Stable Condition

The Nationals fired Matt Williams, and the fact that the move was a year late doesn't mean it's not a good one.

Virgil points out that rumor is a monster, vast and terrible, fleet-winged and swift-footed, sister to Coeus and Enceladus, who for every feather on her body has as many watchful eyes below as many tongues speaking, as many listening ears.

Enceladus' sister is already providing us the with the names of possible replacements. Bud Black? Yeah, sure. Dave Martinez? OK. Cal Ripken? That's the stupidest damn thing I've ever heard.

I mean, the Nats just acknowledged that hiring a really good player with no managerial experience was a mistake. One has to hope that they're not going to follow up by hiring an even better player with even less experience.

Whoever they hire is going to have his work cut out for him. The Nats do have talent, but that talent comes with some issues. The main issue is that the guys playing for the Nats are weepy schmucks, at least one of whom isn't afraid to try to get his manager fired.

This stable may well be impossible for an outsider to clean out, and I'm going to suggest that they give that job to the man who filled it up.

Jayson Werth should manage the Nationals in 2016.

Just think of all the things that could go right!

• Barry Svrluga said that Werth is insightful and thoughtful. That can't be enitrely because Werth spent all year giving Svrluga dirt about the team. Disregard for speed limits aside, Werth does seem smarter than the average ballplayer. He might be really good.
• Major league manager is a full time job. Faced with the pressures of his new role, Werth might be tempted to give himself lots of time off.
• It's pretty clear that the most difficult aspect of managing the Nationals is Jayson Werth. But if Werth is the manager, it becomes the easiest job in sports. Smooth sailing, Nats fans!

Meanwhile

I'm going to talk about the Orioles for a minute, since the only Nats news right now is about Bryce Harper's gluteus assimus, and this is a family-friendly space (but only recently - don't read the archives, kids).

I know most of you hate the O's, but I don't and neither does beloved mascot Professor Bacon. He likes them so much that sometimes he changes colors to Orioles orange and makes me call him Professor Old Baycon. He even squeals in a Hairspray accent.

"Feed me an apple from down'ere, hon."

Barry Svrluga wrote a really nifty piece in the Post about the O's playing out the string. The players, "displaying the kind of steadfast delusion only ballplayers can," are at least claiming they're still in it, but they're not.

And it's only going to get worse for Baltimore, since about half of these guys are free agents at the end of the season. It's too bad. I kinda like the O's, and I really like meaningful baseball programming on MASN.

A couple notes on our orange friends:

1. Ownership is still terrible. If you're in the AL East, this is the time to go for it. The Red Sox are lousy, and the Yankees are only pretty good. For the other denizens of the division, this is an opening. The Blue Jays realized this, so they upgraded in the offseason and then at the trade deadline acquired probably 10% of all the non-Nats players in baseball that I know the names of.

The Orioles, meanwhile, came off a 96 win season in a wide-open division and did . . . nothing. Well, not nothing. They got Travis Snyder, who, it turns out, didn't quite make up for losing Nelson Cruz and Nick Markakis.

It's bad enough that Peter Angelos is evil; he's cheap, too.

2. Buck Showalter is really good at his job. I mean, yeah, it didn't work so much this year, but getting last year's team to 96 wins is an argument for sainthood.

It wasn't that strong a team to begin with, and then a hundred things went wrong. Chris Davis was terrible and then suspended. Manny Machado played half a season, and Matt Wieters played, like, 15% of one. The closer couldn't close.

Yet somehow he was able to get this ragtag bunch of misfits to a division title. Here's a man who knew just when to use Delmon Young, who got an 877 OPS out of Alejandro De Aza and 930 from Steve Pearce. When he realized Tommy Hunter couldn't close, he booted him out of there and tried one who could.

It didn't last. Delmon Young turned back into Delmon Young, and the number 3 starters became number 5 starters. That doesn't take anything from 2014, though. It was a heck of a managerial performance. You could even call it masterful.