Because, See, You Can Get It From Turtles

To follow up on yesterday's whine: how lame is Spring Training? The guys getting paid to blog about it are barely bothering anymore.

But that's OK, because I've got Terps fever! Well, a mild case. Not full-blown salmonella or anything, but that's just because they're out of town. You probably didn't hear about this because those losers at the papers didn't want you to hear about it, but the Terps went down to wherever it is North Carolina State plays (somewhere in the state of North Carolina, I'm pretty sure, but I can't get any more specific than that) and took two out of three from an apparently favored Wolfpack, and it's just a damn good thing that there's no rule about getting beat so bad in the third game of a series that they retroactively say you lost the first two.

I say apparently favored because the only thing I know about college baseball is that teh Terpz rool(!), and these dudes said NC State was going to sweep them. Hah! Seems like any sucker with a Blogspot account can just start yapping about baseball . . . well, never mind that. Instead, let's focus on a guy I really need to come up with a nickname for, lefty closer Brett Cecil. "Beanie and"? "County"? "The Marquess of Salisbury"? Clearly, I need to get out of the nickname business.

At any rate, Cecil picked up two more saves, bringing his total up to 5. Which I guess is kind of a lot this early on. I hope this guy gets drafted by a team I like (hint, hint). Remember what I said before, Stan. I'm giving you this advice for free.

Trees in the park! Cherry trees! That's pretty damn neat. Not neat enough to get me to blow a hundred bucks on season tickets this year, but still neat. Neat neat neat. The real story here, though, is that the stadium's evidently going to be open on time. This fact snuck up on us quietly, but it really is one of the most amazing things that's ever happened. Remember when it kept almost getting killed? Marion Barry was going to stop it, then Linda Cropp, then I stopped paying attention but it seemed like every few months some other hurdle appeared. Yet here we (almost) are, and I don't know who should get the credit. But I'm going to go old school and give it to Jack Evans. Keep up the good work, Jack.

I already like this blog. He's got the right attitude. "The ’07 Nats could possibly be the worst team in the history of baseball." Damn right. No getting around that. A certain attitude is needed if we're get through this season -- bemused apathy or something similar, and think Your 2007 Washington Nationals has what it takes to make it through to October without losing it. It's right over here. Click on it.

Personal to the person who got here looking for information on where the Puppy Bowl is filmed: Silver Spring, MD.

It Happens Every Spring

Spring Training has so far gone just as I predicted. It's been, from a fan's perspective at least, a complete waste of time. My own personal interest in the Nats and their works was just starting to bloom anew, only to be crushed under the muddy boot of meaningless games and Viera datelines. It can't end fast enough.

The big story out of Florida has been that everybody sucks. There was some foolish optimism about the pitching -- Tim Redding or Jason Simontacchi or one of these other guys was going to put it all together maybe by discovering a baseball-repelling substance or breaking his arm and having it heal in such a way that it gives him a super fastball.

When I put it that way, it's not all that surprising that it hasn't happened yet. It would require more interest in this nonsense than I have to determine exactly who's sucking and how much, so I'll just leave it as a generality: they all suck. I fully expect those three words to become a refrain throughout the season, because it's not going to stop.

Similarly predictable are the early returns on Nook Logan. Minors, majors, spring training -- he can't hit and he never will. For the love of Richie Ashburn, what's it going to take for this team to realize that for a speedy centerfielder to be useful, he has to be a better hitter than, you know, me? The propaganda ministers over at the official site didn't even sound convinced this time around. "He can hit lefties!" "He can . . . um . . . I guess he can bunt." He's a poor man's Brandon Watson, who's a poor man's Endy Chavez, and I swear Ladson almost said that once before he caught himself.

Also sucking is Ryan Church, but there's a vital difference here. Church has something of a pedigree. While Nook has never hit, Church has. Not at an MVP level or anything, but enough to be useful. And the most joyous difference we've noticed between Frank Robinson's and Manny Acta's managing style is that the former seemed to judge his players on the basis of grittiness and guttiness and testicular mass (figuratively) (I hope), while Acta has already awarded Church the job based on -- get this -- the fact that he's good at baseball. Truly a new breed of manager.

Meanwhile, Ryan Zimmerman didn't sign a long-term deal with the Nats. Astoundingly, this has produced news. Maybe the adverb at the beginning of this sentence should have been "preposterously." Or, depending on how drunk I am, "completely retardedly," because this is pretty close to the exact opposite of news. I don't know if we can chalk it up to the lack of actual news or the healthy ignorance of fans about the arcane rules of major league indentured servitude, but Zimmerman is owned by the Nats -- lock, stock, and nickname -- for years. Years. Seriously: by the time we have to worry about whether or not Ryan Zimmerman will be a National, not one player on the roster now, in March of 2007, will still be wearing the curly W.

So the fact that Zimmerman's people talked to Kasten's people and nothing happened other than the inevitable renewing of his unbreakable contract is about as newsworthy as the sun rising tomorrow then, after a certain period, setting.

Kasten: "If Bodes is OK with Ryan, He's OK with Me"

From Sports Illustrated:

The marriage of holdover Nationals GM Jim Bowden and new team president Stan Kasten was predicted by some to be a tough one from the start, and while there are whispers the odd couple isn't seeing eye-to-eye, Kasten strongly stressed that those rumors are untrue. "That takes me by complete surprise,'' Kasten responded by phone. "I think everyone's on the same page, and I know we've made a lot of progress from what was a difficult situation when we took over. Even Jim's critics would have to admit he's had a pretty good run of moves.'' [Festive, Mexican-themed emphasis mine]

Kasten didn't name any names, but I know when someone's talking about me. And the sooner he starts using Distinguished Senators for all his personnel decisions, the better this crazy thing's going to go. Here's a tip for you, Stan: I've got the inside line on a mysterious new pitch. Call me.

Will Carroll Has the Goalpost Movers on Speed Dial

From a Baseball Prospectus chat:

bmcginni (Indy): Speaking of the mystical gyro ball...why is it that scouts can't tell if Dice-K is even throwing the gyro? I read that in Matsuzaka's first start the scounts couldn't tell if he was throwing it, the hitters thought he was, and Matsuzaka wouldn't say. What would make it effective if nobody even knows for sure whether it exists because you can't tell if it's being thrown?

Will Carroll: First, does it matter? All I want to know is that the ball ends up in the catcher's glove, not the cheap seats. If you want to call it a slurve, a sinker, a shuuto, a backup, or Pee Wee Herman, it doesn't matter. If the ball comes at the hitter's waist, then drops, is it a hammer curve, a splitter, or a gyro? If it tails in, is that a riding fastball, a sinker, or a cutter? We're too focused on the description when we should be focused on the process.

Totally. We don't want to get caught up in labels here, people. Especially if, say, we completely misinterpreted a book about a new pitch because we couldn't read it and didn't bother to have it translated. And then, say, we just looked at the pictures until thought we had it figured out. And we've been contradicted so many times by people who know so much more about this than we do that we are -- here, in this chat -- taking the first step to claiming that whatever the hell we're teaching high school kids in Indiana isn't a gyroball at all, but actually something even newer and better and -- best of all -- something we can name after ourselves. The Carroll Ball? The Slick Willy? The Juiceball? The Buzz Machine? The Powerful Paralyzing Perfect Pachydermous Percussion Pitch?

The Second Mike Piazza Post in the History of This Blog

Apropos nothing: when Mike Piazza goes into the Hall of Fame, is "Florida" going to show up on this plaque? In case you've forgotten -- and forgetting about this is probably a sign of normalcy, especially compared to the amount of time I've spent thinking about it -- the Dodgers traded Piazza early in the 1998 season to Florida. He played five games there before being shipped to the Mets, who desperately needed him, as their starter until Piazza showed up was apparently Alberto Castillo.

Above: Hyperbole

Five games, seven days, four singles and a triple -- that's the extent of Piazza's Florida career. It was pretty incongruous: Piazza, making $8 million and coming off a year in which he should have won the MVP, making a layover on the worst team the National League had seen until the 2007 Nats, the infamous Firesale Marlins.

Don't worry, Mike. It'll be over soon.

Thanks to the pretty rad Hall of Fame website, doing some actual reporting or at least fact-checking was a breeze. The nearest equivalent to Piazza's situation I could think of was Babe Ruth's forgotten final 28 games, when in 1935 and at the age of 40, the Babe's career petered out with the Boston Braves.

Not a photoshop. As far as I know.

Look at his plaque, and there it is: "Boston-New York, A.L.; Boston, N.L. 1915-1935." Just in case, I checked the next most similar situation I could find rattling around in my brain, which actually wasn't very similar at all. The shortest stop in Rogers Hornsby's career was also the Braves, although he spent a whole year with them. But his plaque not only doesn't have Boston, it doesn't list his teams at all. So I'm guessing that feature of the plaques wasn't regularized until later. My fact-checking didn't extend that far.

So then I thought -- and O what a marvelous tale this is in the telling! -- of a totally, almost perfectly comparable dilemma. Ryne Sandberg (whose middle name is "Dee," which I guess spurred him on to great feats of athletic prowess, because that's just girly -- Sort of a boy named Sue effect) started his career with 13 games and a 1-6 batting line with the dumbass Phillies, who proceeded to trade him for Ivan DeJesus. Hey, you don't win one championship in 125 years by being smart. Anyway, Philly's on the plaque.

So, to answer my own irrelevant question: Yes, Florida will be on Mike Piazza's Hall of Fame plaque. And now you know . . . the rest of the story. Good day.

Gyroball!

There's a sweetness in revisiting aspects of your life that you've set aside. Visiting your old high school, for instance, or hiding in the bushes outside your first girlfriend's house. So it was with me; first with blogging and now with the inevitable companion to blogging, batting Will Carroll around like a kitten with a shiny foil ball.

And did I ever used to do that a lot! I notice, as I lovingly peruse my own archives, that January of 2006 alone saw me pretend to interview him, call him on the hypocrisy of mocking James Frey while also calling his co-blogger/ass-kisser a moron for adoring James Frey and for being too damn dumb to even read his book (special guest star in the comments to that post: Probably Bill Ladson!), and get pretty annoyed at his AIDS jokes and fumbling attempts to backhand Aaron Gleeman.

Those were good times, weren't they? Since then, though, it's become harder and less rewarding to follow Will's absurd adventures in the land of pseudojournalism. For one thing -- and if you're looking for an indictment of sports journalism, here you go -- keeping up with Will actually costs money. Sure, I'll read Carroll's hilarious proclamations of his own importance if they're on some blog, but the crew at Baseball Prospectus (Swingin' Joey Sheehan and the Doctrinaires!) sure isn't getting my forty bucks again.

The other reason for my letting up is that Will's spent most of his time talking about this damn gyroball, and I A) don't care and 2) don't have the kind of knowledge of the subject matter that would allow to me to critique Will's blatherings with any kind of authority. But with Daisuke Matsuzaka, allegedly a constant practioner of the arcane art of the gyroball, making his major league debut, Will's been all over the place (or sulking when he's not mentioned). What finally sent me over the edge was this piece by the Post's own Dave Sheinin -- a Distinguished Senators Most Favored Sportswriter -- which pretty neatly summarizes how the cynically credulous coverage of the gyroball is allowing Will to spew his falsehoods far and wide.

What was supposed to go here was a recitation of events. Thanks to Google and my new favorite Cubs fan, though, I don't have to do any of the work. A fellow named Koch over at CubDumb has been doing some very important work, and, unless you're one of those DS fans who tunes out when Carroll comes up, you owe it to yourself to read this and then this. Seriously good stuff. Basically, Will has been wrong about this pitch (or pitches or whatever) at every step. His well-documented shamelessness, though, serves him well here, as he's quite comfortable just changing his story as the facts necessitate. At first, Will described this magical superpitch that a mysterious, inscrutable far Eastern hurler threw regularly. This blew up once someone (Jeff Passan in this case) did some actual reporting or at least fact-checking and found that -- Oops! -- Matsuzaka doesn't even throw it. Events continued to unfold in pretty much this pattern: Will claims something, an actual journalist or player or physicist contradicts him, and Will adjusts, always hoping to be recognized as the expert in spite of the fact that -- whatever truth there is behind all this double-spin mechanics and whatnot -- Will's uncovered none of it. From the Boston Globe:

"The Secret of the Miracle Pitch" has never been translated into English, and given all the confusion surrounding the pitch, it's perhaps apt that the man who has championed it in the States doesn't speak Japanese. Yet Will Carroll managed to procure a copy of the book, and though he couldn't read it, he deciphered the book's myriad illustrations and drawings, and fashioned himself as something of a gyroball guru.

That's how a real journalist says that he thinks you're full of crap, Will.

Whatever the facts of the "gyroball" are -- and I'm in no position to figure that out -- it's clear that Will Carroll has no idea. It's also likely if not certain that they're far more prosaic than Carroll and the mainstream press' coverage are letting on -- maybe so prosaic that it's just a cut fastball or something. That doesn't make for good copy, though, and that's why I'm annoyed with Sheinin and company. Here's how almost all of these stories have gone:

• Part I: Obligatory reference to Bruce Sutter
• Part II: Obligatory reference to Godzilla
  
• Part III: Carroll's claims are presented
• Parts IV through VII: Carroll's claims are refuted by Al Leiter, Barry Bonds, Bobby Valentine, Robert Adair, and a cast of thousands
• Part VIII: The Big Finish. "[It's a complete fraud], but maybe, just maybe, this [made-up] pitch could revolutionize baseball."

They know it's crap, but it's like reporting on Bigfoot or UFOs or Atlantis: if you humor the nutcase, he'll give you a story. Welcome to your journalistic niche, Will.

New Blog Day

I didn't watch the Nats game on Saturday because I was cheering on the Terps again. I must be good luck, because once again they came from behind to win. The scouts were out in force to see starter Ryan Moorer (who, judging by his name, must be just like me only moreso) and lefty closer Brett Cecil. Keep in my mind that my scouting skills are pretty much on par with, say, my ukelele abilities, but this Cecil could be one to keep an eye on. He terrified the three unfortunate Lafayette scholar/athletes he faced in the ninth, striking out the side and causing the second victim to humiliate himself pretty badly. Seriously, every time this guy throws a fastball, an angel loses his wings. Filthy, filthy stuff. But, you know, sample size and incompetent observer caveats apply.

So, given that I haven't seen a Nat in a while and that nothing interesting seems to have happened, it's new blog time! Like Brussels sprouts or parsnips or cauliflower, Nats blogs spring from the ground, luscious and verdant, in February and March, so I'll be taking a look at some of the new ones. Because I'm all about supporting the community. And churning out content without bothering to come up with something to say.

First up is Nationals Review, which plans to provide statiscally-minded weekly updates. I hope Charlie has more success with that weekly thing than I did. Here's a representative post covering Ronnie Belliard and the candidates to fill in for Nick Johnson.

Ron’s .237/.293/.371 Aug/Sept with the Cards doesn’t seem any worse than what Guzman has to offer. So basically a bad month for Belliard is a normal month for Guzman. Belliard and Lopez makes for an above average hitting middle infield, guys that can do a decent job of getting on base, and could put up a combined 25-30 home runs. . .

What could be really scary for fans and enticing for RFK hot dog vendors is that if Lopez gets hurt, Belliard and Guzman could combine to form the pudgiest middle infield in the history of the game, possibly only the addition of Deivi Cruz at third base could make it any funnier.

Let's not sell Tony Batista short in that category. His gut gets extra oomph because it's next to his little Tyrannosaurus Rex arms.

At the opposite end of the fan spectrum is Nationals Power. I'll let proprietor Joe Riley explain himself:

You won't find cutting-edge statistical analysis here, I'm simply not equipped to do that, and there are already so many more-qualified bloggers who can analyze statistics, both passionately and dispassionately. What you WILL find here is unbridled enthusiasm for a find organization. If you want my views on the hot dogs, the stadium sound system, wonderful vendors and how the beer tastes, then bookmark this site today.

Joe appears to be well-situated to give important information on a subject important to many if not most Nats fans: beer. Check this post out, and let's hope he makes insider beer updates a regular feature.

It's about time we covered a blog that sounds like it should be pronounced with an exclamation point at the end: NATSTASTIC(!) More Belliard is fat analysis:

Minus of signing Belliard: he's not exactly the physical build of your proto-typical 2B. Plus of signing Belliard, Tony Womack, hero of the 2001 World Series, will likely not make the team. Just to put this all in perspective, Zimm graduated from high school in 2001.

Thanks for making me feel old, NATSTASTIC(!)

We've got two entries at MLBlogs, which I don't know anything about. Do you have to pay for those? Doesn't Lasorda have one? Anyway, This Base For Rent isn't new, and I hate it when I miss these things. Sorry. And here's some props for teh community, which makes me feel even worse.

The newness of the team gave fans (and bloggers alike) to get in on following a franchise in its infancy in a new city. It’s been interesting during the past couple months in which I’ve followed the team day in and day out just how often the Natosphere members blog and how detailed and well-written each blog is. And this is the off-season.

Another neighbor of Mr. Lasorda is DC Daily, which seems to be digging The Plan.

So the franchise that is responsible for producing Tim Raines, Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, Randy Johnson, half of the current Indians, Javier Vazquez, Orlando Cabrera, Vladimir Guerrero, Vidro, Brian Schneider, and Ryan Zimmerman is now being run by the man, Stan Kasten, who helped rebuild the Braves before their decade-plus dominance of the NL(tee hee), and Kasten has hired Tom Rizzo, the man responsible for the most recent rebuilding of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and then Kasten hires a Manager best known as a talent evaluator, in Manny Acta. This finally sounds right.

Not enough paper, you say? Get to The Nationals Report and behold the papery wonder! Kyle is focused -- he didn't bother with the usual "this is my first post" post, instead launching right into a middle infield preview, including Smiley Gonzalez.

So what if he’s only 16 (so he says), I gotta give the kid some face time. The buzz is that he could be a franchise type player, with comparisons to Ozzie Smith and Miguel Tejada. USA Today also reports that he’s working on a cure for cancer. Won’t see him for years to come but one of the Nationals few bright prospects.

Finally, while searching the internet for answers to my many ball punishment questions, I stumbled on a blog called Capitol (sic) Punishment. I looked and looked for a quotation worth putting up, but "Chris" doesn't make it easy. Here's a typical one:

I . . . fear . . . the FBI knocking on my door.

Well, the color scheme's pleasing, at least.

Jim Bowden and the Triumph of Honesty

I'm looking forward to this season, as ghastly as it's going to be, because I've never seen anything like it. It's unusual to see a major league baseball team in this kind of extremity, and it's even more unusual to see one so ready to admit it. I never lived in Pittsburgh or Kansas City, so I don't know how frank frankly awful teams tend to be, but the statements coming from Nationals management seem at least extraordinary, if not unprecedented.

Consider some comments Thom Loverro reports that Jim Bowden made during a recent interview.

"The (major league payroll) budget was a lot lower this year than before. But that was a baseball decision. We certainly could have gone out and spent, let's say $9 million, on three pitcher who would do a better job of keeping us in games or gone and got one Gil Meche for $10 million a year."

Aside from the spasmodic reaction the Meche mention is likely to prompt from Needham, I'm surprised to find a carnival barker like Bowden admitting that the Nats quite easily could have been better than they are, but that they aren't, because, you know, Plan.

"You saw that last year. At the trading deadline, teams that want to win, they don't want second-division starting pitchers, so you can't trade them. That piece doesn't get you anything. That doesn't work long term. Then, you win a few more games and get a worse draft pick, so I don't know if that is worth it.

Hmm. Now, I'm fairly pro-Plan, I guess. It's not that I think that Jason Simontacchi or whoever is a real pitcher, but I do have some confidence in the long-term outlook of the team. As I mentioned at least once before, this is the first time that has ever been true. And that's something. Quite a lot, actually.

However, there's a line that's been crossed here. It's one thing to say that your team is going to be awful. We understand that, as long as there's nothing you can reasonably do about it. But Bowden is admitting here that the Nats could have been competitive but that it was decided that they would not be, and that this decision was made at least in part so that we'd get a better draft pick. That's like shooting yourself in the foot to get a Purple Heart, and I don't know that I'm comfortable with it.

But it's not like Bodes invented this maneuver. A dude named Bimbo figured it out when the Cavaliers did it, for example. And pragmatically speaking, it makes sense. $10 million sunk into the rotation is extremely unlikely to result in a team that going to do anything of note, and it does, as Bodes says, make more sense to invest that money in the farm system. I don't know, are we used to teams trying to compete, or are we used to teams pretending they're trying to compete? I mean, yeah, some teams compete. The good ones. But it's taken for granted that certain proportion of franchises in any sport is going to endure the blows of a losing season in order to build for the future or pocket some easy money or because they don't have the will to fire the incompetents running the thing, and the public relations noises they make to the press while they're doing it don't change the reality of their effort.

So it's not Bowden's tactics that make me uneasy, it's his honesty. And that kind of thing should be encouraged, so I guess he gets a pass.

Whew!

Sometimes you read a story about somebody saying foolish, untakebackable things on the internet, and you're amazed and relieved that bloggers aren't involved. Like this one.

Capsule Book Reviews

OK, time to clear out some of the stuff I've been meaning to review. For a couple years, in some cases.

The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz. Almost everyone in this book is a butt-head of one kind or another, from Henry Chadwick to Bill James. Good read.

Stengel: His Life and Times by Robert Creamer. Great bio. You should read this. My favorite part: Casey sits down next to one of his players and says, "Nobody knows this, but one of us has been traded to Kansas City."

Baseball Dynasties by Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein. Welcome to the graveyard of sabermetric ideas that never caught on! Did you know that Joe Morgan had a .379 ROV in 1975 and an .850 OW%? What useful information, and how he must have contributed to his team's Standard Deviation Score! Nice to flip through when you need to kill a few minutes. Fun inter-capsular fact: The Numbers Game reports that Epstein got fired from the Orioles for being a butt-head.

A Homeric Dictionary by George Autenrieth. I've never seen a book that more perfectly did what it set out to do. It's got every word in Homer, and that's it. The first word is aaatos. Georg doesn't know what it means.

Rogers Hornsby by Charles C. Alexander. Eh. Hornsby is one of the most perfect jackasses that ever lived, and his life is a series of squandered opporunities, opportunities that he got only because he could hit the hell out of a baseball. It's hard to make a biography compelling when its subject is so unpleasant in such a banal way, and Alexander ain't Creamer.

You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner. Here's a gimmick you'll get tired of after about 50 pages. But these things weren't meant to be read like a novel, so it's not Ring's fault.

Lizard Music by Daniel Manus Pinkwater. It's no Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, but this is a good one. It's best before the lizards show up.

Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours by Richard Bak. Bak makes a couple of important points: 1) Cobb's racism was considered excessive by his contemporaries, but not to the point that it's the only thing they ever talked about, and 2) dude had plenty going against him even without it. He also says that Al Stump made all that stuff up -- the stuff they made the Tommy Lee Jones movie out of. Like, he never actually murdered anyone. Who knows? Not even the guy Ty Cobb didn't murder could answer these questions.

The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges. You'd think that if you put Borges, ancient writers who got everything wrong but in interesting ways, and weird creatures together, you'd have a winner. But that's what the 2002 Mets thought when they added Mo Vaughn and Robby Alomar. The results here are similar.

Spalding's World Tour by Mark Lamster. I'm a sucker for dudes with handlebar moustaches and heavy, high-collared uniforms spelling base ball like it's two words, but this was kind of flat. Unfortunately, Spalding and company going on a trip around the world is somewhat less interesting than what was happening in the States at the time. "And then they went here, and Monty Ward hit a triple, and the local newspaper said blah blah blah . . ." Meanwhile, the owners were spending their winter shivving the players right in the back, prompting the eventual creation of the Players League. Which is more interesting than the fact that Cap Anson wasn't good at cricket.

Scott Wolf and Ina Garten Should Feel Pretty Bad About This, Too

I've been taking my baseball where I can get it lately, and that trend continued on Saturday when I ventured on the University of Maryland campus to watch the Terrapins take on the George Washington Colonials.

It was a good time, and I recommend it. Five bucks gets you into Shipley Field, a charming venue that can seat 2500 on plastic bench thingies. And you can win that back just by catching a foul ball, which can be exchanged for "a prize." The fan in front of me who performed that feat chose to keep his, but that's probably a five dollar value as well.

I had the pleasure of watching the Terps complete a three game sweep of the hated Colonials, coming back from a four run deficit to take the afternooncap of a weather-necessitated double-header. Frankly, anyone who went to George Washington -- even Mike O'Connor and L. Ron Hubbard -- should be disappointed in if not ashamed at the poor showing of their 0-6 team. They should also fear the turtle.

So if you can't wait for real baseball to start, consider a trip to College Park. There's free parking a short walk from the park, you can use the bathroom in the student union, and if you squint a little bit, they even look like the Nats. Lafayette comes to town next weekend, and I'll see you there! Just don't boo anyone, because you're probably sitting within earshot of about half a dozen of his closest relatives.

Weird coincidence update: I wasn't the only one there, either. This is just like when me and Harper were at the same game in Pittsburgh.

Book Review!

The Pitch That Killed by Mike Sowell is the story of the only major league pitch that ever literally killed somebody, that thrown by Yankees submariner Carl Mays to Indians shortstop Ray Chapman on August 16, 1920. I liked it. A lot. The book, I mean, not the pitch.

Sowell was either lucky or perspicacious in his selection of a topic to write a book about, because the tale lends itself to entertaining anecdotes, historical information valuable to readers who were born 70 or so years after the incident, and some scary stuff. Sowell covers it all in 93 compact chapters of clear, matter-of-fact prose.

Entertaining anecdote: 1920 was Babe Ruth's first year with the Yankees and the year in which he smashed his own home run record with 54. Urban Shocker, then of the Browns and later Ruth's teammate, used some psychological warfare on Ruth: when the Babe came to the plate, Shocker motioned for his outfielders to come in. Ruth, furious, swung and missed at the first pitch, whereupon Shocker brought the defenders in even closer. Another swing, another miss, another step towards the infield for the outfielders. Ruth swung at strike three.

Valuable historical information: Chapman's death was actually the decisive event in a running battle between the leagues and their umpires on the one hand and the club owners and pitchers on the other over baseballs. The leagues had been pushing for heavily-used baseball to be removed from play, while the owners chafed at the expense ($2.50 each, which seems like a lot for 1920) and the pitchers complained that clean balls were too hard to make break and too easy to hit. The pendulum had just swung in the owners' direction when Chapman was hit by scuffed up, brownish baseball (thrown off the field afterwards and lost to history), guaranteeing that all future hitters would have fresh, clean baseballs on which to tee off.

Scary stuff: Sowell gives us a preview of the Chapman beaning and shows us what can happen when baseball meets skull by relating the story of Chick Fewster. A Yankees infielder, he was at bat in an exhibition game against Brooklyn before the 1920 season when a Fred Pfeffer curveball hit him just above his ear. Fewster collapsed, twitched for a while, and didn't come to for ten minutes. When he did wake up -- and this is the really terrifying part -- he starting losing his vocabulary while talked to his teammates. Eventually he was down to two words, and he was unable to say or write anything else. Fortunately, Frewster recovered and actually wound up having a big league career.

The Pitch That Killed ranges widely, but its core are the stories of Mays and Chapman, and it's hard to imagine two more different men. Mays was a sullen loner, almost universally disliked by reporters, teammates, management, and basically every one else -- when his house burned down, he figured someone who knew him did it. He had a reputation for throwing at batters and for not always putting forth his best effort when he was annoyed with his situation. He petulanty left the Red Sox, demanded to be traded, and almost tore apart the American League when the Yankees violated Ban Johnson's injunction against dealing with him. Chapman, on the other hand, was adored by his team and city, and it seems to have been real affection, not an after the fact halo effect. This fact makes the chapters about Mays far more interesting, but the writing is so brisk that nothing drags.

Chapman's death occurred in interesting times, and TPTK takes its time in getting to its climax, allowing the reader the leisure to enjoy the scenery. Babe Ruth was at his legendary best; carousing, attempting a movie career, getting into almost-fatal car crashes. The White Sox spent much of the season battling it out with Cleveland and New York, but with Chicago in second place and heading into Cleveland for a vital series, the Black Sox scandal broke, and the reigning AL champs limped to the finish line with eight players under suspension. During the World Series, which Cleveland won against Brooklyn, Dodgers pitcher Rube Marquard earned his nickname by getting arrested for scalping tickets. These kinds of stories add color to the basic narrative, and the book is full of them.

In covering Chapman's death and its effects on the people around him, Sowell seemingly takes his cue from the box score of the game, a picture of which is included. A laconic note -- "Hit by pitched ball - By Mays (Chapman)" -- is the only record the box score makes of the incident. Sowell is not quite that reserved, but the book's lack of purple prose actually helps the reader understand the strain under which Chapman's friends operated.

Take, for instance, Tris Speaker, the Indians' manager and centerfielder. Speaker appears throughout TPTK, and at every turn is shown to be a sober-minded leader who has earned the respect of his peers as much through his skills as a manager as through his exploits as a player. Sowell relates a number of incidents Speaker is involved in after Chapman's death: he doesn't attend the shortstop's funeral, possibly owing to a nervous breakdown. A fight -- an actual physical fight -- erupts between Speaker, a Mason and a Protestant, and two of his Catholic players over Chapman's memorial service, perhaps further explaining Tris' absence. Shortly afterwards, Speaker, barely playing and playing badly when he does put himself in the lineup, uncharacteristically blows up at an umpire, who (to his credit) lets him. The reader, instead of being beaten over the head with pathos, is allowed to figure out for himself what Chapman and his death meant to those around him.

One final note: after the Indians' triumph in the 1920 Series, TPTK follows the history of the story's leading figures. The most interesting part of this comes when Col. Tillighast Huston, co-owner of the Yankees, gets drunk. He blurts to a sportswriter, "I wanted to tell you that some of our pitchers threw World Series games on us in both 1921 and 1922." Specifically, Carl Mays and "Bullet" Joe Bush were thought to the be the culprits, and a concerned citizen told a reporter that Mays let the Giants score three runs in the eighth inning of game three of the 1921 Series after a bribe had been given to his wife, who was sitting in the stands and who signaled her receipt of the payoff by wiping her face with a handkerchief.

My immediate reaction was to dismiss these claims, but that's not based on anything other than that I'd never heard them before. Whether or not the Yankees had two championships stolen from them by their own players, quite a few people thought they did. Besides Huston, Brooklyn manager Wilbert Robinson gave some kind of drunken agreement. Miller Huggins went to his grave thinking he'd been cheated, saying just before he died that any of his former charges could expect help from him if they were in financial trouble, but "I made only two exceptions--Carl Mays and Joe Bush. If they were in the gutter, I'd kick them!"

It's likely too late to establish guilt in this case, but the fact that there were rumors swirling about a matter this important is tantalizing. Someone -- someone without a strict dedication to the truth or any kind of scuples about impugning the dead -- could write a secret history of baseball, coming up with a litany of scandals that (and I'm just brainstorming here) Kennesaw Mountain Landis demanded swept under the rug for the good of baseball. Seriously, you'd make a mint. They'd give Tom Hanks a terrible haircut and make a movie.

But I digress, and now it's time to sum up. The Pitch That Killed is very good, and you should read it. Maybe I'll let you borrow it, but I will be re-reading it, so get it back to me, alright?

Weird Coincidence Update: One year ago almost to the day, a blogger named Ryan wrote a review of The Pitch That Killed.

La Pared, Da Meat Hook

I'm late in getting to the Ron Belliard signing, but I can only echo the prevailing reaction: approval followed by puzzlement. Belliard's a solid player, not old, not injured, and coming off a year in which he won a World Series ring and pocketed four million bucks. He just signed on to ride the bench for the worst team in baseball, all for a massive pay cut. He's going through some legal problems at the moment, but it doesn't sound serious enough to warrant this kind of downgrade. I don't know how they did it. Maybe Jim Bowden's personal charm.

Belliard doesn't even have to be as good as he is to be better than Cristian Guzman. At this point, our best lineup would feature Felipe Lopez at short, Belliard at second, and Guzman on the DL. There are other factors, though. Guzman is our second highest-paid player. He's the biggest free agent signing in Washington Nationals history. He needs to play in order to bail Bodes out of looking utterly incompetent, and he will until it becomes achingly clear that he's too bad to be out there every day or until Apollo, god of medicine and sudden death in men, steps in and takes care of this for us.

I don't root for anyone -- even Mets -- to get injured, but if Guzman's shoulder isn't all better, it solves some problems. Lopez is switching from short to second to clear room for him, and there's no guarantee that it's going to go smoothly. With Bellliard in the lineup, the number of automatic outs is reduced from three (Logan, Guzman, pitcher) to two. Less than that, actually, given that our starters aren't likely to last long enough to get an at-bat most games.

But if Guzman is fine, as his MRI indicates, he can at least serve as a reminder of what Bowden is capable of. If you ever feel yourself getting a little too happy about the guy, the $4 million worth of chubby, .200-hitting suck standing in the infield will bring you back down to earth.

Dmitri Young also signed up, and this is a less sure thing. Young doesn't bring anything with him but his bat, and that was in a steep decline when the Tigers cut him last year. Dmitri was dealing with some very serious personal problems, and the Nats are hoping for two things: that his problems are behind him, and that his performance will rebound as a result.

If Young regains form, he'll go a long way to filling the Nick Johnson-sized hole in the lineup, and he'd certainly be an asset on the bench or the trading block afterwards. But beyond any benefit to a baseball team, I'll mainly be rooting for Dmitri to put his life back together.

PS RONNIE!

One Third

There's been so much actual news over the last few days that my sarcastic aggregator over there on the right short circuited. I hope to have it up and humming away again soon, but in the meantime it's up to me to sift through all this stuff. It's going to take more than one post, and this blog's subtitle, which was intended as a goal for me as well as a warning for you, is becoming increasingly inaccurate. Well, the first part of it, anyway.

The biggest, worst news is the status of Nick Johnson. In September, Austin Kearns broke Nick's femur in what I'm still convinced was a negotiating ploy ("Say, that's a real nice third baseman you got there. It'd be a real shame if something happened to him"). Johnson walked into camp over the weekend sporting what some observers took to be a cocky new pimp strut, but what was soon revealed to be just a run-of-the-mill, busted femur limp. When will he be back? No one knows. Maybe June. Maybe never.

And that's unfortunate. For Johnson, of course, it's just the latest in an awful series of setbacks. Whatever force or entity it is that decides these things decided to give Nick tremendous talent along with the inability to use it. He's far from the first player to have a potentially great career shrivel thanks to injuries, but it's the first time I've seen it from this close up, and it's depressing.

This is a significant blow to the Nats, to the extent that a team that has no intention of competing can suffer one. With Soriano gone (and rich!), Johnson was easily the best hitter on the roster, and a quick look at our options tells us how hard he'll be to replace. Larry Broadway? I'm rooting for him, but when Nick Johnson was his age he'd was already been in the majors -- well, on the major league DL -- for years. The Nats just picked up Dmitri Young, which I like, but no one wants to see him as the everyday first baseman. Travis Lee has an advantage over Nick in the looks department, but that's the extent of it.

A week ago, the Nationals looked like two-thirds of a pretty good team. Yeah, there was close to literally no starting pitching, but the bullpens looks good, and the lineup had real potential. They were like a novel with believable characters, a gripping plot, but no pictures. But now, the novel that is the Nats has lost its best character -- the wise-cracking robot who plays first base -- and there's that much less to recommend it. And someone, by the way, needs to write that novel.

I Can't Sniff My Soul!

So Thom Loverro maybe did but probably didn't take me up on my offer to get a nice blogfight going to kick off the Washington Times' new blog. We, those of us who can't "get a sniff of the greatness that was Frank Robinson," whatever the hell that means, can't criticize Frank because he's baseball royalty. Which is kind of funny, because Thommy spends the first half of the post basically talking about what a pain in the ass Frank's been. He held a grudge against the Reds for longer than I've been alive and is working on a similarly lengthy sulk with the Orioles. But no, he still deserves whatever job he wants AND is immune from criticism because, hey, 586 homers is about 586 more than any of us ever hit. Sniff the greatness!

Needham's response is entirely adequate, covering the absurdity of Loverro's baseball royalty=immunity from criticism position, the shallowness of his evaluation of Frank as a manager, and the bizarreness of Thom's theologically-based evaluation of Frank's detractors. That was my favorite part: Loverro falls into the trap of the hack sports columnist and can't help but tack a snappy one-line paragraph. The problem, though, is that he's really angry or (almost certainly) kind of drunk, and it comes out just weird and inappropriate.

So if you feel the need to ridicule Frank Robinson, you might want to check your soul. It's missing.

Oh yeah? Well, you . . . wait a minute, my soul? I guess I'm glad he didn't call me a child molester or something, but come on, man. We're talking about baseball here.

This isn't the first time Loverro's taken offense at internet-types questioning Robinson. Over a year ago, he presented a parody of bloggers that was as inapt as it was unfunny.

We've tried to stay in touch with what our fans want, and have closely monitored the various Web sites devoted to the Nationals -- natsfanswithnolife.com, ilovetheo.com -- and have concluded that they don't like the way Frank handles pitchers in the eighth inning with runners on first and second and two outs. So we're going to chose to ignore Frank's 52 years in baseball -- 2,808 games as a Hall of Fame player and 15 seasons as major league manager, including just one losing season during the last four years managing a team made up of players from the Land of Misfit Toys -- and fire him.

Hah hah! That's exactly what we sound like, all having no life and all! No souls, either!

To sum up, Thom Loverro is maybe an idiot, is probably crazy, and therefore a welcome addition to the world of Nationals blogs. We'd better enjoy his time blogging, because I have a feeling that it won't be too long before his bosses tell him that he should probably cut it out.

The Pataphysics of Love

Love! Amore! Ove-lay! It's the most lovingest day of the year, or so I've been told, and so today I'm writing a mash to note to my beloved Washington Nationals. When I say "Nationals," I'm referring specifically to the 2007 edition. Nothing about how blogging about the Nats rescued me from a life full of free time or how me and my pappy, just off the boat from the Old Country, used to bond over Expos games at Alfred Jarry Park. I'm saving all that for my ruthlessly plagiarized, defiantly fictional memoirs. How do I love the Nats? Let me count the ways.

1. The Nationals play baseball. And I love baseball, ergo I love the Nats. It's the most romantic logic thingy ever. I'm fairly desperate at this point, which helps, and not just in baseball either. I watched as much of that Caribbean Series as I could, and that thing was awful.

2. The Nationals are going to be terrible. I'm kind of looking forward to that, both as a fan and as a blogger. Obviously, I'd like them to be good, but if they're not, they might as well set some records and give me something to write about. It'll be more fun following a 100-loss team like Washington than an 85-loss team like Baltimore. I'm also enjoying the unanimity: fans, journalists, Vegas, the front office -- no one's pretending we have a chance.

And beyond wins and losses, there things to look forward to. I can't think of any besides Zimmerman, but I'm all blissed out on chocolate and cupids and not thinking very clearly.

3. The Nationals are going to be on TV. This came close to ruining the season for me last year, and I'm pretty sure I saw more Nats content in September -- once I started getting MASN -- than I did the rest of the season combined. And now there's no Paciorek, so that's just a bonus.

4. The Nationals are a lot more likeable this year. I didn't like Frank Robinson. He was lousy at his job, didn't care, and acted as though baseball owed him a living. Tomo Ohka agrees with me on this, and he's a millionaire. I didn't like Jose Guillen, either. He was pretty good at his job except when he was tearing apart a clubhouse with some imagined grievance, backed up by the apologists he managed to attract to himself through a heady combination of personal charm and being good at sports. I lack both of those attributes, so this bothered me perhaps more than it should have.

And now they're both gone! The fact that I don't hate Manny Acta even though he's declared himself willing to fill out a lineup card featuring Nook Logan and Cristian Guzman is a testament to his charisma. Meanwhile, the corner outfielders stepping for Guillen don't seem to have any personality at all, an unmistakeable improvement.

5. The Nationals might not be terrible forever. As upset as I was about my favorite team being on TV maybe once a week, what really broke me last year was Jim Bowden's contract extension. I knew the Nats weren't much when they got here. I knew they were even less than that the second go-round. But I clung to the hope that once real ownership was installed, things would get better. I gave up on that once it seemed the new regime wasn't any more competent than the old.

But I was wrong. Since the Lerner/Kasten takeover, Bodes has been a downright good general manager. I may not agree with the parts of the Plan that involve the steadfast refusal to have any starting pitching, but I do -- for the first time ever -- have some confidence in the long-term outlook of this franchise. And that trumps all the other reasons I had.

Special thanks to the Acme Heartmaker for thematically appropriate artwork.

Hogsheads and Hectares and Drams

Spring Training! I say this every year, because every year Spring Training happens to fall within my three months/year blogging schedule: I hate Spring Training. The only thing worse than no news is meaningless news. Piles and reams and gallons and British thermal units of utterly content-free reports from sunny Florida. It gets worse every year. Or maybe I just get older and crankier every year. This time, at least, I'm going to do something about it. If you hate Spring Training like I hate Spring Training; if you don't feel like plowing through the preseason's fortieth article about some busted up, no hope pitcher who's going to anchor the rotation or about how Nook Logan's going to bunt his way to usefulness, look over to your right. I'll let you know if there's anything worth paying attention to. Most days there won't be, but if there is, I'll summarize it so you can take a quick look at it and get on with your day. I guarantee that the turn-around time on these stories will be no more than one month, so you won't have to worry about going anywhere else for your Nats news from Viera. Also from Viera: my new favorite roller derby team, the Space Coast Slashers. I'll keep you posted on them, too.

Blogging is like any other obscenely lucrative, personally fulfilling pastime: success breeds imitation. I started by ripping off defunct video game site Old Man Murray, lifting the editorial approach and several word-for-word jokes from it like a nice watch from a corpse. I was followed, of course, by innumerable imitators, each one adding something distinctive to the template. Timeliness, for example, or diligence or not being a jackass. But now the pros are moving in. Could it be that even as bloggers dream of doing the work of journalists (im in ur internetz, stealin ur jobz!!1!), journalists will prove once and for all just how useless we are?

We may be about to find out. Following the Post's Sports Bog establishing a niche as a sort of a local Deadspin except funny, the Washington Times -- the journalistic world's answer to the LA Clippers -- moves in on our territory with Nats Home Plate. There's already an opening day counter, mad links, a weather report, and a link to a chat with Mark Zuckerman that's due to start in negative eight hours. The blog -- Chatter, which is totally what I'd call a baseball-themed high-end fusion cuisine restaurant -- promises to feature contributions from the Times' all star roster of Nats covering guys, which, if nothing else, could prompt me to figure out who they are. So good luck with that, Times guys, and let me give you some advice: nothing gets the old web traffic going like a knock-down, drag-out, get-someone-fired blog fight, and I'm always up for it. Something to think about, you drooling morons. BRING IT!

Puppies, Kearns

My experience with the Puppy Bowl got off to a fantastic start. I tuned in late but just in time to see my personal favorite, the scrappy and gutty Border Terrier Spencer, plow right into overrated pretty boy Sonny. The violent collision, which ended with Spencer standing over the Puggle like he was Muhammed Ali, was hailed by the hideous animals at the Tailgate Puppy as the reply aired again and again.

The action unfolded as it always does -- which is to say, puppily -- though this year's game was marked by a certain lethargy on the part of some of the pups, no doubt afflicting real life puppy owners with amazement and envy. Harry Kalas' voiceovers lent a gravitas that is sorely lacking in modern major sporting events, too many of have their announcing ruined by manufactured enthusiasm, self-satisfaction, and Joe Buck.

So we all enjoyed the Puppy Bowl. But what's happened since is just a shame. I was pulling for Spencer, but it was obvious to any impartial observer that the Most Valuable Puppy was Viszla mix Larry.

ROBBED!

Larry was all over the field. He started fights, he sniffed butts, and he drank water. That's pretty much all there is to do in the Puppy Bowl, and he excelled all competition in each facet. At first, the MVP voting reflected this; Larry had a commanding lead, and with over 1.5 million (!) votes cast, he looked like he was on his way to joining such titans as Tommy Maddux and Jelani "The Sheriff" Janisse.

And yet when the winner was announced, it was Bomber the Samoyed. Bomber is a dog who not only looks like he was made out of the inside of a pillow, but performed like he was made out of the inside of a pillow. His Puppy Bowl highlight was lounging with one or two of his ridiculous littermates and watching while Larry carried all before him, and for that he wins the MVP.

Bomber: "Duhhhhh."

So what happened? Did Siberian hackers rig the vote to ensure that one of their would win? Did the shadowy organization known only as the "Samoyed Club of America" spread some of their bountiful dues money around? If I'm assuming the worst, it's only because Animal Planet is being suspiciously quiet about the results. While voting was going on, this page gave you the votes for each candidate as well as the number of total votes cast. Now there's only a terse paragraph congralutating the almost certainly fraudulent victor. They're just lucky that the Puppy Bowl is too damn cute to boycott.

Austin Kearns signed a contract extension. You probably already heard about this. $17.5 million gets us three more years of not having to worry about who our right fielder is. Or, a more familiar fear to Nats fans, three more years of not having to worry that our right fielder is going to impale someone on a bat.

I like it. It's a Jim Bowden deal of post-Kasten vintage, so of course I like it. That said, it's not something to get excited about. I've given myself a whole week, and by this point I've given up on feeling the kind of wide-eyed thrill I got after the Vinny Castilla for Brian Lawrence trade.

Is Kearns going to be a $5 million player in 2008? We'd better hope so. Is he going to be an $8 million player in 2009? Possibly. Maybe even probably, and you can bet it would take at least that much to keep him. Kearns isn't a star, and it's interesting that the two projections I bothered to look at have almost identical forecasts for him: identical batting average, identical on base percentage, only 5 points difference in slugging. And that projection is . . . well, it's alright. I'm not going to get too excited about a low 800s OPS from a corner outfielder, even if he is the defensive badass Kearns is reputed to be.

I certainly don't think this deal is worth talking about as an indication of the Nats' long-term approach. Kearns isn't a guy who's going to carry this team into the future. He's useful but not all star-level player who now has cost certainty added to the package, which, if anything, makes it easier to trade him. I would be surprised if his Washington tenure outlasted Cristian Guzman's.

You know what contract was rad? Nick Johnson's. Dude got straight-up ripped off. Now that was an extension to get excited about.

Rojas and Rojas

Anyone watching the Caribbean World Series? It's not good, exactly, but it is an occasion for happy reflection.

MASN has proven itself completely useless when it's not showing a baseball game, but it's showing baseball games in early February, and that's easily worth the two bucks a month my cable system pretended it had to charge me for it. It's even worth sitting through Anita Marks commercials -- you know, the ones where she awkwardly fields ground balls while some guy tells us how talented she is.

It's going to be a long year for Nationals fans, owing in large part to the general lousiness of the team on the field and of the field under the team. The Nats don't have any pitchers, and RFK is the ballpark equivalent of the Nats starting rotation. But look at the Dominican team: they're going to win the tournament, and they've got 40-something Luis Polonia at DH. The Expos gave up on Tony Batista years ago, but in the Caribbean World Series he's a force to be reckoned with, what with his home run power and old man gut and little skinny arms.

And as far as facilities, nothing makes you feel more grateful to be a Major League Baseball fan than realizing that the worst big league field puts to shame Roberto Clemente Walker Stadium's stained putt-putt green.

As I said, it's not good, but I'm still watching it every night. The Mexican team in their cartoon jerseys throwing the ball everywhere but where it's supposed to go is like a marionette parody of the real stuff, and that reminds us of both the quality of major league play and that the big leaguers are only about two months away from getting down to business. There are worse things to watch in February and nothing better to think about.

The Puppy Bowl Post

It's February, more or less, and that means it's time to talk about the only good thing to happen in this most wretched month, the Puppy Bowl.

My Puppy Bowl coverage the last two years, while without question the best in all the Natmosphere, has been amateurish at best. A few poorly thought-out mentions at the bottom of posts whining about somebody who apparently called himself "Royce Clayton" was all it got in this quarter. Still, it wasn't without reason that I considered Distinguished Senators to be the internet's leading Puppy Bowl blog.

This year I planned to take it to the next level. That plan didn't last long, though, as my request for a press pass to the Puppy Bowl was turned down. It turns out that not only was the thing filmed weeks ago (which explains why there are already highlights up), but that the stadium doesn't even have a press box. So I figure, fine, at least I can score myself an exclusive interview with . . . I don't know, the Mayor of the Puppy Bowl or whatever. Or at least with one of those referees who has to clean up the puppy fouls using quality Bissell brand cleaning tools. But no, I was turned down again. Maybe it's because this is a baseball blog with the wrong name on it. Maybe it's because the front page, as it stands now, is about 40% me yelling at some dude on the internet.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad Animal Planet denied me insider access. I relish my outsider status, and I can't be compromised. I'm as big a Puppy Bowl fan as anyone, but I'm not afraid to use this forum to bring attention to the obviously destructive "Plan" Animal Planet is employing with this franchise. Some may call me negative, but as far as I'm concerned all those Puppy Bowl fanboys can save their blind adulation for the idiots at the Puppy Bowl Tailgate Party (to which I was not invited).

The Animal Planet front office is making it harder and harder to take the Puppy Bowl seriously as an athletic contest. The first year, it was all about the game itself. No interruptions, just puppies and soothing acoustic guitar music. Puppy Bowl II saw the focus shifted away from the athletes with the addition of a kitten halftime show. This year's installment moves further in the direction of frivolity; the halftime show is still there along with the previously mentioned Tailgate Party. They might as well have Scooter the talking baseball explaining what a puppy is.

A more serious issue is this: I hacked into Animal Planet's computers and discovered that they're allowing voting for the PBMVP days before the event has aired! This award just lost any credibility it ever had -- it might as well be the Gold Glove.

I also have issues with the participants. Look at Bess, a "13 week-old" competitor.

Puppy? Ha! Bess' breed is listed as "All American," but I'm thinking she's a Danny Almonte Pointer, if you get my drift. If AP is going to allow obvious ringers like Bess in the Stadium, why bother playing the game? A brave, intense puppy like Larry can match anyone in heart and determination, but the physical disadvantage is just too great.

Above: Viszla mix Larry shows the Eye of the Tiger

All these problems aside, there's still no greater event than the Puppy Bowl, even if you only watch it for the commercials. I'll be there with my beer hat and air horn cheering on Spencer, the Bowl's first ever Border Terrier.

Above: Spencer, well up on leg

I grew up with a Border and know firsthand their tenacity. They combine the terrier's inherent toughness and irritability with a long-legged athleticism that sets them apart from stumpy cousins. Border Terriers were bred to be able to go into holes and kill various smaller mammals while still being able to keep up with the horses carrying the effete Englishmen in their little red suits. That's a skill set that I think will translate well to the Puppy Bowl. Unless, of course, the powers that be have decided that a scrapper like Spencer isn't good enough for the ratings and hand the thing to Sonny, who looks like he came off a velvet painting.

Above: Sonny. Awwww.

The Puppy Bowl airs on Sunday, February 4, 3-6 p.m. ET with encore presentations at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET only on Animal Planet.

I'm Talking About Baseball and I Care!

For purposes of comparison, Jim Bowden's reaction to catching heat from teh intranets, via Nats 320:

“That’s what makes those websites so much fun, because of people like that--its like talk radio. They are not suppose to like anything you do. They are suppose to show both sides, but, they want to stir it up, so you will respond to it. They want you to get mad. They want to have fun. Its like wrestling, professional wrestling. Its not a REAL WRESTLING MATCH, ITS AN ACT, ITS DRAMA, ITS FUN TO BE WITH. Its really great. The good thing is—They are all talking about baseball, AND THEY CARE!!. Whether someone is ripping you or praising you, THEY CARE, and that’s what its all about. WE WANT EVERYONE IN WASHINGTON TO CARE ABOUT THE NATIONALS!!"

You have the Distinguished Senators guarantee that I'm being entirely non-sarcastic for the duration of this post except for the computer-hacking part: AWESOME! Seriously, this is the best possible reaction a guy in Bowden's situation could have. Bodes has taken a lot of crap over the years (Oh, sweet merciful crap, it's actually been years!), and I'd certainly argue that he deserved most of it. Does he get upset about it? NO! Does he revel in it? YES! Does he compare it to rasslin'? HELL YEAH HE DOES! No doubt my warmening to Bowden's actual work at managing generally is contributing to my appreciation of this sentiment, but still. Awesome. He's not even holding a grudge over the time I hacked into his computer and said he Googled himself.

Now to an issue that, while seemingly unimportant, elicits such strong reactions from fans that its utter unimportance just kind of makes everyone look silly: nicknames. Ryan Zimmerman is the only man on the 2007 Nationals who matters, so of course it's vital that he gets an appropriate moniker; more than one, if possible. I covered this ages ago, at the genesis of the widely reviled "Dutch" movement.

I'm man enough to admit that Dutch is dead, but there's another candidate. The Washington Post's Sports Bog (I guess I missed the explanation for the name, but I'm sure it's hella clever) is one of those things -- like Nats 320 -- that popped up while I was in hiding writing my Rickey musical. It (once again, like Nats 320) is a completely rad addition to the blogroll and, by extension, your daily surfing, which I trust consists of every site I have linked over there, clicked in order of alphabet within category. It's January, and you should be using the Bog at the very least to keep track of the coverage of Gilbert Arenas, who's like Livan with (a little) more talent and no language barrier. Seriously, I love that guy.

Anyway, the Bog posits a new nickname for Zimmerman: the RZA. And I'm all like, "Hell yeah the RZA!" Then I launch into my favorite RZA verse, which can be found on "Reunited," the first song on the Wu-Tang Clan's triumphant second album, Wu-Tang Forever. I quote:

The Riddla
Funny bone tickla
Freak Caligula
Bigger dick sex enigma
Pistil fertilize your stigma

Imagine that over the speakers as Zimmerman strides to the plate! And the great part is that, by giving him this one nickname, we're actually giving him about twenty. The RZA -- the rapper, I mean -- has, as does any member in good standing of the Wu-Tang Clan, a shocking number of reserve appellations: variations on his original name, Five Percent Nation weirdness, and what have you. Tired of calling him (Zimmerman this time) RZA? How about Bobby Digital -- after all, his loving is Digi. Perhaps Zimm has brough the Nats back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit -- he's the RZArecta! Hell, I'm tempted to start calling Nick Johnson the Method Man (his method at the plate is to wait for a good pitch!) just so I can also call him the Ticallion Stallion or Johnny Blaze or the Pantyraider. The starting lineup for you Washington Nationals . . .

The RZA
The GZA
Ol' Dirty Bastard
Inspector Deck
Raekwon the Chef
U-God
The Ghostface Killa and . . .
The Method Man

We could do worse.

I Take Exception

A warning to the casual reader: the following post is really inside baseball. Well, not in the literal sense, because that would be fine and require no warning. It's a lot of blog drama, and I understand if you're not interested.

Farid at Beltway Boys just put up his interview with Bill Ladson, the Nats beat reporter for MLB.com. The neat part is that Ladson hates me, along with several other worthy bloggers. That's fine. I've come to terms with it. What I haven't yet come to terms with, though, is Farid's sycophantic attitude, his willingness to take Ladson' preposterous claims at face value, and his genuinely insulting generalizations about "bloggers."

Bloggers sometimes assume that we can write what we want with impunity because the only people that read our work are fellow fans who understand they are reading subjective rants, some of which we didn't believe ourselves when we wrote it.

Examples please. And not just examples from your writings, Farid. You're calling out "bloggers" here. I'm a blogger, and I assume that I can write with impunity because I'm protected by the First Amendment. And since Farid understands the inner motivations of bloggers, perhaps he can show me the stuff I didn't believe myself when I wrote it.

I'll summarize the next bit: "Ladson whined about some stuff and I agreed with him." Then:

I agreed that this wasn't good reporting - that is - printing assumptions as fact.

Like the assumption that we Nats bloggers make stuff up because we don't think Bill Ladson's reading? Seriously not good reporting.

Then we take a long break from the juicy stuff. There are actually some interesting questions and some interesting answers in the middle here. You might want to read the whole thing, even though it's gigantic.

Then Ladson resumes bitching, and Farid resumes enabling.

I assumed that a proficient writer like Bill Ladson wouldn't waste his time reading what hack-reporters like us wrote about the team.

You're doing it again, man. If you want to call yourself a "hack-reporter," fine. But keep your insults and your random hyphens away from me. Ladson:

"I do have a problem with some of the bloggers who act like they're in the know, in the locker room, and act like they know everything."

Huh. I had an anonymous commenter accuse me of that exact thing a while ago. I'm sure it's a coincidence. It was nonsense then and it's nonsense now.

I can't stand that fact that they get personal.

You know what's even worse than that? Anonymous commenters who get personal. But we could be talking about completely different things here, as Ladson has an idiosyncratic definition of "personal." Here's how I look at it, and tell me if you disagree.

• Non-personal: "Bill Ladson's methods of evaluating players are incorrect."
• Personal: "Bill Ladson's methods of evaluating players are incorrect and he is a bad person."

You see the difference, right? Ladson seems to consider a personal attack anything that contains the word "Ladson" and is not prefaced by email to him. Farid again:

The problem here is that bloggers are like journalists only in that we write words that end up being published somewhere.

Yeah, the free exchange of ideas is a real bitch. Why can't the government do something about this?

Unlike the mainstream media (at least those who are honest), we don't have set of rules to follow, we don't have an editor (other than our own common sense) to say, "Dude, that's going too far."

Right. And my common sense is doing a fine job. I don't need yours.

Now, I'm not talking specifically about any blog, but in general, we could do a much better job of being fair to those we write about.

You should start talking specifically about any blog, because if you don't I'll continue to assume I'm included as a target of all this helpful advice.

To us, talking bad about Ladson or Bowden or Kasten is like talking badly about our sister when she's in the other room. They aren't listening, so it won't hurt them.

There's that first person plural pronoun again. Don't tell me what talking bad about any of these guys is like, especially when your simile is so damn weird. I know Ladson reads my blog. I don't care if Bowden or Kasten does. I say the things I say because I belive them and because I can back them up, not because I think I can get approving howls from all the other unscrupulous lying bloggers.

I learned that bloggers have a responsibility to be fair to those they write about.

You just now learned that? What were you doing before?

Oh sure, we can haggle all we want about the "who's" and "what's" and "when's" of baseball, but when it comes to reporting, it needs to be fair and it needs to be accurate.

Fine. Whatever. I'm not a reporter. If I want a reporter, I'll go to Barry Svrluga.

It's easy to take a swipe at those in the public eye, guys like Ladson and Bowden and Kasten. To us, these are nameless, faceless men, which makes it much easier to be less than fair when writing about them.

If they were nameless and faceless, neither I nor anyone else would have any idea who I was making fun of. And as far as being fair, it's not like Bowden didn't sign Cristian Guzman. Or wear tracksuits. Or give fistbumps.

The difference, however, is that they are professionals, and this is how they earn their living. We can disagree with them all we want, and we can even be forceful in how we disagree.

But getting personal? Nah. That's just no good.

Since when does being a professional make you immune to criticism? You ever criticize the President? Well HOW DARE YOU?! He does that for a living.

The obvious response is that Farid isn't talking about any criticism, just the personal stuff. But given Ladson's ridiculously self-serving idea of what a personal attack is and Farid's sycophantic willingness to go along with it, it's clear what's meant. You agree with Bill Ladson, dammit, because he knows better than you.

And if that's going to be your attitude, you might as well quit. Farid is exhorting bloggers to stop providing an alternative to the baseball media and start providing fan sites, and I'm grateful beyond belief that the nature of blogging dictates that no one -- not Farid, not Ladson, not anyone -- has any authority over me or my writing.

Related Reading. The Ladson interview and my response to it have caused quite a stir in the sleepy winter Natmosphere.

• Banks of the Anacostia, Capitol Punishment, and Oleanders have difficulty accepting Ladson's mystical theories of player evaluation.
• Econo then thinks about it for a while and gently suggests that Farid's starstruck interactions with a superstar like Ladson may have led him to excess. Plus he yells at Boz, which is always fun.
• Dave at the Triple Play muses, reflects, then reflects musingly on musing reflections. I can't help but picture him strolling along a lake on a crisp autumn evening.
  

Remind Me To Tell You About the Womackiad Someday

My most enduring memory of Tony Womack isn't a happy one, but it is tinged with a certain grudging respect. Matt Morris -- and keep in mind that here we're talking about pre-stoner beard/underrated ace/my favorite player Matt Morris as opposed to the hairy, crappy version that you kids today are used to -- lost his shot at some kind of minor immortality when Tony Womack won the 2001 Division Series for the Diamondbacks with a single in the last half of the last inning of the last game. Maybe you remember it. If you knew me personally at the time, maybe you remember me swearing and crying and drinking until the hurt was gone.

I relate this story to illustrate the real danger of this move: Tony Womack is kind of famous; more famous, at any rate, than anyone he's competing with, and that makes minor league contract the Nats gave him dangerous. He's a three-time stolen base champion, a playoff hero, Time's 2006 Person of the Year, and a veteran presence, and those are the kinds of things lousy managers fall for when they're filling out the lineup card. Womack is here as a trial for Manny Acta, the second in what will no doubt be a long string of them.

Remember Jeffrey Hammonds? His resume was similar to Womack's: hoary, veteran presence, Time's 2006 Person of the Year. In 2005 he was a National, and he couldn't do anything. He never could pitch, so I guess it's not right to hold that against him, but he couldn't hit or run or field anymore either, and that's fair game. Yet Frank Robinson played him, even started him. Why? Well, Frank hated (hates, probably) Ryan Church like he's a Japanese pitcher. Plus, you know, you can't let veterans sit on the bench and not play. It's not fair to them.

Frank failed the Temptation of the Awful Veteran, leaving his final record in the Manager's Challenge at 2-117, the 2 being his handling of Jose Guillen and the Brendan Donnelly Incident, which Angels fans are still crying about to this day (cf. Jim Edmonds). Acta is so far 0-1, having taken the easy but wrong path in the Temptation of the Fast but Terrible Centerfielder. He perhaps deserves some slack here, though; it can't be easy for a new hire to resist the organizational pressure that has for years been strangling Ryan Church's career like an anaconda. This, though, is the real test. There is no excuse for playing Tony Womack.

And that's the only interesting thing about the Womack situation. Worst case: he plays all the time, sucks, and the Nats lose 101 games instead of 100. It's at least as likely that he won't even make the team and become another long-forgotten Spring Training footnote like Jared Sandberg or George Arias. But it will be an indication of whether Acta's merely a 500 grand-a-year stopgap or a guy who deserves to be running the team when all those investments in the farm system pay off.

In other Frank news, he got himself a job. So can we stop crying about this now? Do you feel better now that we can be sure he won't be selling matchsticks on a street corner to pay for his Lakers tickets? I mean really.

Programming Note: Man, do I feel pretentious for having a programming note. For all the people who care, I might as well be working on my Nobel Prize acceptance speech (it starts and ends with the word "Rickey"). Anyway, in case you're wondering, yes of course my return to blogging was inspired by Ray Smuckles' return to advice-giving. My plan is to post weekly, on Wednesday or Thursday. So expect things to be excessively long and slightly out of date. For an example, see above, starting with "My most enduring memory" and ending right about here.

Quarterly

Let me tell you, writing a musical about the life and times of Rickey Henderson is harder than you'd think. And getting financing for it is even harder than that. And getting Otis Nixon to star in it is even harder than that. So here I am doing this again.

Imagine my relief when, after several months hunched over a notepad stolen from my office trying to work the "tenure?! Rickey got 16, 17 years" gag into the libretto, I looked around and realized that the Nationals are almost identical to when I last saw them. There's really not that much to cover, so I'm not trying very hard. Because the last time I tried, Otis Nixon laughed in my face.

RATTY GOATEE OUT, PERM IN
Well, they fired Paciorek. I already miss him, his polo shirts, and his wildly popular trademark catchphrase ("Blargh!"). I also miss the sliver of faith in humanity that I lost when I perused fan reaction to his eminently reasonable sacking. The two things I learned: 1) Paciorek is the greatest color man that ever lived, and 2) There is no definitive way to spell "Wimpy." Or "Whimpie." Or "Whimpeey."

Now we've got Hall of Famer Don Sutton, whose chief claim to fame is as the background to countless TBS-fueled weekend afternoon naps. That suits me just fine, even though the mention of Buck Martinez -- a silver-haired, white-suited, kazoo-voiced god among men -- got my hopes embarrassingly high.

CRANKY OLD MAN OUT, CHIPPER YOUNG MAN IN
They fired Frank Robinson so long ago that I actually blogged about it. There's been some recent drama, what with Frank claiming he was promised one of those nice sinecures where he puts on a cap, shuffles onto the field, and waves to the rubes a couple times a year only to have it snatched from him by one or another lying piece of crap in the front office. Whatever. Don't care. Frank stole enough money napping in the dugout while getting paid to manage the Expos that I don't consider it an injustice that he'll be doing his whining about these players nowadays without the official backing of a major league franchise.

But enough of the Ghost of Lousy Seasons Past, and on to the Ghost of Lousy Seasons Present, Mr. Manny Acta! Some months ago I compiled in my noodle a list of things I was looking for in a new manager. I wanted a guy who 1) wouldn't cost a lot of money B) wouldn't be a bigger target for SportsCenter mentions than his players and III) would make sure Ryan Church got 500 at bats. I'm pretty sure he fulfills my first condition, and I know he's good for the second, but we're off to a rough start with number III. Nook Logan being named starting center fielder shows just how little things have changed with this team. My only wish is that Logan were from an exotic foreign country so that I could make an hilarious joke about how his name is the equivalent in whatever language it is they speak over there to Brandon Watson. As it is, I'm stuck with this.

CRIPPLED SECOND BASEMAN OUT, CRIPPLED AUSTRALIAN IN
This is tough for me. I was bagging on Jim Bowden before he was hired, and I sure didn't stop after he got here. He made it easy for me, too -- the Cristian Guzman signing alone is enough material for one of those one-note Fire [Sports Figure] blogs that Deadspin finds so amusing. But damned if he hasn't been on a roll lately. Remember when he ripped off the Reds so bad that their GM went crazy and started complaining that Freemasons were beaming mind control rays into his head? Or maybe that Gary Majewski was all torn up in the pitchological areas of the body. One of those. So, we won that one, and then he went and screwed Seattle so bad they almost had to move to Milwaukee again. I'm amazed that we managed to get anything for Jose Vidro plus Jose Vidro's bloated "what the hell we're about to get contracted anyway" salary. And we didn't get just anything; we got Chris Snelling, the Australian Ellis Burks. Plus some other guy. I'm not doing a lot of research here.

So what happened? Has Bodes, after 12 years or whatever on the job, gotten better? Or is it what I like to call the "Bowden's A Pimp. He Never Could've Outfought Bavasi" theory, along with the "But I Didn't Know Until This Day That It Was Kasten All Along" Addendum? Which is to say, Stan Kasten is actually running things and laying all these GMs out with x's where their eyes should be.

I certainly don't know. On the one hand, it's a lot easier to believe that someone associated with Bobby Cox and double-digit divison titles is competent rather than someone associated with tracksuits and Bob Boone. But on the other hand, the Lerner/Kasten administration has been so far marked by a certain . . . let's say thriftiness. Other than for laffs, why would they keep a well-compensated buffoon on the payroll? It's not like Kasten's afraid of the spotlight -- if he's willing to go on the John Thompson Show and be called a racist, I can't imagine he's nervous about facing Bill Ladson's soft tosses.

So I have to assume they're keeping Bowden around for some reason, and I further assume that that reason something to do with generally managing. Which leads uncomfortably to the assumption that Bodes is doing some good things. Not all good things, of course. The Nats starting rotation, as it stands today, is five reliable pitchers short of "solid," and the ¡Livan! trade is looking more and more like the result of a pretty severe misappraisal of resources. Like selling both your kidneys because you're pretty sure Mike O'Connor can filter the waste out of your bloodstream for a whole season. Nonetheless, it's no longer clear that Jim Bowden is the unadulterated force for crappiness he once was.

For the moment, therefore, I'm promoting Jim Bowden: having defeated Krivsky and Bavasi in single combat, he's now officially the best of the bad GMs. Like being the best Nats shortstop or cleverest celebrity gossip blog or the 2006 National League champions, it's not a huge accomplishment, but it's something, and there's plenty of room for advancement. I'm just trying to make sure I don't wind up like the guy who wrote this Hardball Times column, which stated that "It's too early to judge Jim Bowden's offseason, but it would appear that the last smart thing he's done was the midseason trade for Lopez and Kearns" the day before Bowden did something very smart. It is now the official position of Distinguished Senators that it actually is possible to underestimate Jim Bowden.

Stay tuned starting in April for my next quarterly update, when I'll discuss why it took them so long to bench Nook.