This isn't good...

This is from Jayson's Stark recent column on espn.com:


Nationals' crisis

Problems 1 through 25: Talent
And by that we mean: There sure isn't enough of it. This entire starting rotation won two games last year. Yeah, two. The lineup features nobody who hit 25 homers last season. And once you get past Ryan Zimmerman, Austin Kearns and Brian Schneider, the rest of the roster is "just a bunch of extra players," said one scout.
"I've been watching that team, just to see if we might want to [trade] for someone when they start selling," said one front-office man. "I still haven't come up with that someone."

We're not sure how many games this team is going to lose. 100? 110? 118? But wherever they end up, the Nationals already have done something that's just about impossible:

Over their first nine games, 714 hitters marched up to home plate. Not one of them stepped into the box while the Nationals held a lead. (The only time they led in the one game they won, remember, was the moment the winning run crossed the plate in the ninth inning.) That's gotta be a record that will never be broken.