Planetary Nats Blog

I am going to take you back in time a few weeks… in an alternate universe. The date: April 18, 2009.

In this alternate universe, the Nationals played the Marlins at Nationals Park. The Nats won, 6-2. Scott Olsen went eight innings, giving up two runs and six hits. The Nats had a five-run first inning, including a grand slam by Austin Kearns. Joe Beimel came in and pitched the ninth, giving up a hit.

What is the difference between this universe and the universe that we live in? In this alternative universe, the Nats had no errors in this game, and in our “real” universe, the Nats had three.

Here’s the thing: Even in the universe where there were only two errors in the game instead of three, if the error that is missing is Nick Johnson’s dropped popup in the fifth inning, the Nats still win, 6-5, with Joel Hanrahan getting the save.

I bring this up because there are a lot of people who are only too happy to pile onto the bullpen problems as the cause for the Nationals woes. I am among the first to point out that the bullpen has not been a stellar part of the mix. But in their defense, the bullpen has been asked to come into games and pitch in situations where they never should have. And when you’re a pitcher, and you’re worried that your shortstop is going to boot a ball (or two) in a game, you start pitching for strikeouts. You start pitching not to make a mistake. You start pitching not to lose.

Which, by the way, is different than pitching to win.

I know that my example is both not statistically valid and an exaggeration. But my point is, you can’t give teams – especially National League East teams – extra outs, extra bases, extra runs, and then be upset with the bullpen about giving up a lead… if you’re not first upset with your defense about not protecting the lead you’ve built in the first place.

I suspect that the problem is not one that is solved by changing personnel, including the manager. I believe it is one where each player needs to be focused and accountable for their outcomes. That is more a leadership issue.

Errors happen, and teams win games where they make errors. In last night’s game, Anderson Hernandez made an error on the second half of a double play, throwing the ball away and allowing the batter to advance to second. But the Nats won, and while Hernandez probably should have swallowed the throw, he made the throw trying to be aggressive and get the second out. A mistake of youth. The Nats survived the inning, and the game.

If the Nats can reduce their erros, if the pitchers – both starters and the bullpen – can start to relax and trust their defense, if the whole team can start playing the way they know they can… this will be an interesting season.

If they can’t… well, my head hurts already. It will be a long, hot summer.

… and a thanks to Jeff Bergin at NationalsPride.com for the seed of this idea.

… and one other thing – the picture at the top of this page was from that game.

Frank Robinson’s appointment to a position in the Commissioner’s Office has opened the door to a lot of reminiscing about the good old days… you know, the ones with the bouncing RFK Stadium and the 51-30 start… and this Opening Night:

First Pitch at RFK Stadium, 2005

That season was magical… especially the first half. And it begs the comparison between that .500 team, and our lovable Nats of 2009.

I am sure that nobody would want the old 2005 team back. The ride was exquisite, but our current team is much more talented.

The thing is, the 2005 team played excellent fundamental baseball. And last night’s game was a perfect example of both how much more talented this year’s team is, and how much better they need to play.

Despite giving away five bases on miscues and errors, and a bases-loaded walk, the Nats brought the tying run to the plate twice in the ninth inning… against Johan Santana, the NL leader in ERA, and the Mets bullpen, including Francisco Rodriguez.

The 2005 team doesn’t give away those five bases or walk in the winning run. Now I am not necessarily saying that the 2005 fundamentals and the 2009 talent beats Johan Santana… But it beats the Marlins three times last week.

Lets see if it can beat Mike Pelfrey today.

There’s a lot to say about the Nationals fourteen games into the season. Unfortunately, a lot of it will sound like words from The Oracle (or Alan Greenspan) – truthful, but intentionally ambiguous:

What’s five minutes between friends? A good question. For Lastings Milledge, the ramifications of his tardiness were delayed, but for Elijah Dukes, he was asked to pay swiftly. Fortunately for the Nats, those events happened in the proper order; if Dukes’ punishment was followed by Milledge’s skate (in the short term), there would definitely be some problems regarding the appearance of equity. As it is, we may be seeing Rizzo assert his vision for the team… among them, that nobody is above the rules.

As much as it appeared that Dukes was giving back to the community on this Saturday morning, he was in fact, moonlighting. He was paid for his appearance at the Great Falls Little League. Benching him and fining him was the right thing to do.  Dukes has become a rather sympathetic character as of late, and it is tempting to want to cut him some slack,  but Thom Loverro urges that we not fall too deeply in love. What does this tell us about the organization? I don’t know. This is one of those cases where two points don’t make a line.

Produce or ride the bus. That would be the theme after half the bullpen traded their digs in DC for upstate New York late Sunday night. In some respects I think that the move was a little simplistic – the bullpen was put in a leaky rowboat by the poor fielding of the infield. But the beneficiaries of the move, particularly Garrett Mock and Jason Bergmann deserved to be in Washington in the first place, and in shuffle, two of Bowden’s projects, Wil Ledezma and Steven Shell, found their way out of the organization. It would have been a good move regardless of the circumstances. Timing the announcement after a third game blown in the ninth inning simply allowed Rizzo to bang his new drum a bit more loudly.

The Zims. Ryan Zimmerman has a new long-term contract. You would be hard-pressed to find an unhappy voice on this topic, except perhaps from a certain personal injury lawyer. If Bowden is the GM, this deal doesn’t happen… at least not now. While all of us fans see the wisdom of it, there’s a certain business sense to the move, too. As for the other Zim, JZim, N**2, Jordan Zimmermann, there are a lot of fans grumbling about the rain-delayed start of his Major League debut game. It is a shame that people were inconvenienced, but really, there was too much at stake to do anything other than what the Nats did. It was good for Zimmermann to get his full game in, and it was good from a public relations standpoint – at least for the vast majority of the fans who weren’t there. In a year, we’ll all remember his stellar start, and hardly a soul will remember that the actual  game didn’t start until 9:15.

More Rizzo fingerprints.

Indignant Manny. It is no coincidence that the Manny Acta we’re hearing at post-game press conferences has lost his teach, learn, roll-with-the-punches rhetoric, and replaced it with, well, Indignant Manny. After Sunday’s loss to the Marlins, I was talking with Mike Henderson of NationalsPride.com, and I mentioned to him that Manny’s original mandate has ended. Sure the Nats are a young team, but managing the Nationals is no longer about transforming a bunch of rookies into Major Leaguers. It is about learning to win. And this raises a question: Is Manny the guy to teach our team how to do that? Since the mandate has changed, so will his demeanor. Should Manny be worried about his job? No more or less than the other twenty-nine managers in Major League Baseball. But now all thirty are being asked to do the same thing: Win. Who do you suppose instigated this change? His boss, Mike Rizzo. That’s my guess, anyway.

We may be witnessing a transformation. As long and as slow as every one of those torturous Marlins games seemed, the change is actually occurring at a lightning pace. Players are being held accountable. Managers are being held accountable. The internal expectation is higher. What we’re seeing now is the demonstration of which members of the organization have more to give, and which are just spare parts.

… and this is exactly how it was always supposed to be. Stan Kasten’s plan was to build a professional organization from top to bottom. One that nurtured the growth of prospects and furthered the success of the Major League Team. Instead, what we got was a used car lot, with a segway-riding salesmen at the helm.

Will the Nats win more games this year?

Who knows. It is certainly going to be different with Mike Rizzo at the helm of the organization. One thing is for sure – almost certainly, we’ll feel better about the outcome… no matter what it is.

One last thing: Excellent game, John Lannan. You deserved to win.

It would be really easy to spread a lot of the blame for yesterday’s loss on Joel Hanrahan. His teammates didn’t. Chico Harlan reports in Nationals Journal from last night:

Two of the vets I spoke with after this game were both able to talk for three or so minutes without once casting blame on Hanrahan. In fact, Ryan Zimmerman and Adam Dunn found every way to find blame with their own effort — despite the fact that the lineup scored six runs in the first two innings against Josh Johnson, the erstwhile NL ERA leader. Said Zim: “When we get ahead 6-0, 5-0, we need to kind of step on their throat rather than saying, OK, we’re ahead, blah-blah-blah and just kind of try and coast. It’s not like we’re trying to do that, but we need that killer instinct, I guess.”

And while we can’t know for sure, if Nick Johnson doesn’t drop the popup that allowed a run to score, the game ends 6-5. Add to that the throwing errors and that the Nats had no offense after the second inning, and you quickly see that blaming Hanrahan for the loss is a bit like blaming the firemen for letting your house burn down when you’ve been deep-frying frozen turkeys in your garage.

It is tempting to go along thinking that everything is fine when you’re playing with a lead. That Hanrahan had to pitch at all yesterday given how the first two innings went should tell you that logic chain has a number of rusty links.

One couldn’t ask for a better night at Nationals Park than this past evening. I wandered around with my camera and took some action shots from the game. When I got home, I was surprised to find that Tom Boswell had written a post on Nationals Journal that is in some respects complementary to my posting yesterday.

So I’ve given the liks to Boz’s NJ posting, and below are some pics I took at the game.

As for the Magic 8-Ball, the murky blue liquid seems to be clearing a bit. I bet we have an answer by Sunday.

Here are some pictures:

Nothing in sports is sure… but there are some things that you can almost always count on:

• When you fire a head coach or a manager, the team almost always wins the next game.
• When the pitching coach comes to the mound to talk to the pitcher, the next pitch is almost always a strike (unless the pitcher is Daniel Cabrera)

So where does sending Lastings Milledge to Syracuse fit among the list of almost “sure things?”

It is hard to say. It isn’t as if Milledge was single-handedly costing the Nats games, so the “addition by substraction” thing doesn’t work here by itself.

Communication guys like me are always ready to point to some sort of synergy issue when it comes to analyzing how a team performs (or in this case, under-performs), and it is a tempting conclusion to jump to here. Sending Millege down could be an attempt to send a message that working “hard enough” is not “hard enough”. It could also be the message that no matter how secure you are in your station on the team, you have to perform to stay there.

It could also be about getting Milledge some reps in a situation where his presence on the field isn’t quite so expensive.

Winning tonight won’t answer this question. The Nats are close enough that they’ll luck into a win eventually, and making a connection between a win and Milledge’s departure would be meaningless. And a loss wouldn’t necessarily mean that the Nats are sleeping through their alarm clock, either. We still don’t know if Cristian Guzman will play tonight, and the injuries to Belliard and Harris and the tentative play of Alberto Gonzalez and Anderson Hernandez make for a shaky middle infield.

Being the optimist that I am, I think the Nats are finally set up with their best shot to get off the schnide. But there are no sure things… If the Nats finish the homestand 4-4, come ask me then.

So this morning, in order to get some reassurance, I went to the one place I go when I need the defintive answer: The Magic 8-Ball. It said:

Answer uncertain. Ask again tomorrow.

And with that, I will see you at Nats Park tonight.

Sometimes I wonder if all the traveling is worth it.

I make two trips a year to Washington. I come in April for the opening homestand, and again in September, for the last one. I’ve done that for five straight years. In addition, last year I ran down the road to Seattle to see the Nats play at Safeco.

In all, I catch about ten Nats games a year in person. If you ignore the thirty-three year break between the Senators and the Nats, I’ve been to every opening day since 1971.

Two years ago I didn’t see them win… Not once, in nine games. On the other hand, last year they only lost twice out of the nine games I saw in person (including opening day at Nationals Park, and the next day at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia).

Things aren’t looking so hot for the home nine this year, either. It matters to me if they win or lose. But it matters more to me that I be a part of it.

As cities go, Washington is a bit strange, in that there are so few people who are from ‘here’ – and I can say ‘here’ because I am ‘here’ for Opening Day. So many of us are from somewhere else. For those of us who were born here, there is an awareness of place that very few people share. Baseball was a part of that place for me as a child, and after the Senators left in 1971, I have to admit, the Orioles did help to fill some of that gap for me. But for a lot of people, baseball is not enough in itself. Baseball is wonderful, but it must also be about the place… our home. As wonderful as it was to watch the Orioles in the 70’s and 80’s, Baltimore is where you went to watch the O’s, and you came home to Washington. That long commute down I-95 after a night game served to remind me – the hundreds of times that I made that trip – that I had to leave home to watch baseball.

When the Nationals moved to Washington in 2005, it was a restoration of that piece of Washingtonian life that had been missing since my childhood. Even though I lived 4000 miles away, I was drawn to the reality that I could once again watch baseball in my hometown. I’ve been a part of it ever since.

My hometown has a baseball team again. Tomorrow, something wonderful happens. It is a sure sign that summer is about to be here… a summer we went without for thirty-three years.

Does it matter if they win or lose? Absolutely.

But not as much as it does to be a part of it.

It is definitely worth it.

Be a part of it.

There is a piece of this puzzle I don’t understand. He’s better defensively. He’s better offensively. He works harder.

Why, then,  is Elijah Dukes being asked to prove (and reprove) himself while Lastings Milledge is not?

For those that wonder about my perspective, I wouldn’t put myself in the “Milledge Hater” category. I would put myself in the “The Bar is Set Higher This Season, And Last Year’s Good Looks Aren’t Enough Anymore” category. The team, and especially the outfield, is much stronger this year, and I expect more.

There is no question that Milledge is talented. Some in the Natosphere have pointed this out, and I said last year, as Felipe Lopez demonstrated somnambulance on the field – that Milledge would be an interesting second baseman – assuming he could master that skill set. But so far this season…  in center field, and as a leadoff hitter, I expected to see more.

There is another issue here, though, and while it applies in this argument, it also applies across the baseball world, and to many players: What message does a team (the Nats) send to a player (Elijah Dukes), who appears to have done everything a team (the Nats) have asked of him, that he rides the pine while another player (Milledge) starts? The expectations of Dukes were high, but he has done what was asked. Shouldn’t  he be rewarded for that?

I’ve advocated trading Milledge as a way to solve the Nats’ glut of outfielders. But I realize that is a simplistic solution, at least without considering all of the ramifications. I have suspected, but don’t know for sure, that Milledge’s presence on the team has been a big help to keeping Dukes on the straight-and-narrow. They were childhood friends, and one only has to watch them in batting practice and on the field to know that they’re close now. But for most fans who are not me, these sort of social considerations are not really relevant in making personnel decisions on a Major League team.  So, if you exclude that argument – that they are good influences for each other, and that makes them better players,  no matter which remaining calculus you use, the conclusion I come to is the same.

Unless, of course, there is a calculus I hadn’t considered… hence, the piece I don’t understand.

The Nats have to find another place for Milledge to play. Maybe it is Syracuse. Maybe it is second base. Maybe it is in the American League. If you take Milledge out of the outfield mix, the options are still intriguing and entertaining. Willingham has lived up to my expectations. Dunn has exceeded them. Not only does he do everything one would hope on the field, he’s bringing that veteran leadership that has been lacking in the clubhouse. Kearns has become the outfielder many of us hoped and knew he would be – and as an aside to all the Kearns critics, how many of you are that dedicated to your employer that you show up and work every day, even when you know you should have a physician looking at whatever it is that is ailing you… as Kearns did in 2008?

Dukes’ (hopefully) minor injury last night delays the need to solve the outfield problem immediately. But between the serendipity of the Scheduling Fairy that allows the Nats to leave Jordan Zimmermann in Syracuse until next Sunday and Dukes’ (and Belliard’s) nursing of minor ailments, the urgency to move position players off the 25-man roster is less. But the clock is ticking, and the roster will have to be adjusted soon, and not later than next Sunday.

As they used to say on television: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives…”

… if you live in NatsTown.

Wil Nieves takes ball four, and the Nats win.

You’re right, they should never be in a position where that situation costs them a game… in a game where they load the bases three times with one out… and squeeze out only a single run.

But on the other hand, the Nats are loading the bases three times in a game… and battled back twice to tie the game.

This year is not last year. Some experience and poise are going to right this team.

One other thing… I have heard others say it… but I thought I would chime in. Rob Dibble is really growing on me. I liked Sutton, but listening to him (Sutton) was like listening to your favorite professor lecture. Dibble has the knowledge, roots for the team, criticizes freely… and the careful listener tonight heard him tease Carpenter about declaring a hit before the ball hit the ground. He would be fun to watch a game with. With Sutton, you were embarrassed if you weren’t taking notes.

Maybe he’ll keep Carpy honest.

One other other thing… Elijah Dukes is making a case for himself, don’t you think?

First, let me say… I don’t do the armchair GM thing. There are tons of bloggers eminently more unqualified than I am to tell Mike Rizzo how to run the Nats. I see myself more as a psychic than a GM.

So yesterday’s drubbing at the hands of the Marlins has opened a rift into the psychic world, and have provided me the answer (which I already knew) as to how the Nats will solve their outfield problem.

To be fair, and to provide some empirical support for the results from the tea-leaf-reading, a few weeks back I was talking to Mike Henderson of NationalsPride.com, and I told him this very scenario. I honestly thought it would have played out in spring training, but between our strange economy and the still-slightly-muddy waters in the Nats front office, the True Course of Fate has yet to be revealed to Rizzo.

The Nats will trade Lastings Milledge for (almost anyone).

Almost anyone? Give me a break… the rift into the psychic world isn’t that wide that I have both pieces of this puzzle. It was just one game, and against the Marlins, to boot. How much psychic energy could be released in that contest? For heaven’s sake, ESPN barely knows the game took place!

Trading Milledge makes the most sense. Dunn… very funny. Kearns - there’s the matter of the King’s Ransom the Nats are paying him, and it is a walk year. He’s going to perform if he expects to play next year. Willingham is a young, and his failure (combined with the potential failure with Olsen) would mean that we gave away Bonifacio for nothing… so the Nats are “all in” with him. Dukes has the most upside and is still untradeable.

Who’s left? Ocho-Cinco.

This would solve a lot more problems than it would create. Dukes would have a permanent, play-everyday home in center. My guess is he shines. Kearns could play there to spell Dukes, Willingham can play either corner (and probably be close to as good as Milledge in center defensively). Willie Harris can play the outfield, too. The two problems you’re left with is who leads off, and does removing Milledge  from the team affect how Dukes (a childhood friend)relates to the world off the field.

Still unconvinced? Of those that one would conceiveably trade, which of them do you get the most for?

Milledge.

What happens if Dukes gets hurt? J-Max. Bernardina.

Will Milledge kill us when we face him? Of course. Trade him to the American League. You face him three games every three years.

To be honest, Milledge continues to do all the little things that drive me crazy. The revelation about being fined for being late for a team meeting is just one more. His comments about his work habits had me a little put-off, too.

… And I think he was given a walk this spring. He should have had to compete for a spot, just like everyone else. Perhaps Acta is crazy like a fox, showcasing Milledge as the shoo-in starting center fielder in anticipation of a trade. On the other hand, perhaps there was something in the water at Shea that makes the two of them particularly loyal to each other.

Boz was right in Nationals Journal today… it is too early for panic – it is only one game. But sometimes that one game gives us a little clarity about what needs to be done. This is how Order will be restored to the Nats Universe.

Am I sure? No. But psychic rifts help.