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It’s tough when you realize you’re the losers.  I’m not talking about
losing some or even most of your games – I’m talking about being the ones
everybody else beats up on and laughs at.  As usual, The Warriors, often
called the Citizen Kane of movies, is instructive.  While fighting their way
back to Coney Island, the Warriors encounter a gang called the Orphans.  The
Orphans are, in the words of one of the Warriors, “so far down they're not
even on the map. Real low class.”  But the Orphans don’t know they’re
losers – they’re brimming with confidence: bragging about newspaper
coverage of their exploits, claiming a “heavy rep,” and ultimately
threatening to “rain on you, Warriors!”  But the Warriors know how things
stand, and they’re on their way unscathed after a Molotov cocktail leads to
an exploding car and some suddenly less confident Orphans.  The only thing
that will keep Nationals fans sane this season is not realizing that they’re
rooting for the Orphans.

We Got a Heavy Rep
by Ryan Moore
Team Writer (Washington Nationals)

The first series of the year, against the Mets at Shea Stadium, ultimately
reminded us of the Nats’ status.  The season opener was classic Nats.  Given
that this is the team’s second year, “classic” refers in this case to
2005.  Just like in the old days, the Nats showed no power, left men on base,
and ran the bases self-destructively.  It was, at least, a helpful reminder
that baseball isn’t all freshly-mown grass and James Earl Jones speeches.
 Sometimes it’s bad teams losing bad games thanks to bad calls.

No Nats fan was thinking like that after Game 2, though.  It looked like
another anemic outing from the offense until an uncharacteristic barrage of
homers – including the first of Ryan Zimmerman’s career, a massive shot off
Billy Wagner to tie the game – brought the Nats back.  A five-run tenth
inning and the first win of the year had Nats understandably excited.  Was
Ryan Zimmerman already the team’s best player?  The question wasn’t meant
to damn him with faint praise.

Reality set in on Thursday.  The Nationals didn’t just lose, they were
bullied.  Wedgied, forced to eat dirt and say they liked it, all that stuff.
 Pedro Martinez, no doubt aware that Jose Guillen was hitting over .400
against him, hit Guillen twice and Nick Johnson once.  Maybe they weren’t
all intentional, but Pedro doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt in these
matters any more than Jose Guillen does when there’s an unconscious manager
lying on the clubhouse floor next to a broken baseball bat.  It wasn’t until
reliever Duaner Sanchez plunked Johnson for a second time that a warning was
even issued.

You can guess what happened next. The Nats – specifically reliever Felix
Rodriguez – finally retaliated, hitting Paul LoDuca. Rodriguez and manager
Frank Robinson were ejected and are currently awaiting their suspensions. The
final score: Mets 10, Nats 5. The other final score: the Mets with 4 HBPs, 0
ejections, 0 suspensions; the Nats with 1 HBP, 2 ejections, 2 suspensions.

It’s something for Nats fans to get used to. The Nationals aren’t a real
team; they’re wards of the state, orphans.  They’re owned by 29 men who
benefit from their failure.  Their TV rights are controlled by Orioles owner
Peter Angelos, the one person who has the most to gain from fan disinterest.
 The current management team, waiting for the inevitable pink slips that will
accompany new ownership, performs with no incentive, and it shows.  A rich
rival’s rich prima donna pitcher slaps you around and the umps just stand
there and let it happen?  They punish you when you dare to fight back?  It’s
all part of being the Orphans – everyone but you knows how helpless you are.

So Jose Guillen is promising bloody vengeance.  It’s something he does a
lot, but Mike Scioscia is still alive, so it’s hard to take him seriously.
 And it doesn’t matter.  Jose can waggle his bat just like the Orphans
brandishing their razors, but when it comes down to it, the Mets are going to
throw a Molotov cocktail and you’re going to run away screaming.

Postscript: The Nationals have just come back after being down 5-0 in the
first inning to beat the Astros 12-8. Being a fan of the Orphans isn’t as
pleasant as following a real team, but it has its moments.

Despite a remarkable 2005 season that saw the Nationals finish at .500
despite not being that good, Nats fans had much to worry about going into the
off-season.  Foremost were unfortunately boring political concerns, but these
wound being the only things that went right for the Nats.  After endless
maneuvering and mind-melting parliamentary procedure, the D.C. City Council
finally passed the lease for the new ballpark, putting the
Montreal/Washington franchise on its firmest footing in years and finally
closing the book on the Fables of the Relocation.

Sophmore  Slump
by Ryan Moore
Team Writer (Washington Nationals)

With all that stuff out of the way, it was possible to focus on the damage
interim GM Jim Bowden was doing to the team.  Bowden’s crowning achievement
was a positively insane trade with the Rangers, sending Brad Wilkerson,
Terrmel Sledge, and Armando Galarraga to Texas in exchange for the overpaid
and overrated fantasy baseball superstar Alfonso Soriano.  Wilkerson was one
of the team’s best players, a solid defender at four positions with real
power and impressive on-base skills.  Arm injuries and the dimensions of
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium combined to hurt his 2005 numbers, but a
straight-up swap of Wilkerson for Soriano would have been questionable at
least.  Throw in the other two players plus the extra salary burden on the
Nats (at $10 million, Soriano is the best-paid player on the team) plus the
contract status of the pair (Wilkerson remains under team control for 2007
while Soriano is a free agent), and the trade is possibly the worst of the
winter.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system (it’ll come back the first time
Soriano fields an easy fly-out into a triple, though), on to the lineup:


Catcher: Brian Schneider is a deceptively valuable player.  His offense is
almost perfectly average for a catcher, and when combined with his
superlative defensive skills, durability, and the regard his pitchers have
for him, you have a player who helps you win in every possible way.  One of
the few positive off-season developments for the Nationals was his four year,
$16 million dollar contract extension, which will almost certainly wind up
being a bargain.  Schneider should look into getting a new agent.

Jim Bowden went avant-garde in his original plan to back up Schneider with
two players for whom catching is more an occasional novelty than a career,
Robert Fick and Matt LeCroy.  The sad state of Fick’s right elbow prevented
what would have been an entertaining disagreement between Bowden and his
field manager.  Frank Robinson, true to his old school ways, was not taken
with Bowden’s progressive stance on the back-up catcher issue, and got his
way when Wiki Gonzalez came out the winner in a Spring Training contest to
see which journeyman catcher could do the least damage with the bat.  LeCroy’
s still on the team, so Bowden may get another crack at subverting the
bourgeois concept of the back-up catcher when Fick comes off the DL.

First Base: Nick Johnson has star-quality rate stats, but it’s the counting
stats that give him trouble.  His .408 on-base percentage was 6th in the
league, and his 139 OPS+ was good for 10th, making him easily the Nationals’
 best hitter.  But he played only 131 games, and that’s a career high.
 Wrist, hand, heel – no part of this man’s body is sturdy, and it would be
wildly optimistic to expect a full season from him now.  In a way, that’s
helped the Nats, since it allowed Bowden to connive him into signing a three
year extension worth a mere $5.5 million per, well below what a player of his
talent would command if he could stay on the field.

The back-up job should go to a righty/lefty platoon of Matt LeCroy and Daryle
Ward, though the pitching staff and the rest of the infielders shudder at the
defensive implications of such an arrangement.  LeCroy puts up All Star
numbers against lefties, but is helpless against right-handers.  Ward isn’t
all that great either way, but he does show some power against the righties.
 Marlon Anderson is also in the mix here for God knows what reason.

Second Base: Second is manned, as it has been for the last seven years of the
franchise, by Jose Vidro, an oft-injured shell of his former self out of whom
the Nationals are hoping to squeeze some production in the last three years
of his contract, as he’s owed over $22 million.  That sentence was longer
than Vidro spent at second in 2005, as the unfortunate combination of being
kind of old, kind of fat, and kind of fragile combined to sit Vidro for 75
games.  He never could play defense, but he can still hit and is alleged to
be healthy this year.  We’ll see.

Jim Bowden planned for Vidro’s possible missed time, but he didn’t plan
well.  An off-season program of second baseman accumulation leaves the Nats
with Damian Jackson and Marlon Anderson ready to step in.  Frank Robinson has
stated that reluctant outfielder Alfonso Soriano will not take over at second
if Vidro is out.

Third Base: This is more like it.  21-year-old Ryan Zimmerman inherits the
hot corner after only 87 professional games, 20 of them in the majors last
September.  He hit .397 during that call-up and .359 with seven homers and
seven doubles during Spring Training.  His defense is the strongest part of
his game, though he’s matched his homer total this March with seven errors.
 Zimmerman should make a run at the Rookie of the Year award and be a (the?)
reason for Nationals fans not to just completely give up on everything and
take up knitting.

Brendan Harris will languish in New Orleans for another year, waiting for a
chance to prove he can play in the majors.  Bowden and Robinson will continue
to laugh at him behind his back.

Shortstop: Here’s where the knitting comes in, or at least some hobby that
doesn’t involve concern over the Nationals’ shortstop situation. Cristian
Guzman was a total, wetting-your-pants-at-the-talent-show disaster, and I’m
still trying to figure out how Jim Bowden can show himself in public after
giving him a four-year contract. Guzman will be the Nats’ problem long after
Bowden is gone, but we can ignore him for a while yet, as a torn labrum will
keep him out for a couple of weeks and maybe the whole season.  Good news?
 Not when Royce Clayton is the solution.  Clayton isn’t good, and he cut off
his dreadlocks so I can’t even make Predator jokes.  I was really looking
forward to some Predator jokes.

Left Field: I think I’m going to whine about the Soriano trade a little more
right here.  Even Jim Bowden’s staunchest supporters were aghast when he
traded popular outfielder Brad Wilkerson along with a couple other dudes to
Texas for Alfonso Soriano.  They were even aghaster when Bowden revealed that
he did not, in fact, have a secret plan to solve the problem of having two
second basemen and only one second base.  Would Soriano agree to move to the
outfield?  Well, Bodes would ask him after he got to Washington.  Never mind
that he’d already refused to do that for two teams – Bowden wasn’t at all
fazed when the Rangers wouldn’t grant permission to talk it over with
Soriano before the trade.  He couldn’t wait to hand over Wilkerson and spend
an extra $6 million in the process.

But it all worked out in the end.  Soriano acquiesced (he had not getting $10
million staring him in the face, and not getting $10 million doesn’t blink)
and, having proven himself baseball’s worst second baseman, has his sights
set on the coveted title of baseball’s worst left fielder.  His slide down
the defensive spectrum has him set to be the worst first baseman by 2009,
then the worst DH a few years after that.  But he’s not there for his
defense.  He’s there to hit warning-track fly balls that were homers in
Texas.  He’ll be gone next year, and I’m planning on drinking until I
forget all about this.

Center Field: More Bowden madness. Ryan Church was handed the CF job in favor
of one-dimensional fast guy Endy Chavez just before the start of the 2005
season.  After a hot start, Church battled injuries and, more importantly,
the perception that he didn’t battle injuries hard enough.  So this year,
center field has been entrusted to one-dimensional fast guy Brandon Watson.
 At least Chavez could field.  The idea behind the move is defensible: RFK
has a big outfield, so it makes sense to have some triples ‘n’ steals
types.  But it makes more sense to have good players, and Church is simply
better.  Nats fans just have to hope Watson doesn’t have a hot first couple
of weeks and delay Church’s inevitable return.

Marlon Byrd should platoon with whichever lefty is starting in center.  He’s
a perfect fourth outfielder.

Right Field: Jose Guillen may always be angry about something, he may be
spooked by RFK, and he may have chronic injuries in every arm he owns, but he
was vitally important to the Nats (relative) success last year.  Off-season
shoulder surgery was followed by a wrist problem this spring, and it seems
unlikely that he’ll make it through the year without a trip to the DL.  It’
s important that Jose doesn’t try to play through the pain, as he did last
September, when he hit .130. We’ll probably see Ryan Church here at some
point.

Starting Rotation: This is pretty ugly.  I’ll take the top two against any
team’s, but it gets bad fast, and three out of every five Nats games are
going to make an MVP out of some lucky NL East hitter.  It didn’t have to be
like this.  Back in November, Bowden swindled the Padres into giving up
reliable 200-inning guy Brian Lawrence for the remains of Vinny Castilla.
 But the bill for this deal with the devil came due, and Lawrence tore his
rotator cuff and will miss the season at least.  So the Nats were left to
scramble for depth, finding whatever pitchers they could under the
refrigerator.

Livan Hernandez is my favorite baseball player. He is unique. Despite being a
massive, flabby pantload, he’s one of the best hitting and best fielding
pitchers in the game – he’s been known to take grounders at shortstop. He
throws an amazing variety of Cuban slop up there, including the occasional
eephus pitch. He never throws with full effort unless he has to, which may
account for his leading the league in innings pitched the last three years.
 His ERAs aren’t the most impressive, but he more than makes up for it with
his 250 innings a year, and he managed that in 2005 despite needing knee
surgery most of the year. His knee’s fine, so expect another unheralded Cy
Young-quality effort.
John Patterson had a breakout year in 2005.  Finally healthy, he threw the
most innings of his career (198) with a nifty 3.13 ERA, which is good even
for RFK.  There’s even more reason to be excited this year, as long as we
ignore the hideous, patchy beard he grew because he’s tired of looking like
a baby deer.  He’s been working with pitching coach Randy St. Claire on a
changeup.  Normally I’d throw this on the Spring Training Junk News pile
along with all the other promises of good health and successful position
switches and “we could surprise people this year,” but this is different.
 Randy St. Claire is a miracle worker.  First he tinkered with Livan’s arm
angle and transformed the big man from an innings-eating mediocrity into an
innings-eating ace.  Then he taught a changeup to Hector Carrasco, and we
marveled at the journeyman pitcher who was suddenly actually good.  Patterson
could be his third miracle, and that’s an important number to get to,
canonizationally speaking.
The last three guys deserve only one paragraph for all of them.  Pedro
Astacio was a really good pitcher in Colorado even if no one knew it.  He’s
not anymore, but he turned a good September in San Diego into a shot at
starting.  Ramon Ortiz has had a rough few years, but maybe RFK can cut down
on his homer rate.  Tony Armas is like Nick Johnson but not as healthy.  If
(when) these guys get hurt or fail horribly, Ryan Drese is waiting patiently
on the DL, which is enough to make me wish for Tony Armas’ good health.
Bullpen: Frank Robinson leaned heavily on the bullpen last year, and I don’t
blame him.  When the Nats were winning, it was in spite of a weak offense and
merely decent starting pitching.  The trio of closer Chad Cordero and set-up
men Luis Ayala and Gary Majewski bailed the Nats out time and time again.
 The Nats have already started paying the price – Luis Ayala tore or tweaked
something or other in the World Baseball Classic and is done for the season.
 It’s not the WBC’s fault; Ayala was severely overworked, and there’s only
one Livan.

Cordero and Majewski are still throwing, but we can’t expect repeats of
their superb 2005 performances (1.82 and 2.93 ERAs, respectively).  It’s not
out of the question for Felix Rodriguez to fill in for Ayala, but the bullpen
is unlikely to be the strength it was last year.

Bench: Marlon Anderson was signed to a bizarrely generous two year contract,
so let’s hope that pinch hitting is actually a skill.  Daryle Ward provides
lefty power, Damian Jackson can . . . I don’t know, play the infield I
guess.  Marlon Byrd can start against lefties and help out on defense.  Matt
LeCroy, a big, loveable hayseed who always looks like he’s either on his way
to or just returned from a country bear jamboree, is murder on lefties and
could replace Jamey Carroll as the beloved but not actually all that good Nat.

One thing the bench does not offer is defensive relief.  The Nats won’t be a
good defensive team this year.  Catcher and third are plusses and first could
be average.  But Vidro is lousy, Soriano’s awful, Guillen’s injuries are
going to effect his throwing, Royce Clayton is old, and Brandon Watson’s
speed doesn’t make him a good outfielder.  The corps of pinch-hitters Bowden
assembled will make it hard for Frank to clamp down on defense once he has a
lead.  But maybe there won’t be enough leads to worry about.

Conclusion: This team isn’t as good as last year’s.  The offense should be
improved.  Wilkerson is a better player than Soriano, but 2005 Wilkerson isn’
t.  No matter who’s playing shortstop, he can’t be as bad as Guzman was
last year.  This year’s bench actually features useful hitters, a welcome
change after 2005’s Carlos Baerga party.  Zimmerman has a good shot to hit
more than Vinny Castilla did, and Jose Vidro will probably play more than he
did.

However, the team is worse in all other aspects.  The middle infield defense
is below average, and the outfield is a mess.  While improvements from the
first two pitchers in the rotation can be expected, the other three slots
have the potential to ruin the season all by themselves.  The bullpen was
superb in 2005 and won’t be as good this time around.  It is also worth
mentioning that the Nats were very lucky last year, a .500 team that scored
and allowed runs more like a .470 team.

Fortunately, the Marlins sold off all but two good players on the team and
will try to limp through the season with Sergio Mitre as their #2 starter.
 If there were any Marlins fans, I’d feel sorry for them, but at least they
get to watch Dontrelle Willis and Miguel Cabrera.  Or, would get to if they
bothered.  Anyway, Florida’s slash and burn management style is the only
thing keeping the Nats out of last place.  73-88 with one rainout.