Swinging Things

It seems like every year we have a chance to talk about on-field violence, and every year we have a chance to talk about Bryce Harper being an idiot and missing games because he's an idiot, depriving our beloved Nationals of their best player, who is an idiot.

This year it all happened at the same time, and I'm overwhelmed with emotion. It's like a wedding and a graduation at the same time, which I'm sure someone has tried to pull off.

I'm sure you're not coming to Distinguished Senators for game recaps, but the basic story is that Hunter Strickland, a hulking Georgian who pitches for the increasingly annoying Giants, gave up a couple homers to Harper back in 2014 and is angry about it. To be fair, Harper did give him a look after one of them.

Given the opportunity to face Harper on Monday, Strickland plunked him in the hip, rendering those two and a half year old dingers null and void. They never happened. I'm serious — go to Retrosheet. They're gone.

Harper charged the mound, fruitlessly threw his helmet, and commenced to swinging them things.

Above: The Battle of the Dudes with Basic White Guy Names

This is where I would normally scold Harper for removing himself from the rest of this game and some others that will happen later. But I'm on his side here. Let's add up all the factors:

1. Bryce was right to be angry, and the predictability of the whole thing made it worse. F.P. Santangelo told us this was going to happen while Strickland was warming up.
2. We can afford Harper taking a few games off. They can suspend him for 112 games and we'll be fine. The point I'm trying to across here in list item #2 is that the Mets are an absolute joke of a franchise.
3. It was so rad! Did you see Michael Morse accidentally just ruining a couple of his teammates? Did you see how they had to haul Strickland off like a psychopath? Did you see?

I love fights. I love real fights, I love simulated fights, and I especially love fights where fights aren't supposed to happen, like a baseball diamond or Ukrainian parliament.

Probably none of these guys is named Hunter or Tanner or Cooper or Haberdasher.

I'm not going to feel guilty about this. A baseball game with a fight in it is better than a baseball without one, so I want to thank Bryce Harper for punching a guy in the face. Enjoy your time off, buddy.

Rub Some Dirt On It

Matt Williams lost the Nationals another one last night. The Nats' one deadline acquisition, Jonathon Papelbon, sat there watching as the bullpen did what the bullpen does.

The Papelbon trade turned out to be a "Gift of the Magi" situation. Williams sold his hair to buy Mike Rizzo a watch fob, and Rizzo got Williams a closer he's too stupid to use.

My question: What is the point of Matt Williams?

He's obviously not any good tactically. He has no idea when to pull a starter. He appears to believe that there's a rule preventing a designated closer from pitching in any but save situations. He thinks a defensive replacement is something that happens to other people. He clearly only learned what a double switch was a couple of weeks ago - he handles those things like your grandpa with an iPhone.

Does he make up for it in other ways?

FP Santangelo is a proponent of what I call the emotional school of baseball criticism. You hear it pretty much every game - if the Nats are losing, the solution is to become gritty. Get the uni dirty. Play as a team. Feed off each other like a plane-crashed soccer team.

This is the goal.

I'm not as opposed to this kind of thing as I'm making it sound. There's something to it; I don't doubt that a happy clubhouse leads to better performances than a miserable one or that good attitudes are more likely to produce good results. I'm not going to base any kind of argument around the concept because it's too wispy to hang anything on, but that doesn't mean it's completely imaginary.

But the fact that FP has to say it every day means that Matt Williams isn't making it happen. I can tolerate a bad tactical manager as long as he brings other things to the table. This isn't some kind of "I renounce sabermetrics!" thing either. If I recall correctly, that was the point of Bill James' manager book - the tactics add up to few games. It's being able to manage people that counts.

There's no reason to think Williams can do that. At least some of his players don't like him any more than we do. The team is embarrassingly bad at fundamental things like throwing a ball to first base. To the extent that there's such a thing as "playing with a sense of urgency," the Nats aren't doing it.

Other than using SAT words in radio interviews, is Matt Williams good at anything?

A True Story

I'm finding this all very tedious. The Nationals are 6.5 half games behind the Mets; 10 games out of the wild card. They win some; they lose some. The poor bastards who have to write about this team every day force themselves to find narratives after every game, but your narrative is only as good as tomorrow's starting pitcher.

It is - let's face it - unlikely that the Nats are going to make the playoffs. MLB's official odds put the chance at less than one in ten. Not impossible, but nothing more than a Padres or an Orioles fan can expect. Watching Nats games is thus less compelling than it used to be. As much as Carpenter and FP will deny it, we're just biding our time until the mathematicians say it's over.

Key: The Nats are the one that sucks.

I'm going to tell you a true story here. I had an outbreak of gnats in my house. There's no need to panic - the source has been identified, and crafty traps have been lain. It's just a matter of time before the last one perishes.

That's how I spend my evenings now: Waiting for the gnats to die.

Things That Don't Matter

"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." - Edmund Burke

Which is to say that if you replace Jordan Zimmerman with Drew Storen in the ninth inning with a one run lead and Storen then blows the lead once, you should learn that you shouldn't replace Jordan Zimmermann with Drew Storen in the ninth inning with a one run lead a second time.

I think a chimpanzee could learn this. I'm sure Bud Black could. Davey Johnson probably knew it already.

I don't want to dwell on that right now, though. I want to complain about things that don't matter.

After four innings in Wednesday's game, the Nationals were getting carved up by Shelby Miller, while Jordan Zimmerman was somehow preventing the Braves from scoring. Bob Carpenter was treating these performances as if they were equal.

Heading into the commercial break he said (more or less; I'm going with the Thucydides method of quoting people here), "Two pitchers being very efficient in what they're doing."

At that point, Zimmermann had thrown 61 pitches, five of which were turned into hits. Miller was at 49 pitches and one hit. One of them was definitely being efficient.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining about Zimmermann's results. He was getting the job done, and he was even better from that point until some idiot took him out of the game (he got through the fifth on maybe four pitches, which prompted F.P. to start singing "Smooth Operator").

Carpenter wanted to say something good about Zimmermann, but the tiny, underused part of his brain that is aware of the other team told him that the other guy was better at what he was complimenting Zimmermann for, so he just lumped them together.

I guess what bothers me about Carpenter is that he basically doesn't acknowledge the other team - everything is chalked up to the Nats doing good or the Nats doing bad.

 Actually, a more accurate Bob Carpenter rating system would go something like:

1. NATS ARE AMAZING
2. Nats do GREAT
3. Nats do good
4. Nats do their best
5. Nats do bad

It's not evenly distributed - if you graphed it, it was peak at 2, and you only hear 5 a couple times a week.

Even beyond the homerism, Carpenter's reluctance to admit that there is another baseball team playing the baseball game makes the broadcast boring. I mean, I know the Nats. I watch them all the time. Let's hear something about the guys who aren't on my TV every night. Stay up late and watch a Dodgers game, Carp. Vin Scully can make even a visit from the Diamondbacks interesting.

It's tough, you know? I get all excited because the Nats are coming on, and then I hear that MASN music and get triggered because that's when it hits me that I'm going to have to listen to stupid crap for three hours.

Bold

That was grisly. The Nationals just got swept by a "should we fire our manager?"-level bad team. I have some notes. I'll bold the names so it looks like a gossip column or something.

- Kudos to Joey Votto for demolishing the offensive stereotype that Canadians are pleasant and polite.

- Kudos to Babyhead Michael Taylor for completely kicking ass all weekend after I spent my whole Friday saying he wasn't good enough to start. Eh, it's not like anyone read it anyway.

- On Friday, the Nats finally figured out what we've all known for a long time - that Stephen Strasburg is injured and should be put somewhere he can't do any harm to himself or to others. So they replaced  him in the second inning with Taylor Jordan, who sounds like a chick but pitched like a man. In the 6th, the Reds walked Babyhead with a man on second to bring up the pitcher.

Superstar manager Matt Williams had gotten four scoreless innings from the first guy out of the bullpen. This was clearly the point where you pinch-hit for him, give him a hearty bro-slap, and try to extend the lead. But nope! Williams let Jordan hit poorly for himself and blow the lead in the bottom of the inning.

- I wasn't paying super close attention on Saturday, but apparently Jose Lobaton messed up his hand and couldn't throw. Why in the hell did he finish the game? I know it was Ramos' day off, but if I've learned anything from Generation X film classics, sometimes you get called in on your day off.

- There were exactly two things I enjoyed about this series:

1. Did you see when Denard Span flung that homer back onto the field, turning it into a not-a-homer? The Great American Ballpark (ugh) starting shooting off fireworks as though Span hadn't flung it, and he looked at the source of the fireworks and shook his head. "Nah, I handled that. Not a homer." That was great.


2. Ray Knight doing color was a lot of fun. He was as bloodthirsty as Rob Dibble, and the MASN broadcast has been missing that kind of animal savagery. He wasn't afraid to call out the Nats for swinging at junk, and he provided some insidery strategic insights that F.P. Santangelo doesn't bother with. On the con side, he still feels the need to chuckle at the worst of Bob Carpenter's jokes, which F.P. has learned to ignore.

The Real Victim

If only these guys could hear how sad they're making F.P., I bet they'd play better. It's just heart-breaking.

Hygiene

I don't have anything to say about baseball, but I always have an opinion about watching baseball.

The highlight of the weekend's action was watching the crack MASN camera team bring the catcher narrative to life for us. On Sunday, Ivan Rodriguez picked up one of his late, agonizing hits on the way to 3,000, and the announcers took the opportunity to talk about how maybe Pudge is being pushed to greater heights by competition from Wilson Ramos.

The view on my television immediately shifted to Mr. Ramos himself, enjoying the game while hanging over the Mo Vaughn barrier in front of the dugout. What follows is a list of Ramos' actions while the camera was on him:

1. Pick left ear with left pinkie.
2. Examine left pinkie.
3. Pick right ear with right pinkie.
4. Examine right pinkie.
5. Make a face.
6. Brush off right pinkie on Nationals sweatshirt.

I don't know a whole lot about television production; certainly not as much as the guys who told Jim Riggleman to make really awkward hand gestures while he previews bad managerial decisions in front of a green screen. But I probably would have said something like "CLOSEUP ON JAYSON WERTH! NOW!" right after #1 in that list.

I also noticed that Bob Carpenter is still doing that thing he does. You know, the thing where the Nats screw up really bad, prompting Carpenter to mention the screwup as briefly as possible and then obsessively mention a much less damaging gaffe the opponent committed.

The first time I recall this happening was back in 2009. Elijah Dukes had evaded a flyball like it was a DUI checkpoint - this was back when the Nats couldn't catch anything - and Sunny Bob steadfastly maintained that David Wright was the bad guy.

It happened again on Saturday. Jonathan Sanchez walked approximately everyone, and the Nats responded by scoring only one damn run. I wasn't paying real close attention, so my only info was coming from Carpenter. Listening to him talk, you'd think Sanchez had walked in about fourteen runs. I was honestly shocked when I looked up to see a 1 on the scoreboard.

At least Dibble would have called him on it. I think Santangelo just mumbled something about "country hardball" as we went to break and winced through that Riggleman commercial again.