We don't have enough good hitters!

Jim Bowden is quoted in today's Post as saying:

"'Of our starting eight, I'd say there are only two players who are playing to expectations,' Bowden said the other night in Atlanta. One is undoubtedly Jose Guillen; the other is catcher Brian Schneider. Johnson and Vidro have been hurt, and the others -- Castilla, Guzman, Brad Wilkerson, new acquisition Preston Wilson -- have numbers below their career averages."

This is another example of Bowden trying to shift blame for the team's falling fortunes away from his failure to improve the club by making trades. It also is either misleading or false.

Comparing this season's stats to the career stats for players who are either entering their prime or their baseball dotage is not very helpful because it ignores clear trends. And comparing stats for players who play this year in RFK, an extreme pitcher's park, but played last year in Coors Field, an extreme hitter's park, is similarly misleading.

To do a more accurate comparison, we compared the stats of the Nationals' starting eight for this year and last, but for last year we list only the road stats for Vinny Castilla and Preston Wilson so that we could avoid the distorting effects of Coors Field. Here is an updated list of the starting eight's OPS this year and last:

Player ---- 2004 -- 2005 -- +/-
Johnson --- .757 -- .947 -- 190
Wilson ---- .689 -- .739 -- 50
Schneider - .724 -- .748 -- 24
Guillen --- .849 -- .864 -- 15
Vidro ----- .821 -- .787 -- -34
Castilla -- .774 -- .699 -- -75
Wilkerson - .872 -- .772 -- -100
Guzman ---- .693 -- .502 -- -191

This list suggests that half of the Nationals' lineup--Johnson, Wilson, Schneider, and Guillen--is performing better than they did last year, while the other half--Vidro, Castilla, Wilkerson, and Guzman--is not.

But this list overstates the degree to which Vidro and Wilkerson are underperforming last year's stats. Because the Expos played in a neutral ballpark, we would expect Vidro's and Wilkerson's stats to decline at RFK, and that's exactly what has happened. Using Wilkerson as an example, if we apply RFK's park effects to his 2003 stats (to avoid all those games played in San Juan last year), we find that his 2003 OPS was .787, only 15 points better than his 2005 stats. In other words, Vidro and Wilkerson are playing pretty close to the level they played in Montreal.

That leaves Castilla and Guzman as the only players who are substantially underperforming their 2004 stats. Guzman is a disaster, and no one would attempt to justify his performance, but that is a disaster of Jim Bowden's making. Castilla is also playing poorly, but we believe that's because he is on the downside of his career and is not likely to reach last year's stats.

This is a long way of saying that you can't blame the Nationals' performance on hitters doing worse than we would expect. The real problem is that the Nationals don't have the hitting talent they need. The way to remedy that problem was to trade for good hitters, but Bowden didn't do that. As we said yesterday, Fire Jim Bowden!