Division Foes 2012: The Nats

[G-Fafif]

Charles Pierce can't resist the Nationals, unsatisying TV voices and all, though he'd have preferred they'd moved to Havana.

The fact that Gonzalez is having the year he's having has enabled the Nationals to create the season's finest controversy � namely, the decision by Washington general manager Mike Rizzo to hold Strasburg to a strict innings limit, even if it means shutting down his 24-year-old ace for the entire postseason. (Strasburg had Tommy John surgery in 2010.) This decision has roiled up the Nationals fan base, thereby providing final proof of its actual existence. It has mystified Strasburg and, according to the Washington Post's Tom Boswell, Strasburg's father as well. (Back during the All-Star break, the younger Strasburg famously said that the team would have to "rip the ball out of my hands" if they wanted to sideline him at the end of the year.) And, discussing the matter during a Red Sox�Yankees telecast over the weekend, Tim McCarver nearly went into orbit. To be fair, Scott Boras, Strasburg's agent, has chipped in to support Rizzo � which is, of course, exactly the kind of support that fans adore. Strasburg is expected to pitch Tuesday night against Atlanta in the second game of the series that will determine if there will be an honest-to-god pennant race here, whether a Washington baseball team will stroll into the playoffs talking about Stephen Strasburg and not Walter Johnson. Unfortunately, looking out over this happy, if hopelessly generic, new ballpark, I can only think about what might have been.

[Frayed Knot]

Has anyone else noticed that, aside from:
- their catching crew which, prior to the recent trade for the Hawaiian-born Kurt Suzuki, rotated between three different Latin-born players
- the black (and German-born) Edwin Jackson who was just brought in this Spring on a one-year deal
- and fourth outfielder Roger Bernadina from the Caribbean island of Curaco
that the Nationals are otherwise all white and all-U.S. born?

Not making a judgement here or anything, just something I've recently noticed and something I'm sure has got to be an oddity in today's game - particularly the dearth of Hispanics.
The last overwhelmingly white team like this that sticks in my mind was the 1993 Phillies crew.

[Guest The Second Spitter]

By my calculations, if you bet $100 on the Nats on every single game this season, you'd be up $1291. This is based on average odds of 1.83 for a win.

[Frayed Knot]

Two more starts for Strasburg and then it's Operation Shutdown
That means he'll miss what would be three more regular season starts. And, oh yeah, all that October stuff also.

[G-Fafif]

Strasburg's last start at [crossout:zyyv4pp3]Shea[/crossout:zyyv4pp3] Citi 9/12.

Crazy.

[Edgy MD]

I'm wondering how seriously they considered the option of pulling him three or four starts early and saving the remainder of his innings for the playoffs.

Or better yet, if this was the plan all along, why didn't they delay his season's beginning until mid-May?

[Edgy MD]

Honoring returned and wounded veterans at Nationals Park every home game: very cool.

Playing a song during this tribute that zero out of 10 million respondents from my fake survey claim to enjoy or to draw inspiration from: highly disappointing.

Try harder, DJ.

[Frayed Knot]

Strasburg shut down as of NOW!!!! -- No final game at Citi next week.

After getting bounced around by the Marlins last night (and, really, in several of his latest starts) they think he is wearing down both mentally and physically and so are pulling the plug a bit earlier than they planned.
And, actually, in terms of ERA he's now the 4th best starter on his own team; behind Gonzalez, Zimmermannnnn, and even Detwiler, ahead of only Edwin Jackson.

[Ceetar]

Frayed Knot wrote: Strasburg shut down as of NOW!!!! -- No final game at Citi next week. After getting bounced around by the Marlins last night (and, really, in several of his latest starts) they think he is wearing down both mentally and physically and so are pulling the plug a bit earlier than they planned. And, actually, in terms of ERA he's now the 4th best starter on his own team; behind Gonzalez, Zimmermannnnn, and even Detwiler, ahead of only Edwin Jackson.

nice. shutting him down means when he gets to this point next year it'll also be his career high in IP in a season and maybe he'll tire again.

[Edgy MD]

How do you get such sweet seats in a ballpark with such wealthy fans and not know that "play offs" is one word?

[HahnSolo]

Thats not a Yankee hat, is it?

That could explain things.

[Edgy MD]

I thought maybe. Hard to tell. I think it's a faded navy W hat.

Seriously, though. Look at these folks. Like the opening ceremonies of the Douche Olympics.



I gotta move.

[bmfc1]

"Playoffs" is one word--and so is asshat.

[Edgy MD]

I'm happy for Davey, who's dressing in Navy, and I guess I'll root for them, as another championship could well get him in the Hall of Fame, which he deserves despite being undermined by his superiors at most stops (the Mets mostly being an exception, surprisingly). He could possibly even get bronzed in a Mets hat when he gets there.

But when you see how much this organization is self-consciously and tentatively trying to be like their idea of a baseball franchise, these guys really make the Mets' leadership look like a self-confident, self-aware bunch.

[list:2gr7tfjw][*:2gr7tfjw]We still don't know what their base color is and what they're secondary color is.[/*:m:2gr7tfjw]
[*:2gr7tfjw]We still don't know whether the DC insignia or the W insignia is the defining one.[/*:m:2gr7tfjw]
[*:2gr7tfjw]The shiny gold drop shadow is pretty much the ugliest thing on any big league uniform.[/*:m:2gr7tfjw]
[*:2gr7tfjw]The President's Race a forced, boiled-down stolen tradition.[/*:m:2gr7tfjw]
[*:2gr7tfjw]Washington/Jefferson/TRoosevelt/Lincoln represent a South Dakota landmark, not a DC one.[/*:m:2gr7tfjw]
[*:2gr7tfjw]The fans --- as noted elsewhere --- behave as if they saw Phillies fans acting up in latenight highlights on the widescreen TVs in their McMansions, and thought, "That's cool! I'm going to be hardcore like that."[/*:m:2gr7tfjw]
[*:2gr7tfjw]The WWF announcer, who I've bitched about too many times to name.[/*:m:2gr7tfjw]
[*:2gr7tfjw]Routinely hiring backslapping fools as broadcasters.[/*:m:2gr7tfjw][/list:u:2gr7tfjw]

They're just such a faux team for our faux times.

[HahnSolo]

Some fun little facts in this piece from David Schoenfeld on ESPN (Metly connections bolded by me).

The most important weekend in Washington Nationals history might have been the final three days of the 2008 season. The Nationals began the weekend 59-99; the Seattle Mariners began the weekend 58-101. Both teams were horrible. The Nationals had lost 12 of 14; the Mariners had lost 14 of 15. The prize for the ultimate futility: Stephen Strasburg, already the clear No. 1 pick in the 2009 draft. The Mariners had it in the bag. Except the Nationals lost three in a row to the Phillies. Their batting order the final day was a beautiful list: Emilio Bonifacio, Anderson Hernandez, Kory Casto, Ryan Langerhans, Alberto Gonzalez, Roger Bernadina, Luke Montz and Pete Orr, with Odalis Perez on the bump. The Nationals lost 8-3. And then the Mariners did the impossible: They won three in a row against the A's. On the final day, Ichiro Suzuki had two hits and scored two runs. Yuniesky Betancourt had a big two-run triple. The starting pitcher and winner: R.A. Dickey. The following June, the Nationals drafted Strasburg first overall. The Mariners drafted Dustin Ackley. * * * * Or maybe the most important day came in the draft in June of 2005, the first for the Nationals since moving from Montreal. With the third pick in that draft, the Mariners selected Jeff Clement. With the next pick the Nationals selected Ryan Zimmerman. That draft also yielded John Lannan and Craig Stammen. In 2007, they drafted Ross Detwiler and Jordan Zimmermann. In 2008, they drafted Danny Espinosa. In 2009, Strasburg and Drew Storen. In 2010, they once again had the No. 1 overall. It didn't take long for Bryce Harper to arrive. Maybe the most important day came on June 28, 2009, when then-interim general manager Mike Rizzo traded Langerhans to the Mariners for Mike Morse, a middle-of-the-order bat for nothing. Maybe the Nationals should give the Mariners part of their playoff share.

I bolded the part about the three in a row to the Phillies. The Nats gave no help to the Mets for either the present or future, as the Mets entered that weekend 1 game behind the Phillies for first place. We all know what happened.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

HahnSolo wrote: I bolded the part about the three in a row to the Phillies. The Nats gave no help to the Mets for either the present or future, as the Mets entered that weekend 1 game behind the Phillies for first place. We all know what happened.

As if we needed more evidence that last week of the 2008 season wasn't the ultimate moment in shark-jumping. Just thinking about all that went on makes your head spin.

They crassly removed a section of the center field fence so that fucking creep could begin selling you chopped-up remains of Shea. For a team and a park that conceiveably have a few weeks of real life left, they were content to go into the playoffs with a fake fence. They staged a whole ceremony for the end of Shea ending with Seaver and Piazza walking right through the section of fake fence as if we wouldn't notice it, or somehow wouldn't have minded. Well I fucking minded it very much.

The team laid down like wusses again and again. Not just that awful loss to the Cubs, where Ollie went out like crap, we went back ahead on Delgado's GS, the pen coughed it back up, and we failed to get even despite a 0-out,man-on-third situation with 3-4-5 coming up in the 9th, but that effortless Marlins game a couple nights later when we couldn't or wouldn't touch Chris Volstad until the 'pen made sure it was a blowout. The last game where we didn't bother to show up, and Schoweneweis gives up a homer to Wes Fucking Helms, and they schedule the emotional ceremony after the game, like a funeral, instead of before it, like a rally.

Then they say, hey, who cares, Jerry Manuel was not just the only guy who can take over the team during a road trip, he's also the one and only guy we need to interview to lead the team forward, collapses while he's in the dugout be damned, oh, and Omar Minaya, who's way over his head, you get an extension and encouragement to overcompensate for your previous failures by acquiring a new bullpen by way of looking up Rolaids Relief Point leaders and spending this money we've been printing so consistently we don't need another investment strategy and will surely never run out suddenly and put the entire franchise in the crapper for the next half decade or more.

No, meantime, we gotta hear that the Nationals took their concurrent low point and actually churned it into something, with a big assist from a brilliant manager who was available the last three or four times we made a worse switch. Arrrrgh.

[bmfc1]

Standing ovations for JCL, HahnSolo and Edgy.

[Frayed Knot]

Getting back to that ESPN article posted by H. Solo (are you related to Hope by any chance?) it's amazing how many things went right for the Nationals over the last half-dozen years (and in some cases more) and all of them seemed to bear fruit just in time for this season. I don't want to just dismiss it as luck because obviously it's more than that, but a team does need more than a little luck to go their way in addition to all the right decisions and developmental successes that have to go right to get to where they're at now.

At the same time and for much the same reasons it's also tough to just say 'well why don't we just copy what they did?' because their current team is the product not only of three different cities (remember San Juan?) and four different stadiums, but also was guided by several club presidents, three different GMs (the respected Mike Rizzon, the much-derided Jim Bowman, and, yes, some of these players - Ian Desmond for instance - even go back to Omar Minaya), four different field managers, plus, I'm sure, numerous other behind the scene changes.

Obviously the back-to-back #1 overall picks was the biggest stroke of good fortune. Not only do you have to suck enough to "earn" the #1 overall two years running (something that used to be impossible as that pick alternated between leagues with each draft) but it happens to coincide with years when two once in a generation type players are at the top of those drafts.


The rest of the major players:

Adam LaRoche - Signed as FA in 2011
Had a lost season in 2011, then bounced back at age 32 (just when Alomar, Bay and others seemed to fall apart) to have as good a season as any in his career. Was a gamble to give up on Adam Dunn but it's paid off in at least equal offense and much better defense.

Danny Espinosa - 3rd round pick 2008 (age 25)
Probably the only player in the lineup not having his best or break-out season, and still has 55 XBHs as a middle infielder

Ian Desmond - 3rd round pick 2004 (by Omar Minaya) 26 y/o
22 HRs in ~1,100 ML ABs coming in to this year - now has 23 in less than 500 this season while BA & OBA are up 30-40 pts each. Defense improved as well.

Ryan Zimmerman - 4th overall pick 2005
Seemed to be slipping a bit but then, in mid-year, had what must be one of the most effective cortisone shots in the history of mankind. Not a break-out year for him, but right in line with his career norms

Bryce Harper - 1st overall

Jayson Werth - FA 2011
Bounced back (at age 33) from both bust year and a major early season injury to be as good or better than ever

Michael Morse - Trade 2007
This one kills me. Was traded from Seattle (for Ryan Langerhans) as a 27 y/o with 3 ML HRs (over ~300 ABs) and less than 20 minor league ones -- and since is close to a .300/.350/.500 player with 65 HRs in one full season plus parts of 3 others.
Did they know what they were getting before hand? I doubt it - but this is exactly the kind of move that allows you to pass on expensive FA signings like Jason Bay (acquired just months later) if you can somehow see it.



Steven Strasburg - 1st overall
Bounced back from major injury almost immediately and as good as ever

Jordan Zimmermann - 2nd round pick (67th overall pick from Cubs in return for signing Alfonso Soriano) in 2007 (age 26)
Also bounced back from major injury quickly and is probably better than before

Ross Detwiler - 6th overall pick in 2007
Also missed a year due to injury - then suddenly this season dropped his last year's 4.50 ERA in the minors to 3.10 in the majors
That's 40% of your rotation from consecutive rounds of one draft.

Edwin Jackson - One year FA signing
Always talented although somehow on his 7th ML team at age 28 - ERA in 2012 sits at about 1/2 run/gm below his career norm

Gio Gonzalez - Per-2012 season trade involving 4 minor leaguers
Took a big package to get him but, again, he's worked out as well if not better than expected.
Biggest problem coming in was too many walks but this season that, as well as his H/9 and HR/9, are all at career lows.

And, except for Jackson, that entire rotation is under 27 y/o and under club control for at least the next 3-4 years

Tyler Clippard - Acquired in winter 2007 swap with Yanx for reliever Jonathan Abaladejo (pitched 3 innings for Arizona this year)

Drew Storen - Now set-up man after losing his closer job due to injury - was the 10th overall pick only as a compensation pick when the previous year's 9th overall - Aaron Crow, a guy who has since been pretty much mediocre in two partial season in KC - refused to sign

[Edgy MD]

Davey. Johnson.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Edgy DC wrote: [*]Washington/Jefferson/TRoosevelt/Lincoln represent a South Dakota landmark, not a DC one.

I think you need to get out and explore your own town.






(plus an entire island named for him as well)



All within the District limits. And the four most significant Presidential landmarks in the city too.

[Edgy MD]

But as far as linking them together as the four specific figures defining the presidency, that's a specific reference to Mt. Rushmore. After each race, they even show the standings with the four caricatures depicted on Mt. Rushmore.

Washington, of course, didn't even work in Washington. It would be more interesting if they worked all the presidents in and out of the lineup. At least all the dead ones. You could even put FDR in a racing chair. They could race in earnest, too, instead of making Teddy take the fall all the time.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Or make it into a presidential melee-- I'm fairly certain TR would take one of those every once in a while.

[Edgy MD]

Wow. That's what God made bloggin' for.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

We could get in on this:

[Guest Swan Swan H]

Edgy DC wrote: But as far as linking them together as the four specific figures defining the presidency, that's a specific reference to Mt. Rushmore. After each race, they even show the standings with the four caricatures depicted on Mt. Rushmore. Washington, of course, didn't even work in Washington. It would be more interesting if they worked all the presidents in and out of the lineup. At least all the dead ones. You could even put FDR in a racing chair. They could race in earnest, too, instead of making Teddy take the fall all the time.

At least Teddy should be able to edge out Taft.

[bmfc1]

The 1st place Nationals have 2 for 1 ticket deals available for this week. And there are coupon deals. The "Natitude" only seems to appear on weekends.

Other than Davey...

F their fans.
F Jayson Werth (another WS for him?)
F their GM--I can't wait for them to be eliminated so he can be asked "do you think your team would have advanced if you hadn't 'shut down' Stephen Strasburg?"
F them for tanking for 2 seasons, especially when we needed them to beat the MFPs (see above)
F their awful TV announcers.

(Yeah, I've said this before. Tough.)

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Astros name Nationality's third-base coach Bo Porter new manager.

[Edgy MD]

Amazing to have a guy jump ship at this juncture.

[metirish]

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Astros name Nationality's third-base coach Bo Porter new manager.

even has his own website , seems a good fit for Texas.


http://www.boporter.com/index.html

[metirish]

Edgy DC wrote: Amazing to have a guy jump ship at this juncture.

apparently he will stay with the Nats while they are alive