Nationals Interest 2.0

Thanks to all those readers who sent kind emails (and comments) asking us to blog again this year. I'll be honest: we actually were contemplating abandoning the blog. A serious blog requires more work than we imagined when we started this endeavor, and I'm a bit embarrassed to say that we found the whole enterprise pretty exhausting. We loved doing it, and we especially liked hearing from readers, but it was tiring, and we were often not able to devote the time we needed to make the blog as good as we wanted. That's a long way of apologizing both for the extended lay off and for the too frequent lackluster posts last season.

Nevertheless, we decided that we couldn't turn away from the computer screen this season, so here we are again. Given our absence, we have A LOT to say! We'll start tonight with a short statement on where the Nationals are now, and we'll continue the conversation over the next few days.

Unfortunately, the Nationals don't look much better now than they did at the end of last season. In fact, they look much worse. Vinny Castilla, Preston Wilson, and Brad Wilkerson are gone, but the execrable Cristian Guzman remains. He can't be any worse than he was last season and he will almost certaintly be materially better, but the improvement we need at shortstop is one of kind, not of degree. Jose Vidro is also still here, so we'll get to watch him travel down the water slide of his career one more year.

There are some good additions, like Alfonso Soriano and a full season of Ryan Zimmerman. We'll have more to say later about the former's temper tantrum regarding playing in the outfield, but the Nats need more Sorianos and fewer Vidros, so we'd just as soon like Franky to pencil the Fonz in as the everyday second baseman.

The real crime is not what the Nationals did in the off season, but what they didn't do. A number of our readers last year thought we were too pessimistic and too hard on Jim Bowden for not doing more to improve the team before the trade deadline. Well, we think events have proven us right. The Nationals played over their head in the first half of the season and could have used the delta between their potential and actual payroll to buy good players and lock in their upstart start. Instead, they fiddled at the margins by acquiring players like Preston Wilson. And without a real owner to approve new spending in the offseason, the Nationals failed to take advantage of their potential wealth and instead watched players like Esteban Loiaza walk away into the sunset. Not all of this is Bowden's fault, obviously. Much of the blame lies at the feet of the owners, who dickered with the City Council over every last penny rather than give the team a real shot at improving this season.

The result is that the Nationals have less promise this season than they did last year at this time, which means that a .500 season would be a monumental accomplishment.