Patristic

Baseball Bias column. You know you want to know about the Orioles.

I'm guessing you've already heard about this.

The struggling Washington Nationals optioned outfielder Brandon Watson and backup catcher Wiki Gonzalez to Triple-A New Orleans on Thursday and recalled outfielder Ryan Church and infielder Brendan Harris.

William Blake, despondent over the Mets series, didn't have anything to say, but my old buddy Origen chimed in.
Let no one, then, be persuaded otherwise, nor let anyone deceive himself: Outside of . . . Church, no one is saved; for, if anyone should go out of it, he is guilty of his own death.

I have to disagree with Origen's plea for outfielder orthodoxy. Bringing Church up is the right move, and he shouldn't have spent a day in AAA. But he's not going to save anything. We still haven't had a starter go over six innings, and they've pretty much all been bad to enough to deserve the early hook. We're not scoring, and our hitters -- including one of the only successful ones -- are already demonstrating how ill-equipped they are to deal with RFK's dimensions. Church is an upgrade, but a Band-Aid isn't going to fix a broken neck. I would, however, like Jim Bowden to consider seriously the last part of Origen's take just in case Church gets off to a slow start and a trade or demotion is being considered.

It should be a happy day for me. Not only is my main sacred cow back in the bigs, but so is my back-up sacred calf, Brendan Harris. Will he give Ryan Zimmerman a day off? Will he . . . play shortstop? I doubt it -- he's been languishing in AAA because they don't trust his glove at third or second, so I can't imagine he's being seriously considered to step in where Royce Clayton -- yes, the Royce Clayton -- has faltered. So it beats me what he's doing up here, and given the fact that he hit .333 with a homer in his only nine at-bats last year before being put back on the bus, there's probably not much he can do to keep himself here.

The combination of my natural, Bowden-enhanced cynicism and the fact that ¡Livan! really sucks is making me incapable of enjoying the restoration (however temporary) of Church and Harris to their proper places. I'm serious -- usually when the Nationals embarrass the hell out of themselves, I can maintain a kind of detachment. But there's no detachment when I talk about ¡Livan!, and performances like today's hurt. But Origen told me it's not worth worrying about, considering.
The world was made and took its beginning at a certain time, and is to be destroyed on account of its wickedness.

So now I've got that to look forward to.