Gonzalez and Bonafacio: The mid-summer hiatus is over, the great travel adventure to other parts of the world has ended (with apologies for the lack of posts) and, most important of all, the trade deadline is past. But not before our beloved Anacostia boys rid themselves of useless contracts and hangers-on, and set their sights firmly on the future. It is a future that does not include Paul Lo Duca or Felipe Lopez, whose trade value was apparently so low that, even together, they could not bring a single prospect.  So be it: the Nats will not be renamed the Felipes and Paul may now peddle his talents somewhere else. Which leaves us with the question: what exactly did we get?

Alberto Gonzalez is a good glove no-hit shortstop with impressive team skills. But whether or not he can make it in the Majors is an open question, and one that will undoubtedly be soon answered when he fills in at shortstop for the injured Cristian Guzman. The fact that he once wore pinstripes and has the same name as the former AG of the current crew should not be daunting, he has a better bat and is considered a good citizen by those in the Nationals Past Time who chart such things. The Yankees traded him because they are stockpiling pitching, no matter how modest, and because they seem set at shortstop for some time to come.

The more intriguing prospect is former Diamondbacks’ Emilio Bonifacio, the 11th best prospect in the D-Backs’ organization. Only 23, Bonifacio is known for his speed but, like Gonzalez, has yet to prove he can hit major league pitching. He’ll get a chance to find out: Jim Bowden has penciled him in as the Nats lead-off hitter and starter at second next year, despite the fact that Bonifacio has only swung the bat 35 times in two seasons.

The result will be a somewhat remade infield — with few guarantees that Gonzalez or Bonifacio are any more than better-than-average Triple A players. But then, Bowden had to do something, since scouring Columbus, Harrisburg and Potomac for top-level middle infield prospects failed to find one of any quality. Plus there’s this: if you can find a player that will hit over .250 on this team (a line that neither Lo Duca or Felipe could reach), then you’ve found yourself a starter.

Is Jim In Trouble? Could be. Major league scouts think that Bowden might have gotten more for Jon Rauch and that someone, somewhere, might have given up even moderately experienced prospects for Lopez and Lo Duca. Then too, we are constantly reminded that Bowden passed on a handful of prospects for Alfonso Soriano, though his signing with the Cubs yielded some draft choices. The heat on Bowden is now palpable: while he received draftees Josh Smoker and Jordan Zimmerman for Soriano, the Nats are unlikely to continue to fill the seats of Nats Park unless Bowden can pull off something impressive in the off-season — or before. Bowden supporters point out that Bonifacio has hit .452 since reporting to Columbus and (no doubt) that’s excellent. But Nats fans would prefer he hit somewhere above the Mendoza line when he takes his place at second base (probably tonight), for the first time. You don’t need a crystal ball to figure this one out. Jim is under the gun. And if either Gonzalez or Bonifacio appear to be a bust, the fans will lose their patience, the ownership will read the attendance figures … and Jim will be gone.

Down On Half Street: Let us now dispense forever with the tiresome: “Houston you have a problem” signs and simply note that while the cynics say that it was only a matter of time before the Nats’ bats were loosed against the likes of the lowly Astros, it was damned good to see. From where I sat, the first Belliard home run looked like it was going foul, so the explosion of fandom was all that much sweeter.

It was good to see Kentucky’s bat come to life and you have to feel good for Tim Redding, who finally notched a win after throwing his standard very good game for six innings. But while we’re focused on the bats and Timmy, let’s note that reliever Steven Shell looks like the (proverbial) real deal. Note to Jim Bowden: perhaps you should trade Shell to another team for some prospects! Oh wait, Shell is a prospect. Hey, I have an idea, let’s keep him.

Me Droogs: In an unprecedented show of friendship, the three writers of this blog met for an evening of baseball. We actually sat together during the Nats loss to the Tracy’s — an 11 inning 7-5 affair that the Nats should have won, and would have won, were it not for (in my humble opinion) a late game non-interference call by umpire Angel Hernandez. Every umpire misses a call, but Hernandez’s missed calls are famous — as are his temper tantrums. In 2001 he threw football player Steve McMichael out of Wrigley Field after McMichael (who sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame), had the temerity of questioning his competence. In another incident, Hernandez threw Dodger first base coach Mariano Duncan’s hat into the stands after Duncan threw it to the ground in arguing a call.

No kidding.

In any event, it was great to see the Droogs who, in the midst of the Thursday night loss, received news that Ryan Langerhans was being called up from Columbus and would soon be rejoining the club. We were thrilled. 

Buyer’s Remorse: The first assessment is in on who got the better of the Rich Harden to Chicago for Sean Gallagher, Matt Murton, Eric Patterson and Double-A catcher Josh Donaldson trade– and the nod goes to Billy Beane and the A’s. The common notion is that Gallagher was the key to the trade for Oakland, with early reports suggesting that outfielder Matt Murton would head to Sacramento, Oakland’s triple-A affiliate. But Murton has always been underestimated and it’s no secret that Lou Piniella never really took to him. So when Murton arrived in Oakland, they told him he would start in left field. A very smart decision. I always thought Murton would look good in a Nats uniform: he has a career .294 batting average, a .362 OBP and .448 slugging.

Yesterday, both Gallagher and Murton shined in the Connie Mack’s 9-2 drubbing of the Angels and over at Thunder Matt’s Saloon (named for the now-departed), fans of the Baby Bears were suffering buyer’s remorse. They weren’t the only ones: the Trib’s Fred Mitchell noted that 44 years ago the Cubs made a transaction that sent future Hall of Famer Lou Brock to St. Louis – a trade against which ”all other major Cubs transactions are measured.”  And just who did the Cubs get for Brock? This guy:

The Nation: Everything seems to be clicking in Boston, where Dustin Pedroia’s bat has come to life. The second sacker (and starting All Star) is hitting .311 and sending the Bosox faithful into paragons of ecstacy. There’s no question about it. He’s simply the best baseball player who ever lived. (And he will be …  until, that is, the day that the Evil Empire signs him for $140 million.) I know — let’s talk about Duston Pedroia on Baseball Tonight!

The Bosox are now the class of the AL, and godonlyknows just how good they can be when the get a little from the bullpen. Even so, I can’t help noting that “Red Sox Nation” has been notably silent on the one transaction they once trumpeted — the signing of this guy to a “no lose” minor league deal:

We here at the Dogz have recently learned that Bartolo is either on the DL or that he is the unknown in that song about “the man who never returned.” My bet? He is lost forever ‘neath the streets of Boston.

When a hitter is going good, they say he’s “seeing the ball well” — and they say the opposite when he’s not. Thusly: Don Sutton has been saying lately that Austin Kearns is just “not seeing the ball well,” the ostensible reason for his .194 average, two home runs and 11 runs batted in. “Seeing the ball well” is a slippery term, it seems to me, but it beats the hell out of any other explanation: that a hitter is “not in his groove” or that (for some reason) he’s jinxed — “they’re just not falling in.”

Kearns had two solid hits Thursday night against the Bucs, nominal evidence that he is finally hitting his way out of his latest “funk” (another one of those slippery terms), one of them a single in the eighth that scored the game-winning run. You could see the relief in Kearns’ face when he jogged out to right for the top of the ninth. But to say that Kearns is “not seeing the ball well” is a bit of an understatement: true only if you can claim he hasn’t seen the ball well since he arrived from Cincinnati in July of 2006.Back then, some in the Nats’ front office hailed Kearns as the second coming of Vlad Guerrero, who slipped away from the Expos, back in 2003. Guerrero was then (and still may be) the best hitter in baseball (well, if you don’t count this guy). But if Kearns was ever going to be Guerrero then, it seemed to me, it was highly unlikely that the Reds would part with him, no matter how desperate they were for pitching. For us Nats fans, it would be just fine if “country” (there is a growing coterie of Kearns partisans out in right field who call him this) would regularly hit .289 with 25 or so home runs — rather than struggling to breach the Mendoza line. By the way: Vlad “sees the ball well.”

The closest I ever came to really understanding what people mean when they say that a player “sees the ball well” came in the middle of the 1982 season. The summer of 1982 was fascinating. There was a good race in the American League, with the then-California Angels being led by third baseman Doug DeCinces, their newest acquisition. DeCinces had come over during the winter in a trade with Baltimore for Dan “Disco Dan” Ford — one of the greatest trades in Angels’ history. The Halos had a murderer’s row of hitters: Boone, Carew, Grich, Lynn, Jackson and Baylor. DeCinces was the throw-in, the on-base guy from Baltimore with the okay-glove who had never quite lived up to the billing he had received after being drafted in the third round of the 1970 draft. He was the highly touted replacement for the legendary Brooks Robinson.

Of course, DeCinces could never really replace Robinson and while the Baltimore fans understood that, Baltimore’s announcers were forever mentioning that DeCinces’ glove could never equal Robinson’s. “Robinson would have had that one,” they would say. And so DeCinces was shipped west. (The guy who replaced DeCinces was an anonymous character from Havre de Grace, Maryland by the name of Cal Ripken.) Anyway …. for a time in the summer of 1982, long about mid-July to mid-August if I recall, Doug DeCinces suddenly became the best hitter in baseball. People noticed. I remember tuning in to the Game of the Week just to see him, and checking the papers every day to see what he had done. Other players talked about what he was doing in hushed tones and the likes of Baylor and Jackson and Carew would stand and watch him during batting practice. He hit fricking everything. Even Reggie was in awe. 

For a time there wasn’t anything DeCinces couldn’t hit, and a player who had wracked up a fairly average home run total of 4, 11, 11, 19, 28, 16, 16 and 13 home runs over the course of his eight-year career was suddenly putting them out with incredible regularity. He hit thirty that year, most of them in the hottest weeks of California’s deep summer. I remember someone (Vin Scully I think) interviewed him after one of his more prodigious shots in Anaheim. What was his secret? And DeCinces shrugged: he said he was just seeing the ball well. And Scully asked what that meant. And DeCinces answer was priceless: “When it comes up there,” he said, “it looks like a watermelon.”

But nothing lasts forever. By September, DeCinces had cooled off, Milwaukee triumphed in the playoffs (California was the better team), and St. Louis beat the Brewers in seven games in one of the most exciting World Series ever played. DeCinces played for four more years before heading to Japan and then was out of baseball. But for a time, in the summer of 1982, Doug DeCinces “saw the ball” better than any baseball player at the time. We might wish the same for Austin Kearns.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your 2008 Florida Marlins:

Okay — well it’s not that bad, but with Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis gone to Detroit (a salary dump, in essence, that saved the team $18 million), whatever the Marlins have left will probably cost them a decent season. And just to make it clear, here’s what they have left.

The Marlins project Ramirez at shortstop and the newly acquired Dallas McPherson at third (maybe), with Mike Jacobs at first and Dan Uggla at second. I hate Jacobs — he’s just the kind of grating “pepperpot” player that I can’t stand. The newly acquired Cameron Maybin is the great hope in center (he has to be at least a year away — at least), with Josh Willingham (who I think is actually one heck of a player), in left and Jeremy Hermida in right (Hermida is also a year away, come to think of it, though he’s been in the majors now for three seasons). At catcher, the Marlins have inserted a former Tiger, Mike Rabelo, who has played in 52 major league games. To help the kids, the front office has brought in Luis Gonzalez — who is 40.

Yikes.

Everyone raves about Ramirez, of course, and dubs him the next superstar, a future hall of famer. Maybe, but he reminds me of George Bell — which is, come to think of it, saying a lot. Bell was a hell of a hitter back in the ’80s for Toronto (he once hit 47 home runs), but he tailed off quickly and could never keep his wind. He was relentlessly booed by the Blue Jays fans (they’re Canadians) and he responded by telling the press: “They can kiss my purple butt.” Watching him run the bases that last season for the White Sox wore me out (he was traded there by the Cubs, for Sammy Sosa). Bell and Ramirez are built almost exactly alike and have a similar swing, something I noticed about Ramirez last year, when I had to suffer through three, count em, three Marlins’ games at RFK. (I got three this year too — after going into my draft with only one goal: no Marlins games.)

But the Marlins less-than-mediocre team will surely be offset by a stellar pitching staff of Mark Hendrickson, Sergio Mitre (Sergio Meat Tray), Scott Olsen and Andrew Miller.

Who?

The good news is the Marlins will soon have a new stadium, which will cost them all of $480 million — tops. Here’s what it looks like:

I told my friend Tom: “It must be made out of wood.” Nope: it’s made out of concrete, and glass, and “stucco.” No kidding. It looks like it’s made out of bubble gum. There’s this description: “The stadium breaks the trend started by Camden Yards of the ‘old time’ or retro look. It features a sleek 21st century design meant to capture the architecture in South Florida.” We have no idea what that means. It might mean this:

In truth, it’s about mid-range in cost for a stadium of that size and it will keep the Marlins in Florida, where they will soon be known as the Miami Marlins. About time. There is this: in all of the years that the Marlins have been playing this game, they have only been good twice — and both years they’ve won the World Series. But not this year. Compared to them, the Nats look like the ’27 Yankees.

Projected Finish: Dead Last.

Phillies’ second-year pitcher Kyle Kendrick (10 – 4; 3.87 e.r.a. in ’07) was informed on Saturday that he was being traded to Japan’s Nomura Giants. Given his impressive rookie season, and the fact that he’s listed on the Phils’ depth chart as their number three starter, he probably figured he’d be with the team as least through the first week of spring training. His reaction, as you might expect, was pure “deer in the headlights.” The only problem was, it was a joke in which the manager, traveling secretary, assistant G.M. and Kendrick’s own agent were in on. Talk about piling on the kid. I guess pepper spray in the jock has gone out of style. He might have gotten a hint about the prank if he knew his Japanese teams better. It’s the “Yomiuri” Giants. But at that point the Texas native was probably trying to figure out where he could get his last meal of beef ribs before going to the airport. When the Phils come to D.C. in May he should be greeted with signs saying, “Sayonara Kyle!”