Strategic Losses

As we reported first here at Distinguished Senators, the season is over and the Nats won. Just put up that NL East pennant right now. Our gonfalon bubble is unprickable.

Because the rest of the division is engaged in a dispirited slapfight for second place, our beloved, triumphant Nationals can afford the occasional strategic loss.

Jonathan Papelbon blew the save on Sunday, and that's OK. It didn't happen to somebody that anyone likes, Papelbon can handle it, and it gave our unfortunate friends in Philadelphia something to be happy about. He showed real perspective when asked about it. “We’re in first place and we won the [gosh darn] series, man. You know?”

So it's not too upsetting that the Nats failed to complete a sweep of the Phillies, since that game three loss threw into relief the only problem this team has: the save would not have been blown if Jayson Werth were still capable of playing baseball.

The Phillies won when somebody (who cares?) hit a double over Werth's head. Babyhead would have caught it. Den Dekker would have caught it. Any number of the offseason free agents who weren't interested in playing for the Nats would have had a shot.

Ian Desmond probably wouldn't have gotten it.

The hope here is that we gave up a loss, but in return made Dusty Baker aware that he shouldn't leave his worst player out there in the later innings. Maybe - this is a long shot, I know - this will prompt Dusty to consider that he shouldn't be playing his worst player at all.

That's how a loss becomes a win.

Former Nationals Update!

Helpful commenter "Anonymous" sends along with that Austin Kearns is a volunteer coach at Lexington Christian Academy. It's nice that he's staying busy, and I hope he doesn't break anyone's femur.

I have also discovered that Kory Casto has been inducted into the North Marion High School Hall of Fame. I was always pretty hard on Casto, but that was only because he was taking playing time away from Chris Snelling. Plus I think he was pranking us with how to spell his name.

It's A Dull and Rusty Razor

Do I pick these players because they need to someone to argue for them, or do they need someone to argue for them because I pick them? I don't know what it is, but as soon as I stopped worrying about Ryan Church, things started to go well for him. The moment I declared my allegiance to Chris Snelling . . . well, you can't say his luck's gotten worse, but he has endured a string of setbacks at the hands of the front office. Over the last couple weeks, he's been losing starts in left field to the likes of Michael Restovich and Robert Fick, the latter of whom proves conclusively -- as if we needed any more evidence -- that a gritty, scrappy attitude and left-handedness can get you a long way baseball, even if that's pretty much all you've got going for you.

Now we've got Kory Casto, already vanquished once in this positional war, back from AAA. This move comes, of course, just as I'd forgotten how to spell his name. It also comes as Snelling isn't hitting. He's down to a Guzmanian .208 average, and he's not making up for it with power. What he is doing is getting on base, with his antipodean mixture of walks and hit by pitches giving him a more than respectable .367 OBP. And that's part of what makes me think Snelling should be playing every day -- his batting can't not go up. There's no way he keeps hitting .208, and when he snaps out of it, that tasty on base percentage is a nice foundation to build on.

Manny Acta sees it differently, though: Casto is going to play every day until the little-missed Nook Logan comes back, whereupon he becomes the fourth outfielder. Snelling, out of options and therefore un-Columbusable, gets to sit on the bench and wonder why he went through all that rehab.

This may well be the right decision for the team, but who's pretending to care about that? Not the front office, that's for sure. At this point, it's every Nat for himself and every blogger for his Nat, so I don't feel too bad in hoping that Casto and the three or four other outfielders I need out of the way fail miserably.

We dropped the series with the Mets, which is predictable, but at least we got some nice pitching out of it. Jerome Williams, who was responsible for six innings of it, is on the DL now, but I didn't feel the need to put an "unfortunately" on the beginning of this sentence, which only now have come to the end of. For one thing, six innings of no runs doesn't mean he doesn't suck. More importantly, watching this guy work is pure torture. There's already far too much Steve Trachsel on the MASN family of networks, and I have no desire to watch a Hawaiian Steve Trachsel imitator take three hours to get through five innings.

A word on Tony Randazzo, the umpire who possibly cost us the rubber match with the Mets. Maybe you remember -- in the seventh, down a run and with a man on second, Snelling and Fick came up to hit. They thought they were playing baseball, but Randazzo without warning switched the game to single player Random Strike Call, and they both struck out. Keep in mind, though, that the night before he blew a double play call that let us score a run. It didn't give us a win, but it did make us take a long time to lose, and that's something. Maybe he was trying to make up for his gaffe on Sunday, or maybe -- and Occam's holding a razor to my neck and telling me that this is the explanation -- he's just not very good at his job.

To Franklinton

That weekend went pretty well. Yeah, we lost a game, but it wasn't humiliating, and I didn't see it anyway. Then we won one -- jacked a bunch of dingers and upheld the long-standing tradition of having Mets pitchers throw at us in April. Finally, El Nino stepped in and cancelled half the schedule, bringing with him two happy benefits: 1) We don't lose the series, and 2) We don't have to look at the Mets or their terrible stadium or their cheesy little moustaches for a while.

So it looks my yearly prayer to the baseball gods is paying off so far. I didn't ask for much -- requesting a World Series or 60 wins or something is hubristic and sure to end in disaster. Remember when Mo Vaughn fell into the dugout and messed up his ankle on his first play with Anaheim? That's because some Angels fan got ambitious and wished for an MVP. All I asked for was a .500 record against the Mets and a whole lot of Chris Snelling.

Above: A baseball god. Is very bad to drink his rum.

The gods saw to it that we're .500 against New York, and now they're looking after Snelling for me, too.

Manny Acta decided Thursday to make Chris Snelling his starting left fielder, a decision that has proven to pay off and could lead to Kory Casto's demotion to Class AAA Columbus.
After backing up Casto for most of the first two weeks of the season, Snelling was inserted into the lineup Thursday and has remained there since. And when he hit two-run homer and added an RBI groundout in yesterday's 6-2 win over the New York Mets, the 25-year-old outfielder further cemented his place with the Nationals for the immediate future.

I wonder why this wasn't the situation from the beginning of the year. Snelling and Kasto are the same age, and all indications are that the Aussie is a better player. Why were they so desperate for Casto to win out? I really don't know. Maybe they explained it while I was in Europe taking important photographs. I know they wanted to get Casto regular playing time, but this is (technically) a major league ballclub. If you need more time in the nursery before you can contribute, well, that's why Lucas Sullivant founded Columbus, Ohio.

First Base

We may look back and conclude that it was Nick Johnson's broken femur rather than any conscious personnel decision that made the 2007 Nationals unwatchable.

Driving this home now is the latest twist in the low-stakes competition for the interim first base post, which, depending on how Johnson recovers, could mean a whole season's worth of work for the lucky winner. Coming into camp, it was clear that Nats management wanted Larry Broadway to win the job. Broadway is a prospect only in the same sense that William Hung is a wildly popular recording artist: it's certainly not true now, and it may never have been true at all. He (Broadway, not Hung) has failed to impress in spring training. His .333 batting average is nothing to be ashamed of, but it's kind of cheating when you do it with nothing but singles.

So Broadway's been sent back to AAA and his spot, both on the roster in the desperate hopes of the brain trust, is occupied by Dmitri Young. Looking at this Post piece, the ghost of Jose Guillen reminds us how risky this is. Opinion of Young, as it was with Guillen, seems divided between those with experience of him (negative) and those who are dealing with him for the first time (positive), with Jim Bowden again on the sidelines assuring us that everything's going to be just fine.

Tigers left fielder Craig Monroe declined to answer a question about Young on Thursday, and another Tigers player interjected, "I think what [Monroe] is saying is, 'If you don't have anything good to say about someone, don't say anything.' "

It's worse than that, though, because Young's offenses are much more serious than Guillen's -- Jose was a hot-head who got exiled from Anaheim for locker room incidents. Young beat up his girlfriend and skipped out on his court date, among other things. Plus there's the fact that he can't play first base.

One Tigers official, informed that the Nationals plan to play Young at first, said, "Believe me, they don't want to do that." Young's last appearance there for the Tigers ended disastrously, with Young making three errors in a game July 31 at Tampa Bay. After that, Young would play only 23 more games for the Tigers -- all of them as DH.

On top of that, Young hasn't had a good enough bat to carry first base since William Hung's heyday. Put it all together, and there's a miniscule chance that this is going to work out satisfactorily.

The alternative is even worse: we haven't heard much about Travis Lee because there's nothing to say about him. He can't hit. He can maybe field. He's more suited to a job as Matt LeBlanc's stunt double than as a major league first baseman.

There is a way out of this mess. Kory Casto is one of few nice things in the Nats' farm system, and now that he's gone from third base to the outfield, he's picked up a first baseman's glove. This is the right thing to do, for a number of reasons.

• Casto's upside is higher than that of any of the other options, including Broadway. He's already displayed impressive patience and tantalizing power, and it's not going to take much for him to be a defensive improvement over Da Meathook.
• Casto is one of our guys. It's a lot more satisfying to root for someone who grew up in your system and is going to be around for a while. The fan appeal of the players shouldn't be the primary factor in deciding who plays, but a team that's admittedly not really trying to win should probably throw the cranks a bone every now and then.
• In the glorious tradition of Cristian Guzman and Terrmel Sledge, Kory Casto will be a real test of who's paying attention; that name requires an almost monastic concentration not to spell wrong.