My momma told me not to come...

This is such a difficult season. Watching the Nats is sort of like being strapped to a chair and forced to watch the same car crash over and over again. Or, something like that.

Anyway, this season is particularly difficult because it's very hard to do the one thing the Nationals need to do most--identify and nuture talent to either trade or build around. Last night's game is Exhibit A.

The Post's story captures perfectly the problem. John Patterson isn't the same pitcher he was in 2005. His fastball is at least 5 mph slower than it was in 2005, and he can't throw the sharp curveball that used to be a perfect complement to his heater. As the Post reports, Patterson's arsenal is so depleted that he is improvising new techniques during games. That's a terrible position for a pitcher to be in, but, in a perfect baseball world, Patterson would work through his problem, get back to form, and give the Nationals something significant to trade for young talent.

The problem is that the Nationals don't field a team that is conducive to that process. Their defense is absolutely atrocious. Good fielding stats are hard to come by, but every one of the Nats' starting infielders has at least three errors. Ryan Zimmerman has five and Dimitri Young and Ronnie Belliard each have four. The range of the right side of the infield is, shall we say, limited, and it appears at times like Young just avoided a mafia hit and someow got to the ballpark with his feet encased in cement.

The bullpen is almost as bad. Jesus Colome is the only relief pitcher with a VORP (value over replacement player) significantly over 0, and Levale Speigner is the only other reliever with a positive VORP. It's pretty bad when your bullpen is relying disproportionately on players who aren't even listed in Baseball Prospectus, which analyzes over 1,600 players. The rest of the bullpen has been simply awful.

Both of these inconvenient truths made Patterson look worse than he was last night. Patterson wasn't great, but bad fielding and bad relief pitching turned what could have been a manageable game into a disaster. It could have been a bumpy ride with a few people getting sea sick; instead it turned into the voyage of the Titanic. All aboard!

In the bottom of the third, Robert Fick turned a catchable fly ball into an amusement park adventure. Instead of the inning ending, Ryan Howard came up next and pounded a homerun to give the Phillies a 2-0 lead. In the bottom of the sixth, Patterson left with one out and men on first and second. Micah Bowie then walked Jimmy Rollins to load the bases, and Ronnie Belliard dropped a pop fly. One man scored, and the bases remained loaded with only one out. Chase Utley's single then scored two, including the last runner for which Patterson was responsible.

This doesn't even capture all of the bad fielding that doesn't show up in the box score.

Oh well, another day, another missed opportunity. Get used to it folks, because there are going to be a lot of them this year.