Washington Is Fighting the Wrong Battles

So the funny thing is, everyone just read that title and thought I was going to talk about politics...PSYCHE!

Actually the Washington that I’m referring to is Washington D.C.’s baseball “franchise,” the Washington Nationals.

You see, when the Montreal Expos needed a new home, Washington was once again given a baseball franchise. But the biggest mistake that people make is rubbing them off as an expansion team. They aren’t. In fact, they’ve been around for a long, long time. The problem is that they are horrible.

We are barely 1/16th of the way through the grueling baseball season, and the Nationals have already found themselves nine games out of first place in the NL East. Beyond that, this team, especially since their move to DC, has been characterized for their seemingly endless off field spending with little on field results.

This of course begins with the fact that the Nationals just built a new stadium that cost D.C. tax payers more that it cost New York taxpayers to erect the new Met and Yankee ballparks. So if you are going to have a publicly funded new stadium, you might pay a little money to get a couple of studs in there and give the fans something to watch, right?

Wrong.

The Nationals have the fourth lowest payroll in all of baseball, with more than 15 percent of their money going exclusively to Adam Dunn and his notorious strikeout to home run ratio. And other than that, they have let nearly every good player in the franchise seek higher grounds.

So it’s kind of poetic justice that now those Nationals have one of the lowest attendance rates in baseball, after fleeing Montreal due to poor attendance. You can’t blame the fans anymore. The fans know when you are putting out a bad product. But more importantly, the fans know when you don’t have your priorities straight.

Let’s take Elijah Dukes for example. The former diamond in the rough Tampa Bay prospect has had legal issues and constant injuries totally decimate his career. But especially with the demotion of Lastings Milledge, Washington needed a bat and some speed in the outfield.

Enter Elijah Dukes, who has had an incredible start to the season (and also due to his contract makes $10,000 more than the absolute league minimum). So Elijah, who has had a lot of trouble in the past, finally gets his act together.

Right before Saturday’s home game against the Marlins, Dukes elected to go mentor a Little League group in the DC area. Dukes showed up late to the clubhouse before game time, and manager Manny Acta benched him, and fined him $500.

In addition to the locker-room humiliation, Acta and Nationals GM Mike Rizzo publicly declared that if he were ever late again, they would demote him to the minors. Acta supported his stance by saying something that sounded more like a Joe Girardi reaction to A-Rod taking steroids.

“We are going to change the culture here, regardless of how well a guy is playing,” said Acta, who apparently caught Dukes with a needle in his left butt cheek.

Now, I know what you are thinking here. If you are late, you should get punished. And to an extent, I agree. But I urge you to take the next fact into account...

This past Saturday, the same day that Elijah Dukes was benched, the Washington Nationals took the field WITH THEIR TEAM’S NAME SPELLED WRONG ON THEIR JERSEYS.

That’s correct, ladies and gentlemen. At the exact same time that the Nationals tried to pass themselves off as a serious franchise that doesn’t cater to any of their players (by benching Dukes), they misspelled the word “NATIONALS” on their players’ jerseys. Several players, including their star, Adam Dunn, were forced to wear a jersey that said “NATINALS.”

And you wonder why this team has no fans? They drove all the fans away. When you bring a team into a big market, you are expected to make the right moves to take this team to the next level. Not only have the Nationals failed to make those moves, they have also embarrassed themselves along the way.

It’s a vicious cycle. A team can only go out and pay as much as they think they will make. But the only way to break that cycle is by taking that financial risk, and giving this city a team that they can be proud of.