Send the Washington Nationals Back to the Hell from Whence They Came

The Washington Nationals are the worst franchise in professional sports.

As a creature with origins in the D.C. suburbs, I say this with equal parts sincerity and scorn. What kind of team loses 102 games and then sees fit to offer a free agent first baseman $160 million? Is anyone at this organization paying attention to anything?

Apropos of anything else, why would Mark Teixeira have any interest in playing for this piece of shit team? But let’s forget that side of the equation; this is about the Nationals and my utter contempt for the way they go about doing business.

The Nationals clearly need a first baseman. But as this team learned firsthand with Dmitri Young, first basemen just fall out of the sky. You can find any idiot that can swing a bat and stick him at first, which is precisely what happened in 2007, when "Da Meathook" hit .320 for $500,000 after being cut by the Tigers the previous fall.

Of course, the Nats immediately showed a fundamental lack of understanding about the meaning of “available talent” by resigning Young for two years and $10 million, only to see him succumb to his diabetes that everyone knew about going into the deal, leaving him with just 180 plate appearances in 2008.

So while they’re stuck paying Da Meathook this season, as well as the talented but nonexistent Nick Johnson, the Nats apparently see fit to invest even more money at on the right-infield corner, rather than attempting to fill their numerous glaring holes, such as second base, shortstop, the bullpen, an entire starting rotation, and getting someone to actually come and watch games at their brand new stadium.

The worst part about the Nationals is not their lack of major league talent, it’s their basic misunderstanding of the Success Cycle and how it works.

For years now, the organization has been telling its fans to wait out the slow seasons so that the team can rebuild and compete. However, after four seasons in Washington, a period in which the big-league club has averaged 71 wins and avoided last place just once, the Nats are no closer to contending then Montreal Expos were when they drew less than 800,000 fans and skipped town in 2004.

Even the other local yokels, the perennially terrible Baltimore Orioles, have figured out that harvesting minor league talent is the only way to work themselves back into relevance. The Nationals, on the other hand, failed to sign their first-round draft pick in 2008.

It’s cool, they can afford to blow a draft or two here and there, right? All of the organization’s top talent is already in the major leagues; there are no reinforcements or hot prospects on the way. The Nats’ top hitting prospect, Chris Marrero, is 19 years old and is at least two or three years away. Their top pitching prospect, Ross Detwiler, is coming off his first full season in the low minors, during which he was completely middling.

Every time the Nationals seem to make a shrewd move, i.e. landing Lastings Milledge, violent-criminal-but-awesome-baseballer Elijah Dukes and this winter’s bounty of Josh Willingham and Scott Olsen, they go and shoot themselves in the foot, doing stupid things like re-signing Cristian Guzman, trading their one valuable commodity (Jon Rauch) for a second baseman who can’t hit (Emilio Bonifacio) or the rumored deal that would bring them the Rockies’ Willy Taveras, who would be the fifth-best outfielder on the team in '09.

I hate this team so damn much; send it back to Canada.