The theme of the Nationals' 2015 is nostalgia. The team celebrated the tenth anniversary of its arrival by embarrassing the hell out of us like it was 2009 all over again.
Bryce Harper and Max Scherzer ensure that we're no longer humiliated by every Nats headline, as was the case six years ago, but the ratio is nevertheless unfortunate, and it got worse as the year wore on.
Or rather, it's getting worse as the year wears on - our embarrassments didn't end on October 4, which prompted the Sports Bog to compile the Nats' ten most embarrassing moments.
The Natinals jerseys screwup is the funniest one. Papelbon choking Harper checks in at #1, but I'd put Smiley Gonzalez there. Lots of teams have public disagreements in the dugout; I think we're the only one that's lost a GM because the FBI was coming after him.
Rob Dibble's on there, but Tom Paciorek was worse. Dibble was kind of fun.
"Rob Dibble here reminding you to bring a lunch!"
A couple of my favorites didn't make the list. Remember when the Nats were ordered by the DC Fire Chief to stop setting off fireworks because some hot explosives landed on a guy?
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 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:
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.
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.
You hear about this Rob Dibble controversy? It's about the silliest thing ever, but it gives me an opportunity to take a snarling walk down memory lane.
Rob Dibble was fired from his analyst job after Stephen Strasburg's season-ending injury prompted him to make some of those feral "walk it off, rookie!" noises that you may remember from when Ryan Church ran into a wall.
He recently claimed that Strasburg's dad was so incensed that he emailed the Nats, and that's what prompted the pink slip. Stan Kasten, formerly the guy in charge of apologizing for Jim Bowden, disputes that and hopes Dibble "gets whatever help he needs."
This argument is so trivial that it doesn't matter who's actually correct. Therefore, I'm siding with Dibble.
I know the guy's easy to hate; I've certainly taken shots at him. But Dibble's done some good. He provided a necessary counterweight to Bob Carpenter's cult recruiter cheerfulness. Remember the time he went all Dada and told you to bring a lunch? He wasn't here long, but he left memories that will endure forever. Some of them are even good.
Stan Kasten, on the hand, never did a thing for us. This is a guy who couldn't get rid of Jim Bowden without the help of the FBI. And when the Smiley Gonzalez scandal finally did break, Kasten bravely stood up and blamed everyone in the world but himself.
For all the talk about Kasten bringing the lessons of the Braves dynasty to Washington, the best thing about the Kasten Era was that we lost 100 games only twice.
I've been thinking about archaic grammar and how it relates to the Nationals. Our old friends the ancient Greeks had a number between singular and plural - the dual. It pretty quickly fell into general disuse and came to be used only for things that were usually found in twos, like twins or plow horses or testicles. If ever an ancient Greek could come up with a sentence that included a phrase like "the twin plow horses' testicles," he was credited with a Triple Greek Score and got free desserts for life.
I've been contemplating this because the limitations of the English language make it hard to write about the Nats. When you say "Nationals fans," it's problematic. We learned last year that Nationals TV ratings are small, so tiny that it was posited that they must have been the result of a misplaced comma or a couple of delinquent zeroes. Using the plural of "fan" is an insult to the very concept of the plural AND fails to express the author's scorn at the serious crappiness of Washington's reaction to getting its fourth (more or less) major league team, but using "fan" is pushing it too far. Obviously, there's more than one. Not many more, but more.
That's my problem; the Nationals' problem - as represented by the ratings issues - is being addressed by an aggressive rebranding. Maybe you've noticed that the Nats have taken on an edge lately. You have the acquisition of Elijah Dukes, you've got the FBI investigating the team for filching money from hopeful, fresh-faced Dominican teenagers, and now you have the new color commentator, Rob Dibble.
I'm not quite prepared to complain about this. For one thing, I've never actually heard Rob Dibble: Broadcaster. Maybe he's good. Every piece of evidence argues against it, but stranger things have happened. From the Nats' standpoint, the point is that he's not Don Sutton. I liked Don Sutton. He was even-keeled and intelligent, he had a soothing voice, and he didn't inflict an obvious catchphrase on us. Now we have this:
As edgy as a special guest verse from Fred Durst
See that? The shades, the phony snarl? The bat, which represents his truly impressive hitting record (3-25, .120) and the microphone, which represents his equally impressive talking record? That's branding. This ain't your daddy's color commentator! We're not in Kansas anymore! It's like if the X-Games and Mountain Dew and Poochie the Dog came together and took the form of a gel-haired jackass! Etc., etc.
And don't think it's not intentional. MASN interviewed, among others, Buck Martinez, whose musky, scotch-soaked elegance has fallen out of fashion ever since Ricardo Montalban passed away. Clearly, Buck's status as the best-dressed man in baseball (seersucker? Yes! White after Labor Day? No!) just doesn't fit in with the Nationals' current attitude, which emphasizes informality and malfeasance.
See, that's class right there.
Hence Dibble. It might not be that bad. Maybe he'll spend the season browbeating Bob Carpenter because he didn't play the game and doesn't know how to man up and strap it on or whatever (I'm expecting hits from some pretty hair-raising Google searches based on that wording, by way). Maybe he'll just complain for seven months (this is known as the industry as "Blogger-Style"). Or maybe he'll just be completely terrible. Regardless of the actual outcome, I don't think the Nationals went far enough. If you're going to go edgy, go all the way edgy. Don't settle for some safe-for-ESPN Radio-type controversy - you've got to do the damn thing.
Fortunately, it's not too late. The Nationals' marketing strategy can be completed simply by firing Clint and the Nat Pack and replacing them with these guys (WARNING: this is not safe for work and regrettable in a number of other ways):
Now that's edgy. They have our new advertising slogan: We Ain't Got Bats We Got Straps. Which is to say, maybe we suck as baseball, but we will shoot you. Or at least text you a picture of a gun.
