Beltways with the Orioles studio guy, Jim Hunter: Which of these cheerleading, vaguely imperceptive longtime baseball announcers is more tolerable?

On second thought, what kind of question is that? We're spoiled here in Natsland. Carpenter may not be perfect, but he's not actively odious like Jim Hunter. O's fans are truly cursed in a myriad ways, but moving Hunter to a studio is more putting lipstick on a pig than resolving a problem.

Big day for "The Plan." The Nats pick at No. 6 and four teams thereafter in the first 70 selections. This is a great opportunity to stock the organization, but if any player from the first or second rounds remains unsigned (by August 15), the team gets essentially a do-over in the same slot next year. For instance, if the No. 6 pick isn't signed, the Nats get No. 6-A next season. That's an interesting new rule.
There have been several historical looks at No. 6 picks in recent days. Look here, here, and here for more. Also, here's the relevant draft histories of the Nats' major front office players. Lots of good stuff out there; I'd imagine you've already read it, but if not . . . go ahead and read it.
The draft will be on XM Radio (Channel 178) from 1:00 to 6:30 today. I'll try to keep an ear on it when possible. Be sure to check out the later round coverage tomorrow on XM or MLB Radio. It's a hoot, what with the rampant nepostista selections and all.
Additionally, ESPN has added an exciting new wrinkle to draft day coverage. For the first time, the draft will be televised (on The Deuce). I can't watch it, obviously, though I considered taping it (before I forget to do so this morning). The MLB draft will never achieve the popularity of the NFL or NBA drafts, for good reason, but the televised coverage is a step in the right direction.
My main page post this morning is a bit whimsical. You can't trade draft picks, of couse, and I don't really think the Nats should trade No. 6 even if they could. But it would make things a bit more interesting.
Anyway, it's an exciting day, and we'll see who the "future Nats" will be in a few hours. (Not that every player drafted in the first two rounds is a future big leaguer; far from it.)

The Nats make their picks today -- five times in the first 70 selections, as we've been told a hundred times this week if we've been told once -- and the thought that keeps crossing my mind is how much more interesting the day could be if the Nats could trade a pick or two for more picks. But they can't. They can't trade picks, and they can't trade picked guys until a year after signing.

Pitchers In A Pinch 6/7

	Snell	Chico
BB/9IP	2.71	4.22
K/9IP	7.23	4.98
GB%	44.5	31.1
HR/FB	6.6	9.4
LOB%	79.2	71.4
FIP	3.63	5.56

I understand the policy reasons for prohibiting a team from trading its draft picks, but the prohibition still seems wrong to me. Any first-year law student is taught about the "bundle of rights," or "stack of sticks," or "pack of French Freedom Fries" a property owner holds, representing all the things someone can do with something he or she owns. While a draft pick is not exactly ownership in real property, the prohibition against trading picks still seems like an unnecessary and unfair restraint against the Nats' rights as pick-holders.

This is not to say I would trade picks if I were in the Nats' front office, but it would be nice to have the option. I look at it this way: Washington has several picks, but it could always use more. The farm system is barren, and the ability to "trade down" could be an acceptable strategy to stockpile more picks. Consider it the Jimmy Johnson strategy early in his rebuilding efforts with the Dallas Cowboys, however much I grudgingly compliment the Cowboys on anything.

This draft is considered "deep," but as I understand it, there is a definite top tier of talent: Vandy pitcher David Price, who is considered the best player (and pitcher available) and who will go to Tampa at No. 1; Rick Porcello, who is considered perhaps the most talented and polished high school pitcher since Josh Beckett but who might drop due to signability concerns; Josh Vitters, who is considered the best high school bat in the draft; and Matt Wieters, a Georgia Tech catcher who is considered a fast-riser and potential impact bat.

Mock drafts seem to indicate that Wieters is a possibility for the Nats at No. 6. Teh blogs like Wieters, too, and I'm cool with that. Honestly, I don't know enough about these guys to say any different. I'd be happy with Porcello or California high school hitter Mike Moustakos or super-toolsy Georgia high school outfielder Jason Heyward or Canadian prep pitcher Jean-Claude Van Damme, but Wieters seems like the pick. Porcello's demands seem to be steep enough that he'll either be gone before the Nats pick or could stay on the board for twenty picks thereafter. Wieters also has his list of demands, but rumors are the Nats won't make money too much of an issue with him. If it's Wieters, that's cool.

Yet, if money's not a tremendous issue, I can't help but think this No. 6 pick might be more of an asset in a trade (if, again, that were by rule an option). Granted, if you trade down, you are relinquishing the chance to acquire a top tier pick in terms of value, as Mel Kiper Jr. might say. But what if you find a team who really values that pick, has several early-round picks, and is willing to relinquish several of those picks for the chance to get a guy like Wieters? For instance, the San Diego Padres have stockpiled an incredible quantity of picks for today's draft (eight of the first 87 picks -- No. 23, 40, 46, 57, 63, 64, 82 and 87), but they don't pick before No. 23. Other than the rule against trading picks, what would stop them from using some of these stockpiled picks for a chance at a higher spot? I don't know if they would be motivated to do so (again, but for the rule against doing so), but I'd have to think it would be an intriguing option. Not that the drafts are tremendously analogous between football and baseball, but football teams love to trade up and down. Fans love it, too, because it's fun.

So here's what I would propose in my hypothetical universe, setting aside all rationales for the rule against trading draft picks: Washington sends the No. 6 pick in the first round to San Diego for picks No. 23, 40, and 46. Would the Nats make this trade? (Maybe not; you have a pretty decent shot at an impact player at No. 6, less so even at No. 23.) Would the Padres? (Maybe not; three first and supplemental-first picks are a lot to give up for a pick that's not even top-five.)

But back to reality -- sure, Wieters with No. 6. Or Moustakos. Or the guy from America Jr. For a bunch of guys I don't really know anything about, the draft sure is fun!

[Update: The Nats take college pitcher Ross Detwiler with the No. 6 pick. NFA's instant reaction:

The previous five picks wiped the board a bit; Moustakas went No. 2 to Kansas City, and Wieters went No. 5 to Baltimore. Other than Porcello, who's a massive signability concern, this was probably the best value left on the board. A slightly less valued (by most) college lefty, Dan Moskos, went No. 4 to Pittsburgh. I was intrigued by high school outfielder Jason Heyward, but what do I know? The answer is nothing. This looks like a pretty good pick. I will note that the Orioles took a substantial heap of pressure off the Lernastens; it would have been hard to justify passing on Wieters.]

I suppose it is possible to trace the evolution of the relief pitcher in a manner superficially similar to the evolution of man. Somewhere out of the primordial goop (variously, cricket or rounders) baseball was born, and then the first traces of the reliever began to appear, although in his original form he was hard to compare to today's reliever and probably lacked self-awareness that he was in fact a relief pitcher. He wasn't much different than that other guy in the funky looking clothes who started the game, except he was healthy whereas the other guy suddenly was not.

Pitchers In A Pinch 6/6

	Duke	Bowie
BB/9IP	2.05	2.35
K/9IP	2.86	5.87
GB%	50.6	40.9
HR/FB	12.0	12.5
LOB%	65.7	72.4
FIP	5.15	4.90

Assuming the jerks on the other side of the field bought the injury story (not a certainty, of course), our prehistoric reliever could relieve. But, viewing the situation nearly a century-and-a-half later, there didn't appear to be any indicia pointing to any purpose for him entering the game aside from simple roster necessity.

Before I continue, please note I am not a biologist, so by all means bear with me as I demonstrate my ignorance on matters evolutionary. (Indeed, I am not a baseball historian, so please excuse my lapses on matters hardball-historical.) I tried to phrase the previous paragraph sparsely enough so as not to employ words triggering my ignorance, but I hope the image is understandable.

Continuing on, we have various individuals who might in retrospect claim to be the first modern reliever. I encourage you to find a copy of Bill James's original Historical Baseball Abstract for a fascinating essay on this topic; for those tired of my many Bill James references here and/or unable to locate a copy of his greatest work, I encourage you to search Steve Treder's articles at the Hardball Times for a similar review. In the meantime, you can search Senators Nation for information on Firpo Marberry, because he's one of the fellows who holds a claim to the distinction. But there's a line at which the antiquated became modern -- as judged by our current notions of modernity, of course - and none of those guys before the line, Marberry included, qualifies. Some come closer -- or, perhaps better stated, nearer -- than others. Think of Dick Radatz as a Neanderthal man along that path, perhaps.

Anyway, here's a rough sketch of how the reliever developed from glop to modernity. I might be missing a step or two, but that's why we call it a rough sketch.

Replacement Pitcher (by necessity)	Came in when the starting pitcher physically couldn't go on.
Replacement Pitcher (by choice)	Came in when the manager chose to replace his starter; reliever just another pitcher, a lesser-light.
Early Career Relievers	Not deemed good enough to start. And if they were deemed good enough to start, they'd start.
Early Relief Specialists	Firpo Marberry is the godfather, I suppose. Notably, however, Marberry didn't exclusively relieve, and his status did not inspire copy-cats.
Starters as Saviors	Not every starter could be a top starter, and those run-of-the-mill starters needed top starters to save them.
Early Firemen	Mainly dedicated relievers, often effective (if only in spurts), noted for pedestrian stuff or some defining gimmick. See, e.g., Joe Page; Jim Konstanty; Hoyt Wilhelm (best of the type and should be included in the next type, too).
Professional Firemen	Clearly career relievers, but, as James noted, for the first time career relievers could really pitch. Included not just junkballers getting by, but also notable fireballers.
Ace Reliever	Similar to the previous type, but worked harder and harder. See Mike Marshall for the poster boy. Included greats such as Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle, and Bruce Sutter.
Early Closers	Established by Herman Franks's plan to limit Sutter's workload in 1979. Ace relievers continued on, but influential "bridge" closers to the modern era (such as Lee Smith and Jeff Reardon) emerged.
Modern Closer	Established by the conversion of Dennis Eckersley to the ace relief role in Oakland -- or perhaps by Steve Bedrosian's Cy Young award in 1987. Came into being in the years around 1990; by 1992, the usage was almost uniform. Marked by the same strategy created for the early closer (compile save situations for the ace reliever), but now closer is reserved almost exclusively for the ninth inning. Sometimes (for instance, Detroit 2006), the closer isn't even the best reliever, the true "ace" reliever, anymore -- although it is indisputably the glory role.

The modern reliever must be viewed in context of the closer, the establishment of whom marked the point at which relievers in today's game gained if not true awareness than a certain contemporary savoir faire. I overstate, but perhaps by just a little bit. Every defined bullpen role flows from the closer's - and even those vaguer roles that predated the modern closer's role, such as the long-man or the garbage-man, are eroding as roles flow from the closer spot. The transition is occurring more surely than slowly. Buck Martinez, for one, noted this development on his XM radio show recently; many modern bullpens are ill-equipped when necessity requires a two- or three-inning contribution, because more and more relievers are assigned to more specialized roles - roles divvying up the substantial number of innings left unsatisfied by the closer, but roles made in the closer's image nonetheless.

* * * *

From the "fireman" and "bullpen ace" era(s) emerged the Sutterian closer, the pitcher reserved to protect tenuous leads in the late innings, and from that type of closer emerged his offspring, the Eckersleyian one-inning closer, the man brought in nearly exclusively to save the game, nearly uniformly in the ninth inning. As Treder notes, the transition became essentially complete in the early 1990s. By the mid- to late-90s, the role had become universally accepted, with the last odd or idiosyncratic managerial holdouts latching on to the previous definition (like Sparky Anderson) pushed out of the game; by that point, the phrase "Proven Closer" had come into use - or perhaps overuse to the point of parody, given the satirical use of the trademark symbol that become vogue on places like the Usenet forum rec.sport.baseball.

Sometimes I wonder if there is something so special about having a closer, then why did it take about 115 years of big league baseball for this form of closer to exist, much less dominate so quickly? But is not evolution less about wisdom or betterment than adaption? This is how baseball's bullpens adapted, and in retrospect it is possible to see the influences - ranging from management philosophies to general sports trends to the rise of agents and marketing - that likely contributed to the process. At any rate, the closer system exists now, and it has existed sufficiently long to place closer-era contemporaries and managers, and even ex-closers like Rob Dibble, in the modern media. And so, there is something endearing about the closer. It's a special role, capable of being handled only by those accustomed to it. Whether this is truth, mythology, or merely self-sustaining justification is beside the point.

* * * *

Supporting the closer are all the other guys in the modern bullpen, usually six or perhaps even seven other guys nowadays, and they all have defined roles too, or are well on their way to receiving those roles in the near future. There's the middle men, the set-up men, and the lefties, including the lefty specialist (the lovable LOOGY). There are even foils for the lefty specialist like Chad Bradford, who is essentially a specialist designed to defeat righty batters.

The line between middle men and set-up men has been a touch blurry at times, but the difference is coming into focus. The new term emerging is the "eighth-inning man," who is on the road to becoming the Robin to the closer's Batman in the modern bullpen era. The eighth-inning man is the set-up man but dressed in today's fashions. He's a mini-closer designed to shorten the game.

The set-up man is not a new innovation, of course, and the foundation for the eighth-inning man was not exactly laid yesterday. The Nasty Boys of the 1990 Cincinnati Reds had a famous eighth/ninth combination in (pre-closer) Dibble and Randy Myers. The Yankees have employed a similar one-two punch style for over a decade, first with the Mariano Rivera/John Wetteland combo and then with Mike Stanton and Jeff Nelson variously setting the table for Rivera, though the connection has not always been so solid from the eigth-inning side. The difference is in the last couple years most if not all teams, whether good or bad, are speaking in this parlance.

Take the Nationals, for instance. Earlier this season, Chad Cordero struggled in his closer role (perhaps owing to an illness and subsequent death of a close family member), and his set-up man, Jon Rauch, was pitching well. During Cordero’s leave of absence, Rauch served admirably as the closer. Since a set-up man is often viewed as a closer-in-reserve, some people questioned whether Rauch would supplant Cordero as the fulltime closer. This issue was broached to manager Manny Acta, who announced Cordero would be eased back into his role – suggesting a belief that there’s a certain mental or emotional aptitude required for closing – and would pitch in a few non-closing situations before reclaiming the mantle. Fast forward a few weeks, and now it is Rauch who has been struggling. Meanwhile, bargain bin pickup Jesus Colome has been a revelation. Sure enough, a new question has been broached to Acta: should Colome replace Rauch as the eighth-inning guy? So far, Acta’s answer is no.

I suppose I’ll save for a rainy day an extensive search of past Sporting News issues (via the Paper of Record website) to determine, if possible, when this managers began openly mulling this eighth-inning role, but I’m of the mind that it’s a very recent development. As noted, you heard of the excellent eighth/ninth inning combos along the way, and surely teams have employed set-up men for years, but I don’t recall so many teams aiming to place a single pitcher in that spot expressly as the closer’s dedicated assistant. The Nationals even market Rauch as such on those laughable MASN smack-talk spots.

Granted, the set-up man is a little harder to locate than the closer. The set-up man does not have a recognized money stat like the save upon which to hang his hat, and he doesn’t make closer money from which to buy an even better hat. As such, I’d imagine it’s harder to determine the usage patterns of modern set-up men, since the term "eighth-inning man" is still a descriptive rather than literal term, though it must contain a good measure of truth these days. At any rate, while I have not seem exhaustive research on non-closer innings pitched to games ratios, I do know Rauch’s ratio was 1.08 innings (91) per appearance (85) last season. According to Treder’s research, this is precisely what the average closer’s ratio was as recently as 2004.

* * * *

Set-up/eighth-inning men like Rauch tend to be worked harder than closers, although the policy basis undergirding this tendency is readily apparent. The practice is to save your closer as much as possible for "save situations." This is not always practicable – I was amazed at how few save opportunities Mariano Rivera had coming into Sunday night’s game, for instance – but even a poor team will give its closer a reasonable number of save opportunities. Recall the Pythagorean formula; poor teams are significantly outscored, tend to get blown out more than enjoy blowouts, and therefore tend to win a sizable chunk of their games in close or relatively close contests.

With this practice in mind, closers aren’t going to have a stake in very many leads blown in the eighth inning (since that’s generally outside his common jurisdiction), so those are games in which the closer won’t appear whereas the eighth-inning guy most likely will. Moreover, having set aside one pitcher to a particular purpose, can a manager do the same with a second? Not exclusively. A set-up man will pitch "outside his role" a little more than a closer will, or at least that’s my impression. Rauch has certainly done so more than Cordero, and I’d imagine Acta’s bullpen usage is fairly normal, or at least as normal as possible given the paucity of innings his starters gave him in the early season.

Given this background, Rauch’s role appears to consist of:

• preserving leads for Cordero
• doing whatever else Acta wants him to do when it is not possible to preserve leads for Cordero, keeping in mind his primary role is to preserve leads for Cordero

The second part of the second bullet point might seem like a tautalogy, but it’s really more of a statement of jurisdiction. Taking a look at Rauch’s gamelog (through June 5), Rauch has made 30 appearances, with half of those appearances confined to the eighth inning.

Keep in mind this ratio is somewhat skewed owing to Rauch’s temporary closing stint. On May 11, after four days’ rest, Rauch closed out a 6-0 win. The next evening, Rauch entered a 3-3 game in the ninth and recorded a victory after pitching a scoreless inning. (That was the early-morning Zimmerman grand slam game.) In the next three contests, Rauch closed out wins, earing saves without incident. If we remove those five appearances (or at least view them in a different context), then Rauch has entered in the eighth inning in 15 out of 25 appearances (60%), and in none of those appearances has Rauch pitched beyond the eighth inning.

The point is, the eighth inning is his.

Eight of those 15 eighth-inning appearances resulted in a hold; the remainder were closing out road defeats, or garbage-time appearances, or both. Rauch’s other hold occurred when he entered the game in the seventh inning, which he has done four times: once for that two-inning hold on May 6, once for a two-inning hold-then-blown-save on May 19, and twice in road defeats. Rauch has a smattering of other appearances in the ninth and tenth innings, but his job is nearly as straightforward as that MASN spot makes it out to be. Except when he expressly isn’t the eighth-inning set-up man, Rauch’s job is to be the eighth-inning set-up man, unless circumstances dictate there won’t be need for an eighth-inning set-up man and Acta determines he needs him anyway.

It should be noted this is nearly precisely the stream of logic that gave us the modern closer. This logic has been adapted to other roles, and I suspect it will be adapted (albeit more loosely by aforementioned necessity) by some to still more roles. Who will be the team's stated "seventh-inning man" five or ten years from now?

* * * *

This is all very boring reading, I’m quite sure, but I’m just about to sting Bob Carpenter a little bit, which should perk some ears, I’d guess. During Sunday afternoon’s game (yes, it was raining viciously here in Richmond, too), Carpenter was discussing Rauch, our set-up man; for some reason, he compared Rauch to Duane Ward, who was cited as an example of a particularly effective set-up man. Perhaps I missed some context where Carpenter was trying to compare and contrast the two, but I don’t think so. If not, the comparison was born of ignorance of what the set-up man really is in contemporary baseball.

Other than in title (set-up man), Ward and Rauch are not comparable. Or perhaps better stated, they’re comparable in function but not in role, or perhaps that should be stated vice versa. Whatever. Rauch is a bicycle courier zipping around city streets from office building to office building. By comparison, Ward was a semi chugging down the interstates. There’s really no comparison. They were pitchers in different eras – although Ward’s career straddled the modern bullpen era – and, come to think of it, aren’t comparable in role or function. The kind of set-up man Ward was bears little relation to the type of set-up man Rauch is.

* * * *

I first remember Duane Ward’s picture appearing in a set of Richmond Braves baseball cards from the mid-80s. He was a goofy looking dude with some dorky looking glasses. Ward was traded by the Braves to the Blue Jays for Doyle Alexander, and by 1988 Ward emerged as a somewhat unbalanced force in Toronto’s bullpen. He walked 60 batters in 111.2 innings, but what is noteworthy for the purpose of this post is that he compiled all those innings in 64 appearances – and with 15 saves, to boot.

From our 2007 perspective, the Jays’ bullpen might have been located on Mars for all we know, but – cracks about Exhibition Stadium’s bizarre configuration aside – all evidence points to an Earth-bound bullpen. It was merely different than what we see today; quite different, in fact.

In 1989, Ward appeared in 66 games, logged 115.2 innings, and recorded another 15 saves. In 1990, Ward upped his totals to 73 games and 127.2 innings, though he saved only 11 games. Only eleven, huh? Other than by injury/ineffectiveness afflicting the first-line closer, how else does a set-up man get to 11 saves in today’s game? Toronto’s closer, Tom Henke, was neither injured nor ineffective. Henke saved 32 games with a 2.17 ERA.

In 1991, when Henke was limited by injury (but still saved 32 games), Ward appeared in 81 games, pitched 107 innings, and saved 23 contests, probably a dozen in Henke’s absence. In what was probably his finest season, 1992, Ward pitched in 79 games, logged 101.2 innings, and saved a dozen games.

Henke left via free agency prior to 1993, and Ward shuffled into the closer’s role. Ward’s numbers that season look pretty much indistinguishable from those of a modern closer, with essentially a one-to-one ratio of games to innings and 45 saves. Ward blew out his arm in 1993, and very brief comeback in 1995 was all that was left in his career.

For a five-year stretch, however, Ward was an animal of a set-up man, and I guarantee you he wasn’t confined to a role capable of being summarized on a television spot. Let’s take a look at his last season in the set-up role, 1992, since maybe that season would reveal the most modern of his usage patterns in that role. Ward appeared in 79 games. In 18 of those games, he appeared in the seventh inning. Ward pitched two or more innings a quarter of the time. On three occasions, Ward pitched more than two innings (and on one occasion, three innings), every time picking up a save that Henke could have garnered (either by rule or if Ward had actually given up runs, which he didn’t). There was certainly a large component of holding leads for Henke; Ward notched 24 holds on the season. Furthermore, in many instances, Ward did actually what Rauch is called to do: enter in the eighth and hold a close lead. But Ward did so much more. Ten times, Ward recorded what you might call a seventh/eighth-inning hold. He entered close games in which the Jays trailed and held the status quo. He pitched a couple innings to finish out ballgames, wins or losses, saves or non-saves.

Just for the heck of it, let’s look at that 1988 season, where it all began for Duane Ward. You know what? Ward appeared in 64 games that year, and in only 18 did he pitched an inning or less. That’s right; forty-eight times Ward pitched more than an inning when he came to the mound. Five times, he pitched three innings. Three additional times, he pitched at least four.

Back then, a set-up man wasn’t merely a set-up man, although he didn’t realize this, of course. By today’s standards, he was a set-up man, a middle-man, a long-man, and sometimes a garbage-man, all in one. To compare Rauch to Ward misses the point entirely. The bullpen has evolved, and roles have become defined. Even if Rauch could be Ward, his role wouldn’t permit it.

* * * *

The thought occurs to me that my comparison of Rauch to Ward is uncharitable to Rauch. By appearing in 85 games last season, for instance, Big Jon has already surpassed Ward's career high. Perhaps on that basis it is Rauch who is the tractor trailing hauling oranges from Florida. At any rate, it's a different role.

It's fascinating to watch big league teams as they juggle bullpen management issues. Bucs Dugout recently noted that Jim Tracy has swapped out Salomon Torres for Matt Capps in the set-up to closer exchange. As Charlie from BD notes, Tracy offers a rational basis for the switch (aside from Torres blowing the role); Torres is the more durable pitcher and thus can be used to bridge the gap somtimes in the seventh inning, whereas Capps cannot. I doubt Torres will be used in that manner an extraordinary amount -- he's rubber-armed and makes tons of appearances, but he essentially averages an inning per appearance -- yet it is fascinating to see managers who state they want a little bit more out of a set-up man than just holding an eighth-inning lead.

Charlie also bemoans the pro forma use of a closer, all in the name of collecting saves it seems. I feel his pain, so to speak, but I'd hard to imagine the practice changing any time soon. As Treder contends in his Hardball Times articles, the development (or evolution) of the modern closer is apparent in hindsight, even if its usage often seems counterproductive. Looking back on the last half-century, you can see how we got here. And, depending on your perspective, we've either been here almost twenty years (dating to Eckersley's conversion to relief), or over fifteen years (when Bobby Thigpen established the single-season saves record), or over a decade (in which the usage of the modern closer, in terms of innings/games, hasn't changed too much at all). I'm not sure things will change any time soon, both because teams have gone about as far as they can go with their closers (without expanding rosters or some other development) and because managers have no real reason to rock the boat now that a closer is not only commonplace but considered common sense. "Bullpen by committee," whatever that is, is now derided. The only other place to go is in defining roles for the other relievers, and I believe we're well on that path.

Yet, I wonder if these more newly defined roles like "eighth-inning man" will have an unexpected effect, and this is the thought on which I will close this already too-long post: If the role of eighth-inning set-up inheres in it the same or similar traits now ascribed to a closer -- a mental toughness, an innate ability to hold a lead under tough circumstances -- such that some people have earned the spot and have to be shown incapable of the role in order to be displaced (as is hinted in the Rauch-Colome article), then would such shared traits no longer make the closer seen as . . . special? If so, might holding a lead in the eighth inning be seen as a similar accomplishment as recording "the last three outs"? And if so, might this perceived extra layer of specialization begin to chip away at the very aura of the closer in the first place?

Just a thought.

In the heart of every idealist is a cynic yearning to be free. If one were to let that cynical side guide thoughts concerning "The Plan," then it would invariably point to the Pittsburgh Pirates, a team that has cycled through multiple stated rebuilding plans, any number of super-high draft picks, and yes, even a beautiful new ballpark, all to little productive end. Notice I am not saying one's reasonable analysis of the Nats would lead one to think of the Buccos, only one's cynical side. And with good cause. There's plenty there to be cynical about, what with that franchise having failed to secure even a .500 season since the moment Barry Bonds scooted out of town after his twelve-hopper failed to beat Sid Bream to the plate.

Pitchers In A Pinch 6/4

	Chacon	Bacsik
BB/9IP	4.26	1.37
K/9IP	7.11	2.75
GB%	48/8	42.6
HR/FB	11.1	11.5
LOB%	87.3	83.3
FIP	4.78	5.03

I'd say the Pirates have merely spun their wheels for a decade-and-a-half, but that image seems strangely inaccurate. Rather, the Pirates are the rusted out car sitting in the overgrown front yard, bereft even of tires and wheels and other ambulatory accoutrements. They just ain't goin' anywhere, and there really doesn't seem to be anyone trying to change that status quo.

Yet, obscured by successive win totals of 75, 53 (strike year), 58 (sorta strike year), 73, 79, 69, 78, 69, 62, 72, 75, 72, 67, and 67, the Pirates franchise has happened upon an anniversary of sorts. It's the ten-year anniversary of the 1997 Pittsburgh Pirates, the last Bucco contender.

So as not to confuse, let me be clear that there are two commonly accepted definitions for "contender," and the '97 Pirates satisfied only one of them. The first is a team of high quality that could reasonably be expected to compete in its division/league/conference, and this definition certainly doesn't apply. The second is a team actually engaged in the act of competing for its division/league/conference; strangely enough, this one does apply, even though the '97 Pirates went 79-83. In a weak NL Central, they finished in second place, sandwiched between the division-champion Houston Astros and the Jim Bowdified Cincinnati Reds. And this wasn't one of those deals like, say, the 1995 AL Central, where the division champion smoked the field, leaving even the second place team staggering in a wake.

For much of the 1997 season, the Astros and Pirates engaged in a spirited albeit mediocre tussle for the division's top spot; at any given time, the team that nudged its nose slightly above break-even led, with the other just on its tail, so to speak. At the end of April, the Astros (15-11) led the Pirates by 2.5 games. By mid-May, the Pirates (21-18) led the Astros by a half-game. Ten years ago today, June 5, 1997, the Pirates (29-29) held a half-game lead on Houston. At the all-star break, Pittsburgh (43-43) led by a game.

Houston briefly but convincingly caught fire, winning 16 out of 21 contests to start the second half and stake a six-game lead over Pittsburgh by August 15. The Pirates never quite recovered, though they never quit. By September 1, Houston's lead had shrunk to 2.5 games, where it remained a week later. By September 15, the lead had grown by a game, where it remained a week later. The Astros ended up claiming the division by four games.

Counting the Pirates, five four National League teams have failed to make the postseason since the start of the wild card era (four, if we fudge in honor of Bodes and count Cincy's wild card elimination game appearance in '99 see below), and I wonder if, in a sense, 1997 was a missed opportunity to ensure all NL teams will have made the playoffs in the near future. Somewhat inexplicably, Philadelphia has not made the postseason since '93, the year before the expanded divisional/wild card arrangement was set, despite contending several times since 2001. Fluke start or not, Milwaukee has a very solid core of young talent and seems well-positioned to claim an NL Central not dissimilar to the one from ten years ago (before the Brewers flipped leagues, incidentally). If we continue to fudge on the Reds [Note: My apologies to Bodes; the Reds' 1995 playoff appearance totally slipped my mind], then that leaves us with the Nats(pos) and the Pirates. However long "The Plan" might take to execute, what are the odds Pittsburgh makes the playoffs before Washington? Not tremendously great, I would hope.

So, here's to the 1997 Pirates, the team that could-have-been. Here's to Kevin Young, the failed prospect who returned to Pittsburgh and surprise everyone with a mid-800s OPS. Here's to (briefly) former Nat Tony Womack, who swiped 60 bases. Here's to upstart shortstop Kevin Polcovich -- a name I'm sure we all readily recall, right? -- who put up one of the more retrospectively surprising .350 OBPs I've seen, then hit .189 on his way out of the big leagues the next season. Here's to Al Martin, who was still several years away from doing something embarrassing, though I can't remember what that was at the moment. Here's to Jermaine Allensworth, who never panned out, and here's to Dale Sveum, who hit a fluke 25 homers ten years before that. And here's to a lively bench like by Mark Smith and Turner Ward (who hit .353) and Kevin Elster and sort of former Nat Keith Osik and the Browns -- Adrian and Emil -- and Midre Cummings and big old Eddie Williams and a little bit of Shawon Dunston and Abrahan Nunez (no, the other one, depending on your point of view), and Lou Collier, who I might add was once traded straight-up for Jason Bay. And here's to pitchers like Frankie Cordova and pre-better-things-in-store Jon Lieber and Jason Schmidt and Steve Cooke and Richardo Rincon (who was yet to make his best contribution, for Brian Giles) and Rich Loiselle, the closer because they had to have a closer.

And here's to Jose Guillen and Esteban Loaiza, two guys who had no idea they would be inaugural Washington Nats years later.

* * * *

May revelation Mike Bacsik takes a June turn and no doubt prays the slipper still fits, or the clock hasn't hit midnight, or the stuff hasn't hit the fan. Bacsik, who is not a former 1997 Pittsburgh Pirate, has given the team three nice turns in the rotation. He's already a success no matter what he does going forward.

Is it just me, or does the team seem more under control with the rotation replacements on the mound -- or at least the non-Speigner ones? I'd suppose that is because they are more under control. Since returning from his tweaky groin, Jason Simontacchi has walked eight batters in 29 innings. Since trying on his own glass slipper, Micah Bowie has walked four batters in 13.2 innings. And, since his contract was purchased from Columbus a couple weeks ago, Bacsik has walked three batters in 19.2 innings pitched. Add it all up, and you get 17 walks in 62.1 innings pitched, a very nice rate.

Now, walk rate isn't everything, and other rates -- such as Bacsik's strikeout rate -- are also worth review. But walk rate is certainly important, and compare one walk every 3.2 or so innings with the rates those guys replaced.

I was away for the Padres series, and for that I apologize. It's nothing against the Padres, I swear, but the truth of the matter is that I spent a couple days doing some serious research. You see, I've come across quite a few articles similar to the following, and something just clicked.

It strikes me we've seen a lot of "Speigner's early struggles doom the Nats" recently. If Levale's 9.10 ERA doesn't get to you, then his .355 opponents' batting average will. And those 63 baserunners in 28.2 innings pitched? Sort of sobering, man.

Maybe I'm unduly overcome by a pessimist's streak, but I'm thinking it might be time to get Speigner off the active roster for a little while. But you can't just disappear him, so to speak. If Bodes tries to sneak him down to the minors, the Twins can have him back for half of Speigner's $50,000 draft price. Maybe the Twins bite or maybe they don't, but as "convenient" as an injury may be, it doesn't appear that will happen any time soon either. So we're at loggerheads.

Unless . . .

What say you, Candidate Speigner?

Oh, come on and hear me out. Think this one through: If Levale forms a presidential campaign committee, then he gets the Fancy Fred treatment, right? Even if equal-time rules don't apply explicitly to cable channels -- and this Post article states they don't -- wouldn't it be in MASN's best interests to play it safe? And insofar as the Nats own a stake in MASN, albeit it a very little stake, it appears the practical choice is to take a chance with Speigner or field a team entirely composed of presidential candidates. (And just when the Nats were playing better!)

Run, Levale, run. It's so easy to do -- these morons have already figured it out -- and it's a mutually beneficial arrangement for Speigner and his employer. For Levale, he gets to say he ran for President of the United States, and I mean being a real candidate; this won't be like that silly town in Kansas whose residents all voted for Howard the Duck or anything. For the Nats, they get to put Speigner on the restricted list and fill his spot for the time being with a replacement who can get hitters out. And the commitment is pretty minimal if you think about it. This doesn't even need to be a long-term arrangement; the season ends on September 30, so it's not like Levale would even have to campaign through primary season if the grind becomes unsatisfying. Heck, by next spring, he can be back down in Columbus free-and-clear, with no need to manipulate our nation's political process.

I have a feeling that if Levale goes for the plan he'll want to do it right, though. I've taken the liberty of drawing up a platform of sorts for him. It's a rough draft, so please be kind. Here are some highlights:

• Support for Necessary Government Programs: I'm not going to label Levale a Democrat or Republican, but let's be honest -- everyone in Washington loves me some money to spend. And Levale gives every indication of a willingness to indulge in some pork. Take the first inning of Saturday's game, please. Six runs, six hits, one walk. Plenty of spending, so to speak. No one went hungry in the San Diego dugout, I assure you.
• Nevertheless, a Sense of Fiscal Restraint: Okay, so Speigner got some spending out of the way in the first inning, but in his final three, Speigner demonstrated he knows how to reign it in. He allowed no runs on one hit after the first inning. This is a man who knows how to hold the line. He'll balance your budget, America.
• An Appreciation for a Strong Defense: We live in a world that has walls, and who's going to guard them? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? Nook Logan? Cristian Guzman? Ryan Church? I don't know what Kevin Pollak's doing, but I do know the last three guys mucked up Levale's first inning to a certain degree. This isn't to say Speigner's been any great shakes out there (hardly), but you would think the man appreciates the value of solid defensive play behind him.

Add it all up, and I think we've got a vibrant, young candidate to take America into the next generation. Okay, maybe he's a little too young. He's 26 years old and as such is constitutionally prohibited from holding the nation's highest elected office for almsot another decade. But I figure there's no rule against him simply running. If he wins, well . . . we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

For now, though, run Levale run!

Most people who know what kind of baseball fan I am know I love spacious ballparks. Give me all that wonderfully extra green vastness, fences so far from the plate you need some cheap binoculars so we can locate where that darn pelota is, and determined outfielders frantically running here and there. The occasional homer is fun, I suppose, but I rather enjoy the action that occurs while the ball is still in play.

Yet, however stubborn I may be on the topic, even I have my limits. The way I figure it, if a team can score plenty in the sinfully smaller parks but can't score any in the blessedly larger parks, the sinful path becomes all the more tempting. RFK is one of the sacredly expansively parks, but its effect on Washington's fortunes this season has been rudely profane.

Pitchers In A Pinch 5/31

	Hendrickson	Bowie
BB/9IP	2.54	2.13
K/9IP	6.52	6.39
GB%	47.2	41.6
HR/FB	15.6	12.1
LOB%	71.1	74.8
FIP	4.43	4.66

Two seasons ago, I made a bit of a to-do during the Nats' first half run that the team was exploiting a huge home "isolated power" advantage over its opponents. This is to say that the Nats' difference in batting average and slugging average in RFK contests was far greater than their opponents' corresponding difference. The advantage flattened out over the course of the season, as you might expect, but for a spell it was tantamount to a lovely home field advantage.

This season, we could very well track the reverse. Entering Wednesday's action, the Nats have an isolated power figure of .101 (.333 SLG - .232 BA) in home games, whereas their opponents have beat that figure by nearly forty points. This is a problem, and it underscores that Washington's offense -- no juggernaut under most circumstances -- turns anemic at RFK. The Nats had all of 11 home runs at RFK entering tonight (when they were shut out again, so they obviously didn't homer), which means they are on pace for thirty-something home park longballs for the season. The "on pace" stuff doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot, even a third of the way into the season, but let's put it this way: RFK is RFK, but it ain't Petco Park -- and the Padres are averaging about a dinger per home game and have a fifty point advantage in home isolated power over the Nats. The Padres are the Padres and the Nats are the Nats obviously, but he point to be gleaned is that the Padres' extra base power has barely suffered in their home games. Their opponents' sure has. Flip around the Nats' home field isolated power deficit, and you have the Padres at home. They are getting the entire benefit of the home field bargain. If only the Nats were so lucky -- or good. You make the call.

Anyway, the Dodgers blanked the Nats for the second straight night. Tuesday, it was 10-0. Wednesday, it was 5-0. Question for the math whizzes: Is the next score in that progression 0-0 or 2.5-0?

* * * *

You might have noticed the box above called "Pitchers in a Pinch." I'm trying something new here -- tying in a day's post with the day's game, after not doing that kind of thing for awhile -- and I hope to keep it up. Mainly, I just want to show off my newfound mastery of the align attribute for HTML. Yes, I am that computer illiterate.

The box provides some of the most relevant pitching measures pursuant to this masterful U.S.S. Mariner post. These measures are:

• Walk Rate ("BB/9IP"): The relevance of a pitcher's walk rate is rather self-explanatory; it's an important factor to track. David Cameron, the author of the USSM piece, advises using BB% (walks per total batters faced). Last season, the average MLB rate was nine percent. However, BB% is sort of hard to locate, so I'm using simple BB/9IP. Generally speaking, I think we know what's good and what isn't.
• Strikeout Rate ("K/9IP"): This is the foil to a pitcher's walk rate. Again, Cameron advises to use K% (MLB average was 17%) in 2006, but I'll go with K/9IP for the same reasons.
• Groundball Rate ("GB%"): Based on accumulated play-by-play, a given flyball is more "harmful" to a pitcher than a given ground ball. The reason is self-evident: flyballs have great potential for resulting in extra bases (including homers), whereas groundballs have limited potential in that regard. Thus, tracking a pitcher's ability to induce grounders is important. Last season, 44% of batted balls resulted in grounders. (Incidentally, all of these "last season" references are coming from the handy-dandy Hardball Times Annual.) As Cameron notes, sinkerball pitchers can (and should) well exceed this figure, whereas pitchers hovering at 35% or below are prone to encountering difficulties.
• Homer Rate ("HR/FB"): I suppose I shouldn't call this "homer rate," since it's a bit more nuanced measure than that. Instead, it's the percentage of outfield flyballs resulting in a home run. (Infield flies are irrelevant to this measure, obviously, and in fact infield flies are as close to a given as you can get; the percentage of those converted to outs is in the high nineties.) Last season, 11% of outfield flies resulted in homers. This is an important figure to be aware of, because, as Cameron notes, "We’ve seen very little evidence that major league pitchers have significant control over how often their flyballs go over the wall, so occassionally you’ll see a wild swing in performance that is not indicative of a player's true talent level, simply because a pitcher is having more or less flyballs go over the wall than should be expected. . . . [S]ignificant variation from [11-12%] is probably not an indicator of talent for a major league quality pitcher."
• Strand Rate ("LOB"): I suppose you might call this a measure of clutch pitching -- though, like clutch hitting, the best guys in this area tend to be the best guys in most areas. Basically, good pitchers will strand more baserunners than bad ones because that's one way in which a good pitcher separates himself from a bad pitcher. But, as a guidepost, about 70% of baserunners are stranded. Go much below that, and people will have sympathy; go much above, and people will consider you living on borrowed time.
• Fielding Independent ERA ("FIP"): This is an expected ERA for a pitcher based on his walk, strikeout, and home run rates, as tracked by the Hardball Times. Consider it a generic version of DIPS and the various enhancements thereof.

Anyway, there you go. There are other measures I could cite, such as innings pitched per start or pitches per plate appearance (or inning pitched) or batting average on balls in play. But I'd say these are enough for now. Besides, I don't want to stray from the reason Cameron cited the measures above -- they are indicators of a pitcher's talent, generally speaking. Anyway, I've already included FIP, and that was basically Cameron's sop to ERA fiends.

As best as I can, I'll track these measures for the starting pitcher matchups. (Thankfully, given a five-man rotation, you can do several matchups in advance.) Maybe I'll even put this to good use. Probably not, but it's worth a shot. Just my luck, though -- my first day doing this, and one of the guys is an emergency starter. Oh well.

* * * *

Speaking of pitching . . . well, uh oh:

Hill has proffered some sort of associational issue, like the injury to his left shoulder in the aftermath of his late April baserunning adventure in South Florida has resulted in the right elbow injury. The one affected his mechanics, which resulted in the elbow pain, and his knee bone is connected to his thigh bone. In any event, as the Nats.com article notes, that elbow has been through the grinder. In fact, it's turned into an annual event. I'm reminded of a line from that bearded guy I always quote; something like half of these guys would be dropping bread crumbs to Cooperstown if not for arm injuries. That's a bit more creative than necessary, yes, but there's a definite kernel of truth in that.

In other news, why do the Nats hate the good people at Mars, Incorporated?

The less said about this one the better. With Brad Penny in complete command, the Nats weren't going to win regardless of Zimmerman's misplay in the seventh. Manny Acta commented after the game that Jason Simontacchi pitched better than his linescore indicated (6.1 IP, 11 H, 6 R). While there's some truth to that, it hardly mattered. Penny wasn't going to lose last night.

Here's an interesting note from the AP game recap:

Remember back to 9:32 pm on April 12, when the Nats took their first in-game lead of the season? They went something like . . . well, whatever it was -- ten games, I guess? -- without leading at some point during a game. (They, of course, won the third game of the season in walk-off fashion.) Six weeks later, the Nats had gone nine straight games scoring first. Weird sport this baseball is, eh? Anyway, scoring first obviously puts a team in an enviable position, and I for one endorse the practice.

A comment in yesterday's Advance Scout post pointed me to Dodgersims, a blog that "runs 2000 game simulations to come up with probabilities of every NL West game." The simulator is reputed to have "an amazing track record." On Tuesday, the blog entered the day with a 74-49 record. It regarded the Dodgers as the favored team with a 58.45% chance of winning. The simulator went 4-1 predicting the NL West games for the day.

What about today? The simulator likes Mike Bacsik and the Nats over Derek Lowe and the Dodgers, but it's a slight preference. It gives the Nats a 51.20% chance of winning. We shall see.

Monday marked an historic day in baseball history, or at least its historicity was incorporated by reference. Fifty years ago, on May 28, 1957, the National League club owners unanimously approved the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles and the New York Giants to San Francisco. Relocation in itself was not a novelty by then -- Milwaukee and Baltimore had recently received relocated franchises -- but this particular dual relocation did indeed reshape our National Pastime in ways too multifarious to satisfy in this space.

A review of the circumstances that led to the Dodgers' move can be found in this MLB.com article. It's a fascinating article that tracks the actions of Brooklyn/L.A. owner Walter O'Malley, as he in essence dueled Robert Moses -- a master builder/city planner who played a larger role in shaping the physical environment of New York State than any other figure in the 20th century -- over a new ballpark in Brooklyn and ultimately rejected Moses's offer of a stadium site in Flushing.

Flushing would eventually become the home of the expansion Mets, of course, but the Brooklyn-born O'Malley said no dice. He long sought to build a "geocentric domed stadium" in Brooklyn. The article notes:

I do not quote this portion of this article as a comment on O'Malley or Brooklyn or stadium-building. Instead, I reference this letter because, through the wonder of teh internets, we can actually read this letter. Pretty cool, huh?

It turns out the O'Malley family has created a Walter O'Malley website in honor of the big guy. The site contains all kinds of scanned-in correspondence to and from O'Malley as well as his own internal memoranda. Here is a memo to the file dated April 11, 1957, after O'Malley visited Moses's home and "frankly discussed the general political apathy toward the new stadium in Brooklyn." This meeting occurred about six weeks before the NL vote, of course. Here is a telegram from Commissioner Frick to O'Malley dated May 10, 1957, in which Frick advised O'Malley to be especially circumspect concerning the relocation process. And here is a letter from San Francisco mayor George Christopher, whose city supervisor apparently met with O'Malley concerning stadium construction features. Christopher noted Frick's wish to keep things under wraps but noted with some understatment, "[T]he various media on occasion take the liberty of elaborating on certain remarks made[.]" (As a personal aside, the Christopher stuff interests me a bit more than it probably should. He was close friends with my grandparents and when he passed away a few years ago, my grandmother would have gone to his funeral but for her own frailty at the time.)

Anyway, I find this all very fascinating. It's like searching through old issues of the Sporting News except with the added benefit of reading from a primary source. The hat tip goes to Dodger Thoughts from the wayback machine.

* * * *

According to this Baseball Prospectus article (registration required), the new ballpark is on track for a noble yet simultaneously cynical Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design ("LEED") certification from the United States Green Building Council. The author appears to use logic similar to that employed by Jennifer Aniston's restaurant manager in Office Space -- you know, she had the minimum amount of Flair but was a vague disappointment because she sought not to have more than the minimum.

Not that I'm knocking the author; he wrote an essay on environmental-friendliness in this year's BPro annual and is obviously both passionate and knowledgeable on the subject. And I certainly know nothing about this stuff. But the criticism seems to be that, when the DC ballpark hit or exceeded its spending cap, the LEED stuff was the first choice to be cut back. If so, it's hard to consider this a particularly remarkable development.

* * * *

Levale Speigner's next turn in the rotation isn't until Friday, so we don't have to worry about that for the Dodger series. But we might not have to worry about Speigner starting during the Padres series, either, because the Post reports Manny Acta is mulling the possibility of replacing Speigner with another hurler for Friday's start. Acta certainly has cause. Speigner has a 14.81 ERA in three fill-in starts, and the Cardinals -- a team that otherwise did nothing much offensively over the weekend, let alone the entire season -- gave the poor fella metaphorical whiplash Saturday night. It seems time to go back to the cozy world of garbage time for the Rule 5er.

Still, the "another hurler" part might prove dicey, since there just isn't much left. This is not to say I doubt the team's ability to coax quality innings out of just about anyone. Who's the next miracle lefty willing to volunteer? Donovan Osborne? Brad Woodall? Dave Otto? Shane Rawley? It might be Chris Michalak, actually. Close enough.

The Post article notes Columbus starters Joel Hanrahan and Emiliano Fruto have had their own injury issues. I suppose -- in light of the injuries that have befallen four-fifths of the big league Opening Day rotation -- this would be called the "I learned it from watching you, okay?" defense. Hanrahan actually pitched on Monday evening, tossing three scoreless innings. He was great before a groin injury set him to the DL, but he's obviously not an option for Friday now. For what it's worth, the ex-Dodger farmhand's line Monday seems to indicate an erratic and inefficient outing: 69 pitches, 35 strikes, and four walks.

Another option seems to be righty Tim Redding, a foolish favorite of mine during the spring's rotation derby. He has a 6.54 ERA at Columbus. Billy Traber is apparently not an option for Friday's start. The team appears steadfast in its preference that Traber remain in the bullpen.

For the dumpster-divers among us (and who isn't?), Sir Sidney remains unemployed but Mark Redman took a minor league deal with Texas.

It's Memorial Day, which has a specific purpose in our national consciousness as a date worthy of reflection, and which has a more generalized purpose in the baseball world as the time when we begin to take stock of what we have seen in the young season. Memorial Day is essentially the season's first marker, a point roughly a third of the way into the schedule when we have established the minimal amount of perspective needed to evaluate what has occurred so far and the foresight to anticipate what might be yet to occur.

As an initial matter, I thought I'd take a look at league-wide offensive output, since that's a constant subject of scrutiny in this age of PEDs high-octane offense. Admittedly, what follows is an uneven comparison, a comparison of offensive levels (expressed in runs per game and on-base-plus-slugging) as they exist today, Monday, with offensive levels after recently completed seasons. But it's the best I can do under the circumstances; I don't know a way to look at league-wide offense as of a particular date in past seasons. Anyway, it's pretty clear offense is down at least so far this season, at least as compared to last season.

Year	NL OPS	NL R/G	AL OPS	AL R/G
This Season	730	4.43	753	4.80
2006	761	4.76	776	4.97
2005	744	4.45	754	4.76
2004	756	4.64	771	5.01
2003	749	4.61	761	4.86

The relationship between OPS and runs per game isn't perfect, as we can see. The NL's runs per game column has bounced up and down in recent seasons, and this season's R/G match, 2005, nevertheless had a league-wide OPS about 15 points higher. Part of the apparent disparity is explained by a somewhat greater percentage of unearned runs this season than in 2005; it appears, at least from unearned run distributions, 2005 was a very good defensive year league-wide. At any rate, the NL's slugging percentage trails that of every season since 1993 and, if the season ended today, the NL's teams would average fewer than a homer per ballgame (0.89, entering Monday) for the first time since, interestingly enough, Mike Lupica's apparently disavowed Summer of '98. This season's offensive characteristics (again, so far) are fairly in line with the juiced-ball season of 1987 and the expansion year of 1993, which ushered in the high-octane era.

Incidentally, the NL's average position player age so far is 29.4 years old. The NL record, set in 2003, is 29.5 years old. (Year-by-year can be found at Baseball Reference.) Maybe this is the kind of thing only I find interesting, but the NL never hit an average of 29 before 2000 -- never in its history, from 1876 onward. Well, almost never; the average age hit 29.1 in 1945, but I think that barely counts, seeing as it was a war year. If they had gone ahead and played with the scabs in 1995, I'm sure the average age would have been like 34.8 or something. Didn't Pedro Borbon Sr.'s grandpa try to break some team's camp as a utility infielder?

At any rate, the NL's average age hasn't dipped below an average of 29 since 2000. There have been some peaks and valleys along the way. In fact, just eyeballing the average age, it seems to fall in eras typified by speed like the 1960s. This makes some intuitive sense. Then again, the average age was at least close to current levels in the most recent speed decade, the 1980s. Anyway, I'm babbling here, but it seems like position players have been rather consistently "old" on average for about two decades now and are getting older. This could be explained by better conditioning/weight training/other measures, and it probably is to some extent. But I'd imagine another influence is free agency and the inevitable long-term contracts that come with it. Generally speaking, the long-term contracts have gotten longer over the years; Barry Bonds's original deal with the Giants (either six or seven years; I forget which) was by far the lengthiest I recalled at the time, and from there it became common for top free agents to get at least five years. To toss in an example from the American League, would David Segui's career have lasted until 2004 if the (Baltimore) Orioles hadn't committed to paying him that long?

But enough babbling. My impressions so far, division by division:

NL EAST: I think the Mets are legit, and that's a surprise to me. Did you know Oliver Perez is walking about three batters per nine innings with a three-to-one strikeout-to-walk ratio? His success actually looks more sustainable than John Maine's. After a year of being shut out of the dance, I have a feeling the Braves might find merit to the wild card back-in. If it comes down to four teams, I'd certainly expect Atlanta to be one of them -- along with Philly and two from the NL West. Coming into Monday, Florida was right on its Pythagorean record. The Nats, we know -- the most marvelous 21-30 known to man. By the way, I make a big to-do about average innings per start, but sometimes that can be deceiving; twice, Matt Chico has had solid starts interrupted by rain delays, leading to four-inning outings.

AL EAST: How legit do the Red Sox need to be in this division? With tonight's loss and Tampa's win, the Yankees are now tied for last. However, there exists some basis for believing they'll be in the wild card hunt. Their Pythag, for one, reflects a team with a winning record. Still, their task is daunting. Just to play around with some numbers . . . The Yankees are 21-28 now, with 113 games left. Let's say they go 70-43 starting tomorrow. That would get them to 91-71, which is just about the minimum required to take the wild card. That 70-43 run, combined with a .500 finish to Boston's season, would force a one-game division playoff. That's unless Toronto or Baltimore has more than 91 wins in 'em . . .

. . . Nah. Buck sez Tampa doesn't finish last this season. Did you know James Shields is averaging better than seven innings per start? I think Toronto has a slightly better chance of being surpassed by the Rays than the O's do. I suppose not finishing in last would vindicate Baltimore's offseason-of-the-reliever, no?

NL CENTRAL: Four words -- race to the bottom. The key to the whole mess is whether Milwaukee's hit a nasty two-week rut or whether the Brewers are just a poor team off to a phony fast start. The truth is probably closer to the former, but if it's the latter then the division opens up to three or perhaps four other teams, depending if you want to humor the Pirates. Suddenly, the Cubs look like a team capable of a real kick and the Astros perhaps like a mudder waiting for the right conditions. And then there are the Cardinals. They're staring at a ridiculous Pythag record and the thought that their rotation currently rests on Braden Looper, a guy who had never started a big league game before April, avoiding any semblance of the dreaded wall. Then again, if their offense is this dysfunctional, then I'm a literary great. As for the Reds, I'm just happy my scrappy hero is okay.

AL CENTRAL: This is by far the most interesting division in baseball. A true four-way race is highly unlikely, but I could see any of four teams winning it, even after thirty percent of the season complete. The Twins recently dumped their crappy veterans for the young guys. It's probably a good trade; it certainly couldn't be a bad trade, considering how Ponson and Ortiz were pitching. But, as a Hardball Times article pointed out over the winter, they couldn't have tried it the other way if they wanted options in the case of failure. So I suppose it was a valiant effort -- from a certain point of view. It's now up to the young guys to pick up the pieces. By the way, I know I'm speaking from a perspective not all that devoted to the Twins, but I'll be somewhat sad when their new park opens. Say what you will, but the Metrodome is unique.

In a division like this, the Royals could make all kinds of gains and not improve an inch in the win/loss column. Given Greinke is in the bullpen and Gordon is hitting Julio Franco's age, I'm guessing the gains aren't really apparent anyway.

NL WEST: MASN is running one of those ridiculous smack-talk ads advising someone named "Peavey" to watch out for Ryan Zimmerman. This from the same advertising campaign that tries to convince us Nook Logan is an offensive force. Oh, and the same people who think it notable that Austin Kearns, a rightanded batter, hit better against lefties but also hit more homers against righty pitchers. Well, duh . . .

The Dodgers have an edge the other teams probably can't match; as evidenced last season, they are capable of making plenty of midseason moves without much effect to the budget. The D-Backs strike me as a year away, which might not be such a good thing considering ¡Livan! is up for free agency and Randy Johnson would be a year older. The Giants are perfectly constructed for an 83-79 record. Jamey Carroll is hitting .177/.307/.198 on the year, and I've never been happier a guy gobbled up a two-year deal when he had the chance.

AL WEST: I'd say it's 60/40 Anaheim runs away and hides, with 35 of the remaining 40 allocated to the A's giving the LAAs a goodly tussle. I'm happy that the Dos Joses have found a landing spot, but I can hardly conceive a way the Mariners hang around (but if there is a way, its name is "Felix"). On behalf of all losers old enough to do more important things than running a baseball team but too young to run a baseball team, I must admit I don't see a whole lot of merit to Jon Daniels's performance in Texas so far.

I'll close this post with an observation: During this past week, Jim Bowden "won" his 1,000th game as a general manager. The MASN people played it up a little bit, and the print/electronic sources noted it too. Here's a question for you, and it might shed light on the impact of this historic thousandth win. Have you ever before considered how many games a general manager's teams won during all of a general manager's years general managing? Yeah, me neither.

But, not to be a jerk about it, congrats Bodes.

It is extremely tempting to try to rationale the last night's win, the fourth in a row and eleventh out of fifteen contests. There are all kinds of ways to reason around the essence of this hot streak to put the season in focus. Something like Resolved: The Nats weren't as bad as they seemed when they were 9-25, but they're not as good as they are now.

That's a good one, because it's probably true, or at least would be if the same guys were winning now that were losing then. Not only does this seem like a different team, in a very real sense it is is a different team. Last night, it was Micah Bowie in yet another emergency start/spot start/shut 'em down for long enough to build a lead performance. How do they get performances like this? Is it Randy St. Clair? Is it some sort of pyschic motivational deal Manny Acta has going on? Or is it possible Bowie -- a guy who hadn't started since 1999, and who had a higher-than-nine ERA when he did -- knows a trick or two about shutting down the opposition?

Whatever it is, it is. Ultimately, you just have to enjoy what's happening and not worry about causes or resolutions. The Nationals could turn back into a pumpkin tonight in St. Louis, and maybe there's still a humiliating little 54-108 season in the offing. You never know. But I do know that this eleven of fifteen stretch has been far better than anything I imagined a month ago, when we were talking about eight of seventeen stretches being hot stuff. They've made this season worth it in May.

Because of family origins and the like, I spent many summer days over the course of my childhood playing in my grandmother's backyard in Wood River, Illinois, and many summer evenings sitting in the seats at Busch Stadium. It seems like a lifetime ago now, and in a sense it was. It was a different brand of baseball those Cardinals of the early- and mid-80s played. WhiteyBall, they called it -- "essentially smallball writ large." It was skinnier players with elastic bands holding up the opposition's light blue road uniforms, and artificial turf with dirt cutouts near the bases, and speed. Lots and lots of speed, but not so much on the power.

It was a different game back then -- whether better or worse is outside this post's scope -- and the Cardinals serve as an exemplar years later. This year's Cardinals, playing a different style of game in a different style of ballpark, have hit 24 home runs in 44 games, just under a 90-homer pace for the 162-game season. That would be almost precisely half the number of homers the Cardinals bashed last season. Their power outage is humbling now, but such production would be a matter of course for the Cards of my youth.

As unfathomable as it may seem, let us presume for the moment the Cardinals fail to reach 100 long balls for the season. The last time the Cardinals failed to reach the century mark for big flies was 1992. They also failed to reach the mark in 1991. And 1990. And 1989. And 1988. And 1987 (though they came close, with 94, in the year of the rabbit ball.) And 1986. And 1985. And 1984. And 1983. And 1982. And 1981.

That last one's easy, given the work stoppage. But the '81 Cardinals wouldn't have made it to 100 homers in a full season regardless of labor relations. They hit 50 homers in 103 games, so you do the math. Besides, I think the point has been made. They went twelve straight seasons without reaching 100 homers as a team.

But, in case the point wasn't made, they also failed to reach 100 team homers in 1971. And 1972. And 1973. And 1974. And 1975. And 1976. And 1977. And 1978. As a matter of fact, a grand total of three homers -- one in 1979, when they hit exactly 100, and two in 1980, when they hit 101 -- separates the St. Louis Cardinals of spanning essentially an entire generation without hitting 100 homers as a team in any one season. Not even Houston, with the famed, power-suppressing Astrodome, could say the same.

Now, this isn't to imply the Cardinals of back then played a punchless brand of baseball, especially relative to their competition -- or at least not necessarily. When the Herzog-era Cardinals didn't win, they didn't score; however, when they won, they most definitely did score. The Cardinals claimed three pennants (and one World Series title) in the 1980s, and in all three seasons they finished among the top five in the NL in runs scored. In 1985, they led the league; in 1987, they ranked second. They merely did it without the long ball, finishing last, next to last, and last in the NL in homers in the pennant-winning seasons.

Big league baseball's precusor to the offensive explosion of 1993 to the present day was 1987, when everybody claimed the ball was juiced and just about everybody became a longball threat. That season, the Cardinals not only finished last in the NL in homers but were more than doubled by the league leader. The Cards hit 94 homers, whereas the Cubbies hit 209. We can and should consider park effects, but that's still a huge difference. Andre Dawson hit 49 homers that year, better than half St. Louis's total alone. Nevertheless, the Cardinals outscored the Cubs that season, and it wasn't particularly close -- a difference of about a half-run per game.

The WhiteyBall era ended unceremoniously in the middle of 1990, and the Cardinals steadily increased their home run totals from 1993 onward. For the last decade, they've been sort of informally synonymous with the homer, from the Mark McGwire era to the legendary start of Albert Pujols's career. (Pujols is a complete hitter, of course, but it's undeniable the guy is a home run force.) I'd imagine their early season power outage is jarring even for their most dedicated and historically astute fan.

As the St. Louis teams of the 1980s demonstrated, it's not impossible to have a potent offense despite going yard infrequently. Such a team just has to do other things well, which the those Cardinals did -- including, as this article notes, the most important thing, getting on base. In each of the three 1980s pennant-winning years, the Cardinals led the NL in on-base percentage. The current Cardinals . . . well, they're not exactly leading the NL in OBP. They're 13th, which does very little to offset the leage's second-worst slugging percentage. Unlike the Whiteyball teams, they don't run well either, ranking last in the league with 13 stolen bases (against 12 caught stealings) and three triples. They've absolutely cratered offensively, which I suppose means they have nowhere to go but up.

One of the beauties of baseball is that, as one notable 80s-era Cardinal once remarked, the one word that says it all is you-never-know. The Cardinals could mount their offensive climb without a moment's notice. If the Nats could do that -- and they certainly have, leading the NL in runs scored over a two-week span -- then so can the Cardinals. But I guess you've already guessed the next line: Let's hope they wait until after the weekend to turn it around offensively.

* * * *

PS: Given the table above, it seems advisable to murder their starters a good bit. Everyone else has been -- or at least everyone up until the Cardinals' just-completed sweep of the Pirates.

PPS: The drinking game sweeping the nation (or at least the Mid-Atlantic portion thereof) is to do a shot every time Bob Carpenter mentions St. Louis or the Cardinals or the St. Louis Cardinals. In light of this weeekend's opponent, perhaps participants should take it easy. We wouldn't want a fleet of ambulances hurrying to Miss Chatter's Saturday "Baseball on the Barn" and there's enough alcohol poisoning in this sordid world of ours.

I suppose it is a bit convenient to say this is how we thought it would be -- a nice and neutral headline like "Washington 4, Cincinnati 3" recapping a pleasant road series win to improve the team's record to something resembling respectability. Maybe we expected that sort of thing at the outset of the season, back when my recollection says most of us predicted benignly and unremarkably poor records such as 64-98 or 66-96 or 69-93, rather than some of the "historically bad" Buster Olney-ish predictions. But, even if we say that we saw beyond a little thing called Nine and Twenty-Five, did we really expect the climb to pseudo-respectability to be heralded by something like this? "Bacsik, Nationals Edge Reds," I mean, with the corresponding subhead "Lefty earns first win since 2004 with 7 2/3 solid innings."

Mike Bacsik?

Yes, Bacsik went 11-0 last season in the Pacific Coast League. We know that. We also know:

• he is bald
  
• he is apparently a huge fan of Dallas Mavericks; and
  
• other than that, we have know idea who the hell he is.

Surely we're not alone. And before you object to the overuse of the overly inclusive "we," you might as well admit too that you have no idea who the guy is. So it's we. So it's us. So it's all of us. We're all clueless about this guy.

Yet, here Bacsik is, 1-0 with a 1.98 ERA in two starts. Pretty cool.

Bacsik, like another May rotational addition, Jason Simontacchi, is succeeding so far because he's been able to avoid beating himself. He's walked two batters in 13.2 innings and has trusted a Washington defense that, errors aside, has been pretty solid. The Nats are fifth in the NL in defensive efficiency, a stat I've referenced a few times this season. It means the Nats' percentage of balls in play converted to outs is the fifth-highest in the NL. (The Reds, by contrast, have the worst defensive efficiency rating in the league, an attribute amply exploited by the Nats especially with a red hot Dmitri Young and the corresponding "Keep Robert Fick the hell away from the starting lineup" plan.)

Good control and efficient defense comprise a fine combination, one enhanced by the ability to keep the ball in the park. So far, Bacsik and Simontacchi, to name two, have combined for three homers allowed in 36 innings (counting tonight's eighth inning homer that allowed the Reds back into the game). Surely, this is a rate aided in large part by RFK Stadium, but it's worth noting both Simontacchi and Bacsik thrived in the considerably more cozy Great American Ballpark (again, except for the late homer off Bacsik).

The key phrase, I suppose, is "so far," since a 36 inning-sample from two pitchers is the very essence of small. And, truth be told, I'm not tremendously sanguine about Bacsik going forward. I can't really speak for his first outing, but based on what I observed of him tonight, he was surrendering quite a few rockets. These shots were converted to outs -- I again refer you to the team's defensive efficiency -- but they will eventually start finding safety in greater numbers to the point where, given his likely inability to strike out enough batters, there will be issues concerning Bacsik's sustainability.

Yet, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Is there really even a "going forward" for Bacsik? Bergmann should be back fairly soon, Hill should be too, and even our delicate flower, John Patterson, will be hitting the rehab circuit before we know it. Mike O'Connor supposedly will be back in the swing sometime in June, and Brandon Claussen has taken an aggressive posture to rehab. As fill-ins go, Simontacchi very well might stick around, but Bacsik is strictly a fill-in.

* * * *

There seems to be a growing sentiment as the season progresses -- in this first season of widespread MASN distribution -- that Bob Carpenter has not been the greatest of play-by-play men. I don't wish to pile-on, but I do think it is relevant to point out an instance in tonight's game where Carpenter (and, to be fair, Don Sutton as well) neglected to comment on something important to the disposition of tonight's game.

David Ross led off the bottom of the eighth with a plasma shot off of Ryan Zimmerman that finally expended the last of its energy when it made its way into Ryan Church's glove in left. Slappin' swifty Norris Hopper followed with a pinch-hit drag bunt single, and Billy Traber started tossing in the Nats' bullpen. The Reds had turned over the lineup, and leadoff man Ryan Freel (the greatest of the Ryan Freel-type players, of course) smacked another hot shot. Fortunately, second baseman Felipe Lopez snared the line drive. Lopez attempted to double-off Ross at second, but his flip to Cristian Guzman was errant. Zimmerman and Bacsik both reacted quickly, however, with Zimmerman tracking down the ball and Bacsik sprinting to third base once he saw Ross break off of second. The Zimmerman/Bacsik combo was faster, and the Nats converted a bizarre little 4-5-1 double-play.

Carpenter and Sutton were appropriately effusive in their praise of Zimmerman and Bacsik, and they noted the double-play loomed large once the next batter, Alex Gonzalez, slammed a two-run homer to cut the lead to one. But they failed to address one thing: why Ross tried to take third base in the first place. Why did Ross run? It was a stupid play. Obviously, he saw the ball pass by the bag and must have figured there was a good chance Zimmerman wouldn't make it in time, but why even risk it? As a catcher, Ross isn't a fast runner, his run was in isolation nearly meaningless, and the heart of the order was lying in wait. And yet, ninety seconds later, the MASN announcers treated his out as incidental, part of a wild and unlucky double-play that deprived the Reds of a tie game.

Well, the double-play was wild and unlucky, but Ross's out was not incidental. It was the product of a choice. It may be harsh to say it was a poor choice, given the pace of the play; yet, it was an unnecessary choice, and that's what made it poor. You'd think that choice would be worth a mention.

Speaking of poor choices, what was with Jeff Conine bunting with one out and no outs in the bottom of the ninth? Was that on Conine's initiative, or did Jerry Narron call it? Either way it was odd -- Sutton wryly noted Conine had "seven sacrifice bunts in his illustrious career" -- and will likely lead to an uneasy appearance in the morning paper for Narron tomorrow.

But hey, the Nats will certainly take it. GUZMANIA prospers, too!

Do you get tired of the humdrum lines of analysis applied to these Washington Nationals? Bored with the "historically bad" predictions? Quite familiar with how unknown the team's starters are? Up to speed on the normally sluggish offense? Then does Thom Loverro ever have what you need, because I'm not sure this angle has been trotted out yet:

Don't jump to conclusions before you start deriding. Loverro isn't saying these Nats could be six games better; he's saying a hypothetically payroll-infused edition of the Nats could be "if [the Lernastens] had made a little more of a financial commitment to the team on the field this year[.]" Okay, now we can start deriding.

The Nats, 16-29 heading into Tuesday's action, have actually lost 14 games by two runs or less, not 13. They are 12-14 in such games (and are a surprisingly competent 8-7 in one-run contests). Let's do as Loverro urges and turn six two-runs-or-less losses into wins. That gives the Nats a 22-23 record overall and an 18-8 record in close contests. That would be, as Loverro insists, a reason for hope, correct?

Well, no. If so, it would be a false hope, and the ability to noodle back even two years in time would serve as an ample reminder of such foolishness. What, pray tell, happened when the '05 Nats won all those close games in the first half of the season? They lost all those close games in the second half, of course. Those things tend to happen; they tend to even out. On behalf of all of us who allowed our hearts to obliterate our heads back then, we won't get fooled again.

So, what Loverro is pining for is a marginally positioned team riding an unsustainable wave of luck. To each his own, I suppose.

* * * *

With a bit less blogger snark, I'll note Loverro is looking at this close-game split all wrong. As noted above, there's not much foreseeable room for growth there; you don't look at a near-.500 record in close games and conclude that's what has doomed your drive to near-.500 status overall. It's the other games -- the games not decided by two runs or less -- that provide the theoretical window for improvement. After all the Nats are (again, entering Tuesday) 4-15 in non-close games. Now, that record could stand for some substantial improvement with a better club. Poor clubs do tend to get blown out quite a bit.

But let's assume the Lernastens had pumped some more money in this team during the offseason. Would such initiative have gotten the team up to around Loverro's 22-23 mark? I'd say it's unlikely. I contend this is the case because, if the Lernastens were going to spend money this offseason, it was going to be on pitching.

Plenty of people urged the Nats to sign some relatively low-cost, veteran pitching. But how many people advocated the team to bulk up the offense? Not many, because the lineup looked fairly set (if predictably substandard). While I'm not saying there is no room for improvement among the pitchers (obviously), the club's weaker dimension has been offensive. Yet, unless Loverro is applying a good bit of hindsight and Tuesday-after-Tuesday-after-Tuesday quarterbacking, I don't think he's pointing to additional "financial commitment" on the offensive side of the game (unless he's making a veiled reference to re-signing Alfonso Soriano, I suppose).

Furthermore, what kind of hope does a near-.500 team bring? It's convenient to apply the conditions of a previous year to the present day, but it rarely works that way. The Nats were contenders most of the year in '05 because the winning number in the division was low; it did not remain low last season. Similarly, last season a team won the World Series despite a thoroughly mediocre regular season. To the extent this result had any bearing on a team in the NL East, like the Nats (and it didn't), we can be pretty sure the result won't repeat itself this season.

So, yeah, a near-.500 record would certainly feel quite a bit better at the moment, but at the end of the day . . . so what? Embrace The Plan, Thom.

In a sense, the 2006-07 Reds are similar to the 2005-06 Nats. Both teams made valiant but ultimately futile runs in year one, runs occasioned by standard bearers of mediocre quality, and both teams found (or are finding) year two much less enthralling. There appears to be the hint of turmoil surrounding the Reds, as general manager and apparent legal thriller devotee Wayne Krivsky accompanied the team on a West Coast road trip and speculation appears to exist that manager Jerry Narron is on the hot seat. There's even a snazzy campaign button advocating Narron's dismissal.

But Narron (and Krivsky) will be around for the four-game set against the Nats, so the natural angle for the series is a review of last July's big trade between the teams. (The other natural angle, both in its own right and bootstrapped into the trade via the Majewski grievance saga, is Captain Leatherpants' annual sojourn back to Cincy.) I regard the trade as I did ten months ago: a fine swap of talent for the Nats, one I won't really begin to evaluate from Cincy's perspective.

Now, it's important to align expectations of the trade with our current reality. And our current reality is that neither Felipe Lopez nor Austin Kearns is a star, neither player projects to be a star, and there's an argument to be made Lopez really has no long-term future with the Nats, either as a shortstop or as a second baseman. If we were to evaluate the trade on the basis of whether the Nats received stars, it would seem disappointing no matter what the Nats gave up in return. But who was expecting stars? Lopez was a former all-star and Kearns was still "projectable," so maybe the pair had star potential. At the time, however, I believe most people thought the Nats were gaining some next-wave players to replace (or eventually replace) Jose Guillen and Jose Vidro, two veterans more than likely (or, in Vidro's case, hopefully) on the way out. This is precisely what the Nats have received.

So, although Lopez and Kearns have stalled (as the rest of the team's offense has, of course), I believe the trade has the same merits today as when it was made. Lopez is forced as a leadoff hitter, but could be plus down in the order. Kearns, like Guillen before him, is not an individual who can carry a club, but he's a perfectly acceptable supplementary power source.

I've seen a couple posters at Baseball Primer attack the deal collaterally from the Nats' perspective. The basic argument is that the Nats are building for the future -- what with "The Plan" and all -- and neither Lopez nor Kearns fits that plan, insofar as they are already too close to their "theoretical peak," which is a shorthand way of saying the guys are close to age 27, the age at which Bill James two decades ago found a plurality of players enjoyed their best seasons. (Lopez and Kearns are both 27 years old this May.) Leaving aside the question of whether the age-27 peak year guidepost is still applicable -- or, indeed, ever was -- the criticism is that the former Reds are irrelevant to the Nats' rebuilding, as they will be either past their peak abilities, or too expensive to keep, or both, by the time the Nats are ready to compete in full come . . . well, whatever that comes to be.

I don't think much of this objection. It reduces the so-called "success cycle" -- a model of teambuilding capturing teams at specific moments when they are ready to build, tear apart, rebuild, or contend -- to something resembling an absurdity. Just because a team is explicitly starting over from scratch (which, at the team, was not precisely true last July 14) does not mean the team must, as a matter of logic and consistency, forgo efforts for immediate and intermediate improvement.

I've also seen a more nuanced variation of this objection, which essentially states Okay, fine, you made the trade; now trade these guys as assets furthering "The Plan." Actually, it's not an objection to the trade in principle, as we can see, but how the organization utilized the tools acquired in the trade going forward. There's merit in this criticism, but, for reasons outside the scope of analyzing the trade itself, I don't know if this is a politically palatable course.

A more specific objection is that the trade was contrary to Jim Bowden's mantra of "Pitching, Pitching, Pitching." It doesn't take long to reason that almost everything Bowden does is contrary to the mantra, since the mantra is nothing but mere puffery. Since when has Bowden valued pitching? He doesn't; one of his biggest blindspots as a general manager is appreciating rotational depth. I remember the MLB.com article explaining the loss of Darrell Rasner on waivers to the Yankees. The justification was the Nats saw Rasner as no more than a fifth starter. I'm sure the Nats saw Claudio Vargas as no more than a fifth starter, too. Bowden relinquished both pitchers for absolutely nothing. This result is close to unacceptable in my eyes not because Vargas or Rasner are any great shakes (certainly not now, since Rasner's pinky is mangled enough to warrant a three-month stint on the DL), but because guys who are "no more than a fifth starter" have some value -- or, at least, some value to people other than Jim Bowden.

In this case, though, Bowden gave up some pitching, but he didn't give it away for free. Furthermore, the pitching he gave up was of the most replaceable kind: relief pitching. The Nats have cobbled together a nice bullpen with the Saul Riveras and Jesus Colomes of the world, guys who cost nothing. Bill Bray might evolve into a shut-down lefty reliever, and Bowden certainly should know what it feels like when that happens; he traded B.J. Ryan several years ago. But maybe Bray stalls and, unlike Ryan, Bray was traded for contributing individuals. As for Gary Majewski, he was a dutiful reliever, but he wasn't the first middle reliever in the world to be overworked. (Incidentally, Majewski's family has been hit by the tragic death of his sister, a reminder baseball is baseball and life is something completely different.)

The only talent still yet to be revealed, down in the bushes lying wait, is Daryl Thompson, who, the Cincy blogosphere's version of NFA notes, had another fine outing yesterday and is climbing the organization's ladder. Thompson is a 21 year old righthander, an eighth round pick of the Expos in 2003, whose stay in the Natspos organization was interrupted by injury. Thompson could end up swinging the balance of last year's trade, but we'll make that assessment at the appropriate time. Thompson is at High-A ball right now. Although I certainly don't wish him further injury, plenty of factors could inhibit his development. Just ask Mike Hinckley, I suppose.

Anyway, it's nearly a year later, and I just don't see a compelling justification to reevaluate the trade. This is not to say Lopez or Kearns are setting the world on fire, but who is to say they would? By the end of the season, they'll rate as competent performers at their positions. That's fine in my book.

Those were Bob Carpenter's words after Logan's clutch two-out, two-run single carried the Nats past the (Baltimore) Orioles today, which salvaged a win in this first round of the "Battle of the Beltways" interleague series. Logan, who went two-for-three with a walk, two stolen bases, and the Nats' first run scored in addition to driving in their final two runs, had a great day.

Perspective is a real buzz-kill on days like this, so let's not indulge its existence too much. Speaking only for myself, I wonder if the realization that it's a long season carries too much force sometimes. Yes, it is a long season, and a day's successes and failures inhere in themselves very little. Back in June 1995, for instance, light-hitting middle infielder Mike Benjamin lashed out 14 hits in a three-game period. Benjamin ended the season with a .220 batting average. He hit .229 in a 13-year career. As an offensive player, Benjamin was pretty much nothing. But for those three days in 1995, he was really something. When Benjamin was in the midst of going six-for-seven on June 14, raising his average to .447, I doubt anyone was saying, "Yeah, but he was hitting .150 four days ago." Instead, inasmuch as Benjamin led the Giants to a 4-3 victory, their fans were more likely screaming, "Whoo-hoo!"

And so it should be with Nook Logan. Most of us out there in fanland know the guy's limitations, and they require little elaboration in this post. Admittedly, this directive becomes more difficult when the the MLB.com gamer includes Good grief, please hold your horses-inducing lines like "If Sunday was any indication, Logan could be batting second by the second half the season." I don't want to dwell on what Logan can't do, but I certainly don't want to use a great game to get ahead of ourselves.

Logan's day was what it was, and it was great. They say that speed never slumps, which is an interesting type of cliche in the sense that it's a negative proposition; what is revealing about the saying is what it doesn't say. Speed doesn't win, at least not in the sense that on-base and extra-base-advancement do. (On-base and slugging percentages are said to correlate well with runs scored.) Speed must be occasioned by something else, because, as another saying goes, you can't steal first base. But you can come pretty close, as Nook evinced in the third inning when he stretched out a bunt single. Having gotten to first, Logan matriculated his way down the basepaths, as Hank Stram might have said. He stole second and then stole third. The latter swipe was rendered somewhat superfluous when Felipe Lopez singled him home, but it was a pretty steal nonetheless.

As mesmerizing as Logan's third inning performance was, however, it must be repeated: speed doesn't win, baseball skill does. We most associate "one-dimensional" with plodding, whifftastic sluggers like Rob Deer, but generally speaking, Nook Logan is just as one-dimensional, only he represents a different dimension. Not today, though. In the bottom of the eighth, Logan was a tenacious ballplayer, reversing a difficult hole in the count and churning out the decisive base hit. It was a nine-pitch at-bat that started called strike/foul ball. Logan then fouled off another Danys Baez offering, took a waste pitch in the dirt, took another ball, fouled off two pitches, and then took another ball. Having battling his way back to a full count, Logan struck a grounder in the hole between first and second and led his team to victory.

There were certainly other heroes today (to the extent a single victory over the O's can be considered a heroic accomplishment). In the decisive eighth inning, Ryan Zimmerman lashed his second double of the game, Ryan Langerhans drove him home with a single, and Ronnie Belliard perfectly/luckily placed a short fly that eluded the glove of second baseman Brian Roberts. Emergency starter Micah Bowie, making his first start since the "Chicks Dig the Long Ball" era, did well enough for three innings before requiring relief in the fourth. But it was Logan's day, and there cannot be much doubt about that.

A recent innovation from the mind of Bill James is the concept of a "win share." I'm not going to delve into the dorky details for this post, but I'll note the concept of parceling shares for wins is illustrative here. How many wins would a player of Nook Logan's caliber "create" over the course of a season? Probably not too many above and beyond what a "replacement player" would. His bat is too weak, his ability to get on base too meager to enable his speed to profit. Yet, today, May 20, Logan gets plenty of share for this win.

And that is certainly reason enough to celebrate. What a day for Nook Logan, indeed. Whooo-hoo!

* * * *

Changing the tone just a bit, we can be rather certain Logan is not the long-term answer in centerfield. Logan joins a particularly inclusive club, as the Expos/Nationals have tried just about everyone in center during the first part of the milennium except maybe that telepathic Area 51 alien who manipulated poor old Commander Data in Independence Day. Oh, and Andruw Jones.

Speaking of Jones, he's one of the prospective free agent centerfielders profiled in today's Post. Jones is not likely to be a future Washington National insofar as he'll be callin' rain in a matter of months. He's younger than Alfonso Soriano, can actually play centerfield (as we all know), and is represented Scott Boras. That spells money, with a synonym being Yankees.

Anyway, there are plenty of other centerfielders on the list: Torii Hunter, who figures to be something of a poor man's Andruw on the free agent market (poor in all but the financial sense); Ichiro!, who is almost as unlikely to join the Nats as Frank Robinson (I'm guessing Ichiro either re-signs with the Mariners or joins the Bonds-less Giants); Corey Patterson; Aaron Rowand; Mike Cameron; or the awesomely-named Japanese star Kosuke Fukudome.

I've got a funny feeling it's going to be Cameron. Okay, it's not so funny; the guy's an ex-Red, which is one thing Jim Bowden looks for in a player. Or a scout. Or a front office guy. Or a bullpen coach. Or a studio analyst.

Keep an eye on this Fukudome guy, too. The Nats have contacts in Japan, which seems like a nice idea. Anyway, a set of bold, Plantastic predictions: If Fukudome signs with the Nats, he'll hit .345 with 40 homers and 130 ribbies. If he doesn't, he'll hit like .257 with 18 homers.

At Federal Baseball, we've been all over this MajewskiGate thing since its inception. Along the way, we've judiciously used resources inside the game of baseball to provide the most immediate and accurate information possible on this developing controversy.

This has been a task requiring much patience and perspective, insofar as the controversy has been "developing" for over nine months. But we persist in our goal of informing the Nats-going public. To that end, last August we disclosed an internal baseball form indicating the condition of Gary Majewski's right shoulder was not explicitly mentioned by the Nationals but the omission was not pursued by the Reds.

After months of no-comments and veiled threats, Cincinnati general manager Wayne Krivsky has now filed formal grievance, according to the Washington Post. It was time again to contact my sources and see what they could provide. And one of these sources, sure enough, provided a goldmine. What follows below is a copy of Krivsky's grievance form filed so recently its ink is barely dry.

While the burden is no doubt high to prevail on an internal grievance, you can see Krivsky aims to deliver a compelling case. Federal Baseball will continue to provide updates and internal documents on this situation as they warrant.

A Brief History of the Baltimore Orioles in the Last Decade

1998: Coming off a division championship, what we really need are some really old veteran free agents at the end of their careers. Hey, Joe Carter, Doug Drabek, Ozzie Guillen -- come on down! Oh, and the manager. Hey, Ray Miller -- let the good times roll!

1999: So, old free agents about to retire didn't work? But Joe Carter was an RBI Machine -- what could go wrong? Aha. They weren't expensive enough! We need Will Clark, Delino DeShields, Mike Timlin, and . . . and . . . Albert Belle. Take that, Yankees! So what if our manager resents the money these guys are making???? (See this thread, last comment.) Well, I guess we do care. Let's fire Miller. And hey, let's fire our young GM, too. We'll say he offended Cal or something. Too late to get Gillick back, but there's always time for . . . Syd Thrift!

2000: This isn't going quite as well as planned. Mediocre veterans aren't working (though Lord only knows Jim Hunter loves B.J. and Bordy and Niner and the gang). Better acquire some mediocre prospects, but we'll market them as "Kids." Do we think our fans are this stupid? Who cares, we still have Cal.

2001: Crap, we're not going to have Cal anymore. Someone give Surhoff a call! In the meantine, David Segui looks pretty goo . . . oh. Nevermind.

2002: Ladies and gentlemen: We give you the Marty Cordova Era.

2003: Tell you the truth, the Marty Cordova Era sort of sucks. The Rick Helling and Omar Daal Era ain't so hot either. Let's try the youth thing again.

2004: Tell you the truth, the youth thing sort of sucks too. Let's buy big again! Hey, the veterans got us all the way up to third!

2005: Up, up, up . . . doooooooooooown. Maybe it was a bad sign last season when Sheinin was writing that our manager didn't know his left from his right.

2006: Did we even play in 2006?

2007: Middle relief is a problem. Let's go out and get some middle relievers. Oh, and offense too -- let's get Aubrey Huff and Jay Payton. Solid.

* * * *

I grew up a baseball fan, and I liked the Phillies as a kid. I don't know why, but I liked all the Philly teams as a kid. Maybe it's because I was born near Philadelphia, though that can't be it unless sports fandom is imprinted from birth, seeing as my family moved to Richmond when I was eight months old. I just remember Mike Schmidt was my favorite player since . . . well, since I gained the ability to remember. I also liked a couple others, guys like Dusty Baker and George Brett and Cal Ripken Jr.

From an early age, I was advised that I might as well pick an American League team too, seeing as the National and American were separate leagues and they'd never play each other unless it was the World Series, because that was just the way baseball tradition went. So I picked the Orioles, a natural fit, seeing as they were the closest big league team to me, and sure enough a year or so later the Phils and O's met in the World Series.

Anyway, I've been an O's fan since about the age of six, and I've witnessed this franchise ebb and flow ever since. As I said yesterday, my interest in the O's has died off in the last two or three years, or even more than that. I hung on between 1999-2004, to be honest, just because I figured the team couldn't possibly be run as incompetently as it seemed to be.

Then the Nationals arrived, and I was all for that. My interest in the Phillies -- a childhood thing -- had lapsed, and I had a National League and American League pair to root for again. Except the arrival of the Nats made me reevaluate where I was with the Orioles and their cluelessness and their dastardly owner. Though I've made good faith efforts since 2005, there's precious little juice anymore.

I'd like to root for the Orioles, I really would, but . . . what's the point? This franchise been churning spoiled butter for a decade, occasionally flipping around leadership (except for the throne room, of course) and instituting awkward regimes easily susceptible to mockery. Syd Thrift? (R.I.P.) Beatagan? Fluquette? It spent years and years perpetuating a silly little "regional team" myth, as if the way to beat the Yankees and the Red Sox was carve out its own ridiculous fiefdom, and when that strategy didn't work the only recourse was to isolate Lord Angelos's Mid-Atlantic kingdom from any alternatives or competition. I'm glad Mr. Angelos ultimately got what he wanted (television money), and in a sense he was correct when he predicted a DC team would take some of his fans, but that loss was his own doing. It was in my case, at least.

So here the Orioles stand, and in retrospect I offer the same observation I made at the time, back in 1998-99: the Orioles essentially operated like the dumber small market franchises did in the wake of the Strike of 1994-95. Those clubs spent the middle and later parts of the decade swapping around over-the-hill, moderately inexpensive, veteran "talent" at the expense of big splashes or -- more to the point -- player development, without the first damn design of how those pieces would fit into a contender other than that people would recognize their names. Just chart the later careers of guys like Vince Coleman, Terry Pendleton, and Hal Morris, among others, and there you go. The Orioles were essentially as dumb, except they had some assets that brought in some money at the time. We all know what those assets were. They've now dried up, or pretty much so, and Angelos secured an asset that is not conditional on the end of a player's career or winning and losing. Bully for you.

Some of those dumber small market teams eventually wised up, and that's why you see the Milwaukee Brewers busting out this season. Maybe the Orioles will see a similar revival in the near future, though I sympathize they're placed in a tough division (but nonetheless one that guarantees great home attendance for approximately a quarter of the season). But while I've heard the player development program has improved, it's improved from what exactly? From the state where a straight line between Cal and Brian Roberts was intersected essentially and only by Jeffrey Hammonds? They're producing more quality farmhands than that now? It's about damned time.

With some wisdom and a little luck, the Orioles are bound to experience some success eventually. They're probably not there yet, and I'm not even sure if they'll get there before the Nats do. That would be an interesting comparison. But when/if the O's again reach success on the field, will I return to rooting -- active rooting, as opposed to indifference? Probably so. Does that make me a bad fan? Probably so.

But, in my defense, I stuck around for a long time while those guys were giving us a bad team. Karma's a funky broad sometimes.

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Late Note: Bergmann to the DL, Mike Bacsik (Training) up from Columbus for tomorrow night's start, Dmitri back in the lineup tonight. For the record, the Nats will throw Simontacchi, Bacsik, and Micah Bowie for the Baltimore series. They'll be followed by Levale Speigner and our new new new new staff ace, Matt Chico. Wow.

Would you like to fraternize with the enemy? Is there even an enemy here, other than mutual agreement that Angelos is the enemy? Anyway, say hi to the fine folks at Camden Chat. You might remind them the team's not called the Expos anymore, but I'm sure someone would allege that was being disrespectful to the Expos. In the alternative, check out their pretty banner announcing a vote of no-confidence in Sam Perlozzo. How could they do such a thing? Don't they know Sammy went to The George Washington University? Sacrilege.

Scott (from Camden Chat) and I might have some sort of bet riding on this "Battle of the Beltway" (or "Battle of the Beltways") thing, but I'm not sure either of our hearts are in it. I don't think there will be a single Raider Fan to be found, so presumably all will return from the games safely and without bloodletting. Oh well.

Well, he is. Kind of. Hopefully not seriously -- but serious enough to miss a turn in the rotation. From Nats.com:

According to the Nats.com report, the club won't fill Bergmann's spot by rushing a young pitching prospect "such as Collin Balester and Cory Van Allen" -- which is both a relief and quite laughable, especially in the case of Van Allen, who is currently hurling at Class-A Hagerstown. According to the article, "it most likely will be a veteran pitcher getting the call" -- meaning we could be seeing the triumphant big league return of Tim Redding, our presumptive No. 2 guy at the start of the spring -- or perhaps Billy Traber, who's pitched a couple relief innings since making his way from Columbus. Speculation aplenty can be found at Nationals Journal (and Barry Svrluga emphasizes the It's Just Precautionary, Bergmann Could Pitch But It Was Considered Unwise angle).

For the record, I vote Traber. But either way it's dumb flippin' luck, though Harper might preemptively dispute that characterization.