When the Audacity of Hope Fades

2007 will go down as the year that the Lerner/Kasten Regime began its top-to-bottom review of what the organization has today and what it needs to be successful next year and beyond.

With 40 games under its belt, we now know the Washington Nationals to be a .350 team, despite their admirable .500 performance in the last 10 games. We know that with a quarter of the season passed, the Nats are baseball's worst-hitting team. We also know that, unlike last year, the Nats have no individual stars on offense. How bad is it without Soriano? Consider this: no Nat even appears in the National League's top 20 in the major offensive categories of R, HR, RBI, AVG, OBP, SLG and OPS. Incredibly, only one Nat -- Ryan Church -- appears in the NL's top 40 in these categories (clocking in at 21st for OBP and 39th for OPS).

With performance like this, it takes a certain audacity to believe in the Nats this year and to hope that the current starting eight will develop into major offensive contributors next year and beyond. With the exception of the promise of Ryan Zimmerman, it is hard to believe that any Nat has a realistic chance of being an above-league-average offensive player and that anyone except Church and Austin Kearns will be league-average producers. (Yes, we know that Nick Johnson lurks in the background, but we'll deal with him soon enough!)

While the Nats' pitchers have been marginally more effective, there is no one on the current roster who projects as anything better than a third or fourth starter on a competitive team, and no Philip Hughes-equivalent waiting in the Nats' minor-league teams.

Is it time to re-start a sustained drumbeat to drive Bowden out of his job? It's tough to see why not. Bowden in 2007 is a known quantity, and he no longer deserves the ability to use otherwise legitimate excuses about the team's poor performance -- ownership uncertainty, long-term franchise neglect -- to justify a future in Washington.

Bowden's tenure in Washington -- granted, under unique and difficult circumstances in 2005-06 -- is poor. The Nats were worse in 2006 than 2005. And 2007 is quickly shaping up to be worse than 2006. More troubling, though, is that Bowden's Nats today have fewer league-average-or-better players and fewer promising such prospects than at any time since the team arrived in DC. We know the plan has been to develop young talent internally and through strategic trades, but today there are no indications that Bowden is successfully implementing that plan. And, off the field, Bowden embarrassed the organization with his DUI arrest last year.

Bowden's tenure in Cincinnati also was, ultimately, a failure. While he ran the Reds for 10.5 years, he only had one playoff birth to show for his efforts -- in 1995, when the Reds had the NL's second-highest payroll and won the NL Central but lost in the NLCS. By 2003, the Reds fired Bowden, tiring of the Reds' poor performance under his stewardship and of his antics. Bowden appeared to sew his fate in Cincinnati when, less than a year after 9/11, and with MLB and the Players' Association in the middle of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement, Bowden unforgivably suggested that if the players "do walk out, make sure it's Sept. 11. Be symbolic. Let Donald Fehr drive the plane right into the building, if that's what they want to do." Bowden followed up that chestnut with a lame and insincere apology.

We're not trying to suggest that Bowden is the worst GM ever, but there's no longer any compelling reason to keep him as the Nats' GM, if there ever was one. Bowden's got a proven track record of mediocrity, and his personal antics at times have made him a distraction and an embarrassment to his employers. Why, under those circumstances, should he continue to receive the benefit of the doubt, especially when there are so many other promising GM candidates who would love to work for the Nats -- a team with low short-term expectations, solid upper management, a new stadium coming online and a fan base that is too young to be jaded?

The Nats and Bowden have been selling their fans on the audacity of hope since 2005. Yet what we lack are any tangible signs to be hopeful. We can't do anything to significantly upgrade the player talent base in the short term. Yet ditching Bowden and hiring a Paul DePodesta (an Alexandria, VA native) or another promising GM would be the easiest and most effective move the Nats could make to restore a little hope.