Monkey Business

Drew Storen's 2015 has been a reminder to call no man happy until he is dead.

Everything was coming up Storen for the first half of the season. He had a pile of saves and a minuscule ERA. His team was cruising to a division title, which would afford him the opportunity to get the Playoff Monkey off his back.

HOW YA GONNA PITCH TO KOZMA, DREW?

After that, he could look forward to a nice raise in arbitration, another pile of saves, and then a big fat proven closer free agent contract.

But Fate or Whatever had other things in mind. Nemesis struck in the form of provener closer Jonathan Papelbon, whom the Nationals acquired on July 28. The thinking - it was good thinking and I liked it - was that having two closers would be better than having one.

This thinking proved to be flawed, since it failed to account for Storen completely losing it and metaphorically gouging out his eyes with his mother's jewelry. He couldn't pitch anymore. His ERA went up by five, which is a lot. He walked everyone and had as much to do as anyone with the damn Mets slamming a door in the Nats' faces.

It all ended with Storen picking and losing a fight with some locker room equipment. Thumb broken, Storen will not pitch again this year, and we've probably seen the end of his Nats tenure.

The story evokes pity and fear. Storen has a tragic flaw - the fact that his self confidence is as fragile as fine china - but he's not a bad person. He didn't do anything wrong other than pitch badly, and he didn't want to do that.

Behold this Storen, who pitched pretty good and was a man most mighty; what setup man did not gaze with envy on his fortunes? Behold into what a stormy sea of dread trouble he has come.

Therefore, while our eyes wait to see the destined final day, we must call no man happy who plays for the Nats, until he has hit free agency, free from pain.

Spine

So, that's that. The Mets came back from a 7-1 deficit last night, ripped out the Nationals' spine, and strangled them with it. It was the final turning point of the season. The time for competing has ended; now it is time for recriminations.

I've made it clear how I feel about trying to impose a narrative on a baseball season, but I also understand how tempting it is. It's never been more tempting than last night. If this were a movie, the Nats' screen time would have ended yesterday. Big shootout, Mets win, Nats wind up falling into a lava pit or something.

But, while existence may be a computer simulation, it is definitely not a movie, and the season still has a few weeks to chug along before we can get on with our lives.

Which means the Nats are still in it! I mean, if you hadn't given up a couple weeks ago, why give up now? Momentum isn't real, no matter what that fig-loving fraud Isaac Newton tells you.

"Nah, they're done. According the principles of physics, I mean. #FireMatty."

The Nats could win tonight, Matt Williams could stop bunting, and Drew Storen could decide to stop it with the sulk-pitching.

Then they could win again and again, even as the Mets are destroyed from within by their own hubris and Scott Boras. It could happen. It's not much less likely than it was two weeks ago.

It's no comfort to me - I actually did give up a couple weeks ago. But I'm happy to humor the delusions of others.

I Don't Know. Whatever.

"Bryce Harper Calls Out Nationals Fans"! Can you believe it?

You shouldn't because he didn't. A journalist asked him a question about the ambiance at Nationals Park. He responded honestly, and that gave all the writers an opportunity to shriek and jump and down and get lots of clicks because of all the delicious outrage. So congratulations to everyone involved - you're all credits to your profession.

“I mean, they left in the seventh, so that’s pretty brutal. I don’t know. Whatever.”

Sounds pretty reasonable to me, and keep in mind that this was in response to a question. It's not like he called Mean Gene Okerlund over and started bellowing into his mic about fair-weather fans.

I particularly agree with the part where Harper said, "I don't know. Whatever." That's exactly right, because this whole thing is dumb. Are Nats fans not good at being fans? It's possible. But it doesn't matter.

Being a good fan has no moral dimension to it. "Good fan" and "good person" are not the same thing. They don't even overlap. If you want to leave the game in the seventh, go right ahead. Maybe you have something better to do. Maybe you're in right field melting into a sunburned puddle. The risk is that you will be looked down upon by people who think spending two hundred bucks on a jersey and being willing to overturn a car should the Nats win a World Series are indications of good character.

I can understand that Harper would prefer to play in front of an enthusiastic crowd. It's just that it doesn't matter. It's like Drew Storen's desire to close - we can't all get everything we want, and we can't concern ourselves with everything everyone else wants.

At the same time, it's silly to condemn Harper for stating a reasonable desire in such a mild, unassuming way. "What a punk!" cry the comments. And, yeah, Harper is a punk. It's just that this in no way a demonstration of that.

But all this is fiddling while Rome burns. The Nats blew it yesterday, as I'm sure you don't need me to tell you. Scherzer has been exhausted, and the bullpen's bad enough that, when combined with the acumen of Manager of the Year Matt Williams, there's no lead it can't blow.

Nero didn't really fiddle while Rome burned, they tell us. He performed a poem about the sack of Troy. I don't understand the objections to this. It was thematically appropriate, and what was he supposed to do? Run out there with a bucket?

The Natsiest

This is it, people. The final countdown. We're headed for Venus (Venus).

The Nationals just beat the ever-loving hell out of the Braves, and that's great. Curb-stomping the Braves is something I will never get tired of seeing. It hasn't been the hardest task lately, but when was the last time the Nats looked like a team that could do it? It might have been as long ago as June, when they actually did it.

So the Nats are heading into this series with the Mets in as good a shape as one could expect. The Mets, meanwhile, have become so Nats-like that I have to force myself not to like them. They just dropped two of three to the Marlins - that's something the Nats would do. They lost two games off their lead over the course of a weekend - sounds familiar. They're talking about shutting down one of their starters because of innings and ligaments and Scott Boras - well, it'd be nice for the Nats to have company when it comes to that kind of stupidity.

So we're hitting the Mets at their Natsiest. That's good, because they can send us to game over this very week if they get their crap together and the Nats regress to their second most recent state.

Europe Update: Europe actually put out an album this year. They're big in Sweden, I guess. Please enjoy the first single and title track, "War of Kings."

Knife Fights

See, here's why I don't get into knife fights.

Imagine you're in a knife fight. Your opponent is wearing his Chucks and high-water jeans, and you have your three-quarter sleeve white pimp jacket, as is customary.

But you're losing! You're all cut up, and there's so much blood on your knife that you can't keep a good grip on it.

Suddenly, the winning move occurs to you. I don't know what this would be since I don't get into knife fights, but maybe it's, like, a double reverse backhand knifestab preceded by saying, "HEY look over there!"

The problem is that you're in no condition to pull off this perfect move - you can't hold your knife and you're getting sleepy from blood loss (does that actually happen, or do I just get sleepy because giving blood is boring?). You figured it out, but too late.

The Nationals could be in a similar situation. Everything's coming together, as long as you define "everything" as "the batters."

• Ryan Zimmerman is . . . well, you can't say he's back to normal, because he's not this good. 7 homers, 28 RBI, and a 942 OPS in August. His September OPS is 2121.
• Jayson Werth is now batting leadoff, and in that position he's "slashing" 328/400/621. I'm skeptical that there's any causation there, but I'll take it. I mean, the man's paid his debt to society and maybe it's time to lay off him.
• Anthony Rendon's maybe coming around. The trend line is upwards, at any rate.
• Bryce Harper is walking more than Johnny Appleseed.

This is a different kind of good team than we expected, but it's looking pretty good regardless. It's the kind of team that can win a division.

But it's probably not the kind of team that can win a division in a month while spotting the Mets six games.

Knife Fight Bibliography:

• Borges, Jorge Luis. (1962) "The South." Ficciones  Trans. Anthony Bonner. New York: Grove Press.
• Herbert, Frank. (1965) Dune. Philadelphia, PA: Chilton Books.
• Payne, Anthony (producer). (1983) Beat It [video]. United States; GASP.

Meanwhile

I'm going to talk about the Orioles for a minute, since the only Nats news right now is about Bryce Harper's gluteus assimus, and this is a family-friendly space (but only recently - don't read the archives, kids).

I know most of you hate the O's, but I don't and neither does beloved mascot Professor Bacon. He likes them so much that sometimes he changes colors to Orioles orange and makes me call him Professor Old Baycon. He even squeals in a Hairspray accent.

"Feed me an apple from down'ere, hon."

Barry Svrluga wrote a really nifty piece in the Post about the O's playing out the string. The players, "displaying the kind of steadfast delusion only ballplayers can," are at least claiming they're still in it, but they're not.

And it's only going to get worse for Baltimore, since about half of these guys are free agents at the end of the season. It's too bad. I kinda like the O's, and I really like meaningful baseball programming on MASN.

A couple notes on our orange friends:

1. Ownership is still terrible. If you're in the AL East, this is the time to go for it. The Red Sox are lousy, and the Yankees are only pretty good. For the other denizens of the division, this is an opening. The Blue Jays realized this, so they upgraded in the offseason and then at the trade deadline acquired probably 10% of all the non-Nats players in baseball that I know the names of.

The Orioles, meanwhile, came off a 96 win season in a wide-open division and did . . . nothing. Well, not nothing. They got Travis Snyder, who, it turns out, didn't quite make up for losing Nelson Cruz and Nick Markakis.

It's bad enough that Peter Angelos is evil; he's cheap, too.

2. Buck Showalter is really good at his job. I mean, yeah, it didn't work so much this year, but getting last year's team to 96 wins is an argument for sainthood.

It wasn't that strong a team to begin with, and then a hundred things went wrong. Chris Davis was terrible and then suspended. Manny Machado played half a season, and Matt Wieters played, like, 15% of one. The closer couldn't close.

Yet somehow he was able to get this ragtag bunch of misfits to a division title. Here's a man who knew just when to use Delmon Young, who got an 877 OPS out of Alejandro De Aza and 930 from Steve Pearce. When he realized Tommy Hunter couldn't close, he booted him out of there and tried one who could.

It didn't last. Delmon Young turned back into Delmon Young, and the number 3 starters became number 5 starters. That doesn't take anything from 2014, though. It was a heck of a managerial performance. You could even call it masterful.

Rub Some Dirt On It

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

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

My question: What is the point of Matt Williams?

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

Does he make up for it in other ways?

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

This is the goal.

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

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

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

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

Slashes

Did anyone think to tell the Nationals that they were allowed to acquire players right up through yesterday? I meant to, but you know how it is. I had to read The Golden Bough to prepare for a 300-word blog post, so I never got around to it.

But yeah, just perusing the old MLB Trade Rumors here, I see that the Royals got themselves a Jonny Gomes. I quote:

Gomes has still slashed a productive .247/.412/.466 against opposing southpaws.

Isn't it terrible the things baseball makes you write? Look at what he "slashed" against "southpaws." I understand - you can only write "hit" and "left-hander" so many times before you get desperate for alternatives. "Second-sacker." "Senior circuit." It's gruesome.

Anyway, I wonder if Gomes would have been useful. More useful than the last time he was here, at least.

And here we find out that the Giants grabbed Alejandro De Aza. I wonder how much he slashed.

The free agent-to-be has slashed .292/.347/.484 over 178 plate appearances since that trade.

Good slashing.

As a left-handed outfielder whose greatest strength is defense, De Aza wouldn't have been the most useful thing for the Nats (although he might have saved that game last night if anyone had thought to get the immobile jailbird out of the left after they took the lead), but there are a couple things to recommend him.

1. If he came here and did well, that would be pretty embarrassing for the Orioles, who dropped him like he was Delmon Young. I know some of you are into embarrassing the O's.
2. He looks like Trinidad's own Trevor Sayers, the genius behind "Stamina Man," the song that starts playing in my head every time I think about Craig Stammen. In a roundabout way, De Aza could have filled the hole Stammen left in our hearts, if not the hole he left in our bullpen.

I wake up in the morning and I pray pray pray for an excuse to post this.

Finally, the Cubs acquired Austin Jackson, and here's something the Nats could have used. Thanks to a series of grandfatherly health issues, Denard Span will not be coming back. Maybe ever.

So we're back to Babyhead Taylor playing every day, and I'm still against that. Austin Jackson may not have a gaudy slash line - not even against portsiders in the junior circuit - but he's an alternative.

Plus his name is reversible. It works just as well as "Jackson Austin," and that gives you flexibility.

August 31 was the last time it made sense to grab the Nats by their labels and yell "DO SOMETHING." They didn't do something, so the most we can hope for in terms of reinforcements is Tyler Moore.

Keep the Dog Far Hence

Sir James George Frazer posited that in pre-historic fertility cults, a sacred king representing the sun was ritually murdered to ensure a good harvest. It seems like a pretty disruptive way to organize your government, and it's probably not true anyway. Regardless, you have to wonder how the doomed king felt about all of this. Did he know?

The Nationals are in St. Louis this week for a series that could turn into the kind of ritual sacrifice that got TS Eliot so excited back in the day. Everything's perfectly set up for it:

• The Nats are 5.5 back. 
• Time may be slowing down, but it is still moving ahead and, from the Nats' perspective, running out. 
• It's getting to be harvest time.
• The Nats are the reigning kings of the National League East and thus representative of the sun.
• The Cardinals are far, far better at baseball. 

It's the baseball equivalent of drugging the king, dressing him up like a stalk of wheat, and telling him to look over there while you prepare your stone axe for the mortal bonk. 

I'm guessing that's how they did it. I wasn't there.

Meanwhile, the Mets get to play the Phillies. The Nats get the best team on the road; the Mets get the worst team at home. You have to appreciate the symmetry.

My point is that if you haven't yet given up on the Nats, you might not have any choice by the time these series conclude. They have squandered a comfortable-seeming lead and spent enough time staggering around like a recently-bonked king that merely playing well isn't going to make any difference.

To paraphrase the last thing Anne Bonny ever said to her pirate boyfriend, had the Nats fought like men, they needn't have been hang'd like dogs.

A True Story

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

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

Key: The Nats are the one that sucks.

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

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

Minnie Churl

I checked to see if everything still sucks, and it does.

Is it churlish to be unhappy with merely winning a series rather than sweeping it? Maybe. I don't know. I'm comfortable with my churlishness. Call me Churlie Hustle. Churl Haggard. Churles the Second, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.

What's going to happen now is that the damn Mets are going to stroll into Coors Field like they own the place, and then will proceed to own the place.

The Nationals, meanwhile, seem likely to take one of three at home from the Brewers.

If I sound pessimistic, it's only because everything sucks, up to and including my favorite baseball team.

It sounds like Ichiro is going to return to the Marlins next year.

That led me to reflect on how it sure seems like Ichiro is terrible now except when he's playing the Nats. I was relieved to discover that the statistics back up my impression.

Ichiro is hitting .262 overall, .245 against not the Nats, and a pretty impressive .394 against Washington.

So here's to the Nats for geting us closer to lots of discussions about whether Ichiro has more hits than Pete Rose. The answer to that question, by the way, is and will continue to be "No."

Some Stats

I was looking up some stats for some random players that don't have anything in common. It's one of the things I do to pass the time until the Nationals' season ends on October 4.

Gerardo Parra in August: 295/348/492, three homers, 130 OPS+

Yoenis Cespedes in August: 292/313/462, two homers, 111 OPS+

Ben Zobrist in August: 383/500/638, three homers, 12 walks, 213 OPS+

Michael Taylor in August: 230/266/361, 1 homer, twenty damn strikeouts, 72 OPS+

Leadoff hitter Jayson Werth in August: 125(!)/200(!)/229(!), 1 homer, 19 OPS+(!!!!!!!)

Jonathan Papelbon in August: Five innings

Like a Duck

That could hardly have gone worse. Everyone was terrible; everything is terrible. We get a day off before the Nationals head east to resume the Rockiest-style ass-kicking that started a few series ago.

I don't think my mind has come to terms with the likelihood that the Nats are going to miss the playoffs. I'm just kind of dazed. Like William Rosecrans after Chickamauga, I'm stunned and confused like a duck hit on the head.

Current worried status: DEFCON Rosecrans. "This way to 80 wins, boys!"

If the Nats are similarly stunned and confused, they're hiding it by trying to sound as blasé as they were at the trade deadline. "We got 'em right where we want 'em" seems to be the attitude.

That kind of thing can be reassuring, I guess, if your cult is being investigated by the IRS or CPS or whatever and you want to be reassured that your leadership has everything in hand. In this case, though, it smacks of laziness and indifference. It's like Frank Robinson's back.

So our favorite team is about to be a laughing stock, and I think that's what bothering me the most. I'm not looking forward to the 2015 Nats being mentioned along with the 1964 Phillies and 2007 Mets. People are going to be laughing at us for this wreck of a season. Forever.

You know what Medea did when she thought everyone was going to laugh at her? She killed her kids and a couple other people and then bailed in a flying dragon chariot. Whatever the baseball fan equivalent of that is, I'm getting there.

Thinking about it.

The Big Difference

My experiment in quantum baseball physics was a failure. I didn't watch one single pitch of that series, but nevertheless the Nationals are 3.5 games behind the Mets. I feel like it's below my station even to look at the Wild Card standings, but the Nats are 6.5 games away from baseball's very worst kinda-sorta playoff spot.

I'm just going to copy and paste myself, because it sure sounds like that series turned out the same as the last time the Nats faced the Dodgers.

The narrative seems to be that the Nats ran into a "gauntlet of aces," so who can blame them for losing? The Dodgers threw reigning MVP Clayton Kershaw, unpleasant weirdo Zack Greinke, and even Mike Bolsinger at us - we should be happy we won one of them! 

Which, I mean, yeah, it's tough to hit Kershaw and Greinke, just as it's tough to watch Kershaw's Subway commercial or (I'm guessing) have a conversation with Greinke. 

But what do we think is going to happen when we get to the playoffs? Hitting tough pitchers is how you win a World Series, dammit. The opposition isn't going to be running Jerome Williams out there in October.  

If you can't score runs off good pitchers, you lose. My evidence for this is the 2014 postseason, in which the Nationals couldn't even score runs off the remains of Tim Hudson and Jake Peavy, and they lost.

So this series loss is not something to brush off as bad starting rotation timing. The playoffs are nothing but bad timing. They don't let the Bolsingers pitch in October; you have to hit the good ones.

Change "Mike" to "Brett" and "Bolsinger" to "Anderson," and everything I wrote back in July is still true.

The big difference between then and now is that on July 21, I more or less assumed that the Nats were going to have a chance to play badly in the postseason.

Shrödinger's Nats

Legendary physicist Erwin Shrödinger didn't get HBO, so he had to wait to watch Game of Thrones until it came out on DVD. You'd find him in his lab at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies with his hands clamped over his ears, yelling "No spoilers!" while his colleagues discussed events.

That's Austrian for "When is season 5 coming out?"

Shrödinger realized that, because of quantum something or other, as long as he hadn't seen what happened on Game of Thrones, it hadn't actually happened. I know it doesn't make sense, but this is all according to physics.

This has been illustrated with a helpful parable about doing terrible things to a cat. We're against that kind of thing here at Distinguished Senators, so we went with the HBO thing.

The same principle applies to baseball games that start so late there's no way you're going to watch them. Let's face it - the Nationals are very likely to lose ground this week. But - and once again, this is physics talking - if I don't watch it and don't look at the results the next morning, it never happened.

You know how when you're a kid and there are monsters under your bed, they can't get you if you pull the covers over your head and don't whatever you do look at them? That's what I'm doing this week.

If you care about the Nats, don't tell me what happens.

Rocky

Worry status update: I am now this worried.

Does this look more worried than the last one? Let's just say it does.

The Rockies were lousy even before they exiled their best player to Canada. They were able to win fully two-thirds of this weekend's games despite having been defanged at the trade deadline.

Really, though, they didn't beat the Nats. They just beat up on Drew Storen. I'm surprised to find out that that's actually making me feel a little bit better.

Even if you put those losses entirely on Storen - which is fine by me - there's plenty to worry about.

Denard Span might not play again this year. Like someone following the instructions of Archie Bell and the Drells, Span's back has tightened up.

This is a real problem, since one of the places the Nats could have expected to improve was center field. Yes, we all love Michael Taylor, but he's not getting it done.

The other day Dan Kolko was relating a conversation he'd had with Matt Williams: Given that Span has tightened up now and we're slated for more Taylor than we'd expected, did Williams want to see Taylor do anything differently?

No, of course not, we are told Williams said. Don't change a thing. As this happened, Taylor's stats appeared in the background, complete with a .280-something on-base percentage.

So, there's nothing you'd like to Taylor do better? Not even one thing? Maybe there was a misunderstanding and he thought Kolko was asking him about Mike Trout.

I'm also worried about Max Scherzer. Daniel Descalso is as perfect a candidate for the Doug's Dingers program as there is, and there's Scherzer stepping in there and scherzing one up for him.

I mean, he hasn't thrown a no-hitter in weeks.

I went and saw The Church last night. Distinguished Senators contributor Steven Kilbey tried to make us all feel better during "Metropolis."

Don't say nothing good will ever come of this
Don't say the damage is worse than it is


I get that, Steve. There's a long way to go. But you can't expect a room full of people who just watched their team lost two of three to the damn Rockies to look on the bright side.

It's like he didn't even know!

Dead Pledge

This is what four months of charity gets you? They sent Doug Fister to the bullpen.

I don't get it. If Fister's pitching badly enough that you don't want him in the rotation, why do you want him in the bullpen? That's not what a bullpen is for.

This isn't the 1950s. You don't just use dudes who aren't good enough to start in relief. Fister wasn't struggling because because he was running out of gas; he was struggling because his sinker didn't sink. He usually doesn't stay in the game long enough to run out of gas.

He's exactly the kind of pitcher who is not going to thrive as a reliever.

The bright side is that Joe Ross is staying in the rotation. I'm a big fan. Joe Ross strikes out everyone and doesn't give a damn about their feelings. Based on his performance so far, the Nats have already won the Steven Sousa trade.

This being the Nats, even the bright side has a dark side. It sure sounds like Nats management, not having learned the most obvious lesson of the team's last four years, is going to put Ross on some kind of cretin innings limit and make him stop pitching.

Using the 25-30 percent concept as a guideline, Ross’ cap could be somewhere around 153 innings (a 25 percent increase) and 159 innings (a 30 percent increase). And if Ross is averaging about 6.5 innings per start so far in the majors, he could have about five (conservative) to seven starts left in the season. In other words, about the rest of the month.

Yeah yeah developing pitchers young arms blah blah blah whatever. Are you people trying to win? This season is what matters. Maybe you don't mortgage everything to go for it this year, but mortgage something. If this means pushing Joe Ross to the point that he has a 2% higher chance of blowing out his arm in three years, do it.

This isn't the time to play the long game. It's time for the short game. Work on your putting. We're in minigolf territory here. Watch out for the windmill.

So what exactly is the argument against starting Clint Robinson in left field against righties? Well, what's an argument that doesn't include "veteran" or "$21 million" or "I'm afraid Jayson's going to come after me with a shiv made of pressed-together newspaper and prison oatmeal."

Or a sock and an Altoids tin

Saltalamacchiato

This isn't happening against top men. The Diamondbacks aren't any good. Jarrod Saltalamacchia ("jump the stain"?), who wasn't good enough to play for the Marlins, is clowning the Nationals.

But not as much as they're clowning themselves. You win championships by doing the little things. There is no littler thing than throwing the ball to first base. It's baseball's quantum. Aaron Barrett couldn't seem to handle it, though.

Other little things include not issuing a walk when the bases are loaded (they did that one twice) and not getting outpitched by Tyler Moore.

I've had this feeling for a while now that the Nats are doomed once the playoffs start because they're shoddy at fundamentals and have a manager who's always thinking three moves behind.

I'm not so concerned about that anymore, because now I don't think they'll make the playoffs at all.

I am this worried.

The Mets are two games ahead, they're about to play a bunch of patsies, and they seem to be propelled by Destiny, who is an idiot.

The Nats are two games behind, they can't beat also-rans at home, and they refuse to tell Jayson Werth to sit down and not play baseball.

Today I was reduced to checking if the Nats would at least get a Wild Card berth.

They're three and a half games out.

Hippocraticritical

Why exactly is Ian Desmond playing every day?

The Nationals' roster construction philosophy appears to be built around a variation of the first line of the Hippocratic Oath. Instead of "First do no harm," it's "First don't hurt anyone's feelings (except for Drew Storen's)."

You can't replayce Jayson Werth - that would be insulting. You can't sit Ian Desmond no matter how terrible he's been. Feelings, man.

Perhaps the Nats would be surprised to learn that neither "First do no harm" nor "First don't hurt anyone's feelings (except for Drew Storen's)" is actually in the Hippocratic Oath. I learned that about a minute and half ago, and I still haven't recovered from the shock.

If Hippocrates didn't say it, maybe it's not a good principle for running a baseball team.

Hippocrates: "Don't blame me for this garbage, bro."

You don't need me to tell you that Ian Desmond has not been a contributor this year. He's hitting like Jayson Werth, and he's fielding like Jayson Werth. A list of possible shortstops who would be doing less than Desmond to sabotage 2015 includes:

1. Jason Martinson
2. Miguel Tejada
3. Trea Turner
4. Cristian Guzman
5. Yunel Escobar
6. Danny Espinosa

Espinosa's the most obvious option, but why he's not playing is anything but obvious. He has one (1) plate appearance since the Pirates series at the end of July. Why do you pinch hit with Werth (56 OPS+) when Espinosa (101 OPS+) is sitting there on the bench trying to remember what playing baseball is like?

Sure, Espinosa's not a real shortstop, and sure, his beard starts, like, right under his eyeballs, but neither of those should be enough to keep him out of the lineup like this. Put him at second, Escobar at short, and Rendon at third. Or just leave him at short and see what happens. The Nats are getting F-minus production from short; Espinosa can maybe get that up to a C.

I don't know - is it really just about Desmond's feelings? Everyone seems to like him; maybe the Nats are worried about a mutiny if Desi gets dissed, and the Werth situation shows that they are afraid to make a grown man cry by sitting him.

Or maybe they think Desmond's the best option. That's even worse.

First Loser

Why are all these terrible things happening to me? I try to be a good person. Like halfwit LA rackets kingpin Mickey Cohen, I have killed no men that in the first place didn't deserve killing.

The example I try to live up to.

You're not always rewarded for doing the right thing. Mickey Cohen went to prison and got brained with a lead pipe. And here I am looking at the blue, orange, and undeserving hindquarters of the New York Mets.

The Nationals' view

Matt Williams put in another masterpiece of bad managing last night. Doug Fister went into a frenzy of charity, anointing three new Doug's Dudes. (Honestly, that homer to Nick Ahmed is probably worthy of a whole Doug's Dingers post, but I'm all out of jokes about that.) After five, Fister was clearly done, but Williams sent him out to hit anyway. I don't know why Williams hates taking pitchers out of the game, but he's awfully reluctant to do it even when everyone knows it needs to be done. Cf. Joe Ross on Saturday.

Still, a good manager wouldn't have won that game. Even if you take out Doug Fister at the exact right time (i.e., while he's warming up), you don't win if you don't score.

I'm starting to think that acquiring a closer who never gets to close didn't solve all the Nats' problems.

Meanwhile, Yoenis Cespedes, whom the Nats should have at least attempted to get, drove in four runs as the Mets - who seem to be some kind of idiot team of idiot destiny - romped all over the Marlins.