The Word

Having Alonzo Mourning as the best player on your team was less than ideal for a couple of reasons. The obvious one is that while Mourning was very good, he wasn't that good. He wasn't Hakeem Olajuwon.

The other problem is that Mourning allowed himself mentally to be taken out of games. All Dennis Rodman had to do was some light needling followed by a discreet elbow, and Mourning would go off like Krakatoa (too soon?) and have to go sit down for a while.

Hugs!

I guess a 6'8" dude with parti-colored hair and a lip ring doesn't qualify as a secret weapon, but Rodman brought more than rebounds to the table. He had less tangible skills.

I thought Bryce Harper was past the Alonzo Mourning phase of his career, but these umpires keep getting under his skin.

On Monday, Harper was pretty upset about the strike zone, and he antagonized the umpire to the point that he got ejected while in the dugout with his back turned.

It turned out to be a very brief 86, as moments later Clint Robinson hit a walk-off home run. Harper took time out from celebrating Robinson's triumph to look at the umpire and yell something at him. That something, I regret to inform you, included what is euphemistically referred to as "the Fuck Word." Followed by "you."

It was pretty churlish, and now he's facing a mild suspension. That is not, in my opinion, OK.

Harper is our best player. He is THE best player, and he needs to keep himself on the field. There are two major threats to his participation:

1. Running into walls like a dumbass
2. Getting himself thrown out like a dumbass

He managed to tame the first one - he hasn't injured himself through excessive effort in ages. I figured he was beyond the other one as well. Remember last May? He flipped the hell out, got tossed, and let Michael A. Taylor hit the Professor Bacon Bacon Blast of the Week. Shortly afterwards, he got ejected for basically nothing, which should have taught him that picking fights with umpires is no way to win anything.

Look, we all want to yell at umpires. They have undeserved power over things we care about, and they seldom seem worthy of it. But you won't win. I mean, Major League Baseball can win against umpires, but Bryce Harper won't. Soothing your own savage breast by yelling at them is short-sighted and ill-advised. Harper just failed the marshmallow test.

It's best to treat the officials like any other part of the game that's beyond anyone's control, like the weather. You can yell the Fuck Word at the weather, but that's not going to get the wind behind your fly balls.

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.

Apples, Spray Bottles, Bacon

Professor Bacon is back, and he brought a brand new Distinguished Senators feature with him: It's the Professor Bacon Bacon Blast of the Week!

I would like an apple

This week's Professor Bacon Bacon Blast of the Week award goes to "Babyhead" Michael Taylor for Wednesday's ninth inning grand slam against Arizona pitcher [look up who this is later] [actually, you know what? Don't bother]. I mean, we all know Bryce Harper would have done the same thing if he had better impulse control, but Professor Bacon doesn't care who dings the dingers as long as the dingers get dung.

Professor Bacon also wants to recommend this video. It's like he's trying to tell us something.

Having triumphed in the desert, the Nationals are off to sunny San Diego, where the locals play baseball in the middle of the night and sometimes wear camouflage uniforms so as to confound their enemies.

Will Ian Desmond commit three or four more errors? Will Bryce Harper punch an umpire in the throat? Will Alexi Amarista become the next Doug's Dude?

If you could let me know about any of those, that'd be great. I'm not staying up for this series.

UPDATE: It looks like mid-2000s relic Professor Bacon isn't compatible with mobile devices. I asked him about it, and he just kind of tilted his head at me. So I said, "You know, Apple products," and then he suggested that apple products sounded pretty tasty and maybe I should him feed him one.

Sunday Starters

The Nationals are being sued by a religion.

Well, not really. What happened was some Seventh Day Adventist ushers got fired because they couldn't work Friday or Saturday games, so they filed a lawsuit.

It's a knotty problem, you know? I try to stay clear of these kinds of issues. I'm interested in pissing off only people I'm interested in pissing off, and that does not include people with strong opinions on when the Sabbath is or what you should or shouldn't do on it.

My advice in these matter is to read the Antigone and try not be like either of the main characters.

My takeaway from all this is that it's gotten a lot more difficult to complain about the Nationals. That's where the misleading first line of this very post came from. It might not have been actually "true" in the conventional sense, but I have developed certain habits following this team for ten years, and among them is the tendency to assume the worst at all times.

It used to serve me well - everything really was awful. Even when I thought something was going to be pretty good, Austin Kearns would run in out of right field and break its leg.

It got to the point that blogging was too easy, especially after I got my template going. If this lawsuit had happened in 2006, I would have just filled it in like this:

"Bodes, having already [something about Cristian Guzman or Jose Guillen] and [something about Smiley Gonzalez], has topped himself by trampling on the rights of a religious minority. Blargh I hate everything here's Professor Bacon."

In 2015, the Nats being sued for persecuting the faithful like a bunch of baseball Diocletians seems more like just something that happened rather than another example of the organization's thorough-going incompetence and malevolence.

On balance it's an improvement, but it does make the blogging more difficult.