Cheap and Ugly in the Capitol

  Upon Googling: “Cheapest Baseball Owners,” the first article led with the following description: “cheap, greedy, tight-fisted, miserly, penurious. A discussion of the penny-pinching figures who historically have ruled the game of baseball includes Charlie Comiskey—of Black Sox fame, Harry Frazee—who sold off Babe Ruth, and Calvin Griffith, who infamously told a crowd in the […]

Making the Game Fun Again

As the season loomed large in the late winter months, a friend who had prepared a paper on the impending changes in the rules of the game asked me to look it over. It was the first time I had truly registered the pitch clock and the other revision to the rules that had heretofore […]

Oh, Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz

For many years the gold standard of baseball writing was Roger Angell. Simple prose and honest story-telling, he left indelible images about a minor league pitcher who could not quit the game, begging his wife for just one last season of traveling small town America in search of some lost chalice. But my favorite was […]

Aaron Judge in a Nationals Uniform?

No, I did not predict Josh Bell going to San Diego, but who did? In my defense, just about everything else about the generational trade of Juan Soto yesterday, went down remarkably close to my crystal ball projections on July 22.  One has to give DC General Manager Mike Rizzo credit for getting C.J. Abrams […]

Juan Soto Should Not Be Playing in DC in August

Yesterday on Sports Illustrated.com, Max Goodman proposed the following trade: Gleyber Torres, Nestor Cortes, Anthony Volpe, Jasson Dominguez, and Ken Waldichuk for Juan Soto. Granted this is not Brian Cashman speaking on the phone to Mike Rizzo, who controls Juan Soto’s fate leading up to the August 2 deadline as much as anyone. But then […]

Deconstructing the Juan Soto Horizon

Driving up to Baltimore yesterday morning I enjoyed listening to Jim Duquette opine on Juan Soto, Joe Girardi and a host of other baseball issues that dominated the day. The consensus about whether or not Soto gets traded is now one of those vastly complex scattergrams, a worm hole in which one could get lost […]

Saying Goodbye to Juan Soto

Juan Soto has been the soul of the Washington Nationals since he first blasted his way through the DC organization’s minor league system as a 17- and 18-year old. In 2018 Soto brought the wide grin, the goofy setup in the batter’s box, and the infectious love of the game to Washington. And DC fans […]

A Restless Farewell

It’s closing time and the moment where Ted Lerner, as the CEO of the Washington Nationals, will bid adieu. His family has announced that they intend to sell the Washington Nationals team and have begun the process of inviting bids and negotiating the final sale. Dylan ends his ballad, “Restless Farewell,” about his early tribulations […]

A Letter to Fans About the Lockout, or, The View From Left Field

I would prefer to have ever Major League sports franchise operated and funded by a Municipal Sports authority that supports that city’s baseball or basketball team with luxury taxes on high end real estate in the city. And furthermore, in my book, baseball’s ownership mostly voted for Trump, whereas only a large chunk of the […]

An Historic Trading Deadline–Can It Happen Again?

If ever a Major League Baseball team traded eight players from its Major League roster in a single day, I can find no mention of it. And yet that is what the Washington Nationals did on July 30, 2021. The Chicago Cubs dealt nine on the same day, which was documented as the highest number […]

Isn’t It Time Congress Seriously Examines the Monopoly Power of Major League Baseball

In December of 2020, with results being certified in the much contested election that saw the defeat of Donald Trump, and with two senate seats still hanging in the balance in Georgia, Major League Baseball, Inc. unilaterally ended its cooperative relationship with Minor League Baseball. For decades, the relationship between Minor League and Major League […]

DC Loves the Long Ball

Gather round children and I will tell you tales of Frank Howard, of how the “Capital Punisher,” could hit a baseball to the moon and back. It was the late 1960’s and the Washington Senators remained perennial cellar dwellers as they had been since the Great Depression. But a giant of a man named Frank […]

The Titanic Hits Bottom

We got on Amtrak yesterday, hoping to find out just how bad the Nationals minor league organization actually has become. Our destination: Wilmington, Delaware, home of the High-A Blue Rocks. Almost every outlet that judges minor league talent, deems Washington’s the worst in the game. After our trip to Wilmington, it is fair to say […]

Beholding the Beauty of the Not-Quite-Normal 2021 Season

The sun was surprisingly warm as we sat along the left field foul line, a dozen rows up from the emerald green field at Camden Yards. The crowd was sparse, socially distanced, but still keenly focused on the game set to begin on the field. There has been little to draw large crowds to Baltimore’s […]

A Small Piece of the Brent Honeywell Story

It’s all over baseball today as the Tampa Bay Rays host the New York Yankees. Brent Honeywell, once the most highly touted pitching prospect in baseball four years ago, took the mound for the first time since 2017, when he suffered a long series of arm injuries. One of those injuries was particularly ugly, when […]

You Don’t Miss Your Water

Yermin Mercedes? Who included him on their list of 100 best MLB prospects?? And yet there he is, emerging on the grandest stage of all. He garnered eight hits in his first nine at bats, where he may yet position himself with Sam Horn and other legendary April wonders. Or is he the real deal? […]

The White Man’s Game

On any given evening in the summer, one can travel to the ballpark to see the game of baseball played by a unique diversity of talent. Whether the game is in a Major League park or a minor league one, the players out on the field might claim Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, Central America, […]

Minor League Players and Covid-19

The MLB owners made the right call and sent the players home. When no one really knew how bad Covid-19 was going to be, MLB ownership got word that their players were at risk. They have invested millions in their teams and so like the billionaire class from which they spring, they moved to protect […]

On Becoming National League Champions in 2019

Victor Robles squeezes the ball into his glove as the man next to me shouts, “It’s an out, baby, it’s an out,” and the stadium erupts into pure animal joy. As the fireworks erupt and the fans explode, the center field gate swings open and a makeshift stage begins to move toward the infield as […]

Is 2019 the Post Season of the Pitcher?

Whoever said it, the old mantra that pitching wins the World Series has an early lead in 2019, even in the modern game where the home run is the attention grabber, the defining moment that lifts everyone from their seats to track the flight of the ball as it heads toward the light standard. But […]

New Big Train Sightings in DC

In the 1924 World Series, Walter Johnson lost Game One and Game Five. He was nearly 37 years old and it appeared that even his storied career of invincible tenacity was at an end. The Series was tied three games apiece between John McGraw’s New York Giants and Clark Griffith’s Washington Nationals. Curly Ogden pitched […]

Ballpark

Ballpark, the excellent book on baseball architecture by Paul Goldberger, is a paean to those unique and very public edifices in which “America’s Pastime” is played. Goldberger’s history and physical description of so many of them is very much like barnstorming the country to see them, so aptly and lovingly described are they in his […]

Notes From the Davey Martinez Fan Club

Davey Martinez, current manager of the Washington Nationals, is a case study in why catchers make such good managers. Be it Bruce Bochy, Kevin Cash, Joe Girardi or Mike Matheny, their years of sitting behind the plate and working with a pitching staff on an every day basis provided key insights into how to manage […]

Selling Ripe Bananas and Making Banana Bread

My 93-year old mother-in-law, bless her dear, departed soul, once opined that she was too old to buy a green banana. Ted Lerner, who was until recently the principal owner of the Washington Nationals is now 93, and many of his decisions in recent years regarding the Nationals have been made out of his desire […]

Is the MLBPA Losing Sight of its Mission?

When Marvin Miller worked with a committed corps of Major League players to create the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the players both individually and collectively were truly a disadvantaged group. A few well-known players got big paydays, but almost every player held an off-season job to […]

The Road Less Traveled By…

The Washington Nationals have reached a familiar decision point. In 1969 Bowie Kuhn stood at a similar divergence. He had to chose between Bob Short’s desire to purchase the Washington Senators and almost certainly move them somewhere else, or go with a local ownership group of unknown ability to hold the fort. Bob Short came to […]

Has Harper Been a Divider or a Uniter?

Bryce Harper carves a path in the world of baseball like a comic book hero laying waste to bad guys. That is the way many fans see him; the way many depict him. The real world, one with which Harper has only nodding acquaintance, is more nuanced. The Harper era in Washington, DC is likely drawing […]

Why the Nationals’ Bullpen Sucks

It is an oft told story: the implosion of the Washington Nationals reliever corps. It is happening now, and it has happened oh so many times that the success stories stand out starkly from the failures because there have been so few of them. Whether it is the failures of Drew Storen in the playoffs […]

The Best Team Usually Wins

One of the bigger surprises in the 2018 season has been the impotence of the Washington Nationals. But that is why they play the games, why paper comparisons in March of this year failed to see how quickly the Atlanta Braves young team would gel with its veterans, or how Aaron Nola and Jake Arrieta […]

Knowing When to Hold Them and When to Fold Them

You have to know when to hold them; know when to fold them. That is what separates the winners from the losers, pure and simple. The Washington Nationals are faced with that conundrum as they ready themselves for the second half of the 2018 season. Their .500 record–48 wins/48 losses–puts them five and one-half games […]

Patches Below the Waterline to Put Washington Back in the Winners Circle in 2018

Tom Boswell likened the addition of Kelvin Herrera to the Nationals bullpen as adding sheet metal instead of tin foil to a significant hole in their bullpen. Herrera is hopefully the first of several moves that the Washington Nationals front office will surprise us with this summer as they look to address the new reality […]

Mambo Soto! A Vision of Robles and Soto Playing DC Baseball With a Salsa Beat?

Juan Soto’s two home runs at Yankee Stadium last night not only cast a spell over the Bronx crowd, but over the future for the Washington Nationals. The young slugger is intriguing enough in his own right. He IS Bryce Harper as a 19-year old. The comparisons can be made now as the young Dominican […]

Firing On All Eight

A friend recently opined that it is difficult to appreciate the arc of history when one is in the middle of it.  You cannot know how the moving hand will compose an ending, but last night, with temperatures around seventy degrees, Max Scherzer was cruising like a V-8 Oldsmobile out on an old country highway, […]

19-Year Old Juan Soto vs. 19-Year Old Bryce Harper

The 25-year old Bryce Harper is on a pace to hit more home runs than in any prior season. It is fun to watch and no slugger since Frank Howard has put on a power display in Washington, DC, quite like this one. But as Harper crushes balls that approach Hondo’s mythic proportions, there is […]

Is it 1924 All Over Again?

For decades the spring dawned in Washington, DC with false hopes that the local nine might have hidden talent. Then, as quickly as you could say “Shirley Povich,” reality was restored by the end of April.  But a new century has created a reality that bends like a pretzel and just when you think you […]

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