WASHINGTON (AP) -If the Washington Nationals decided not to return from the All-Star break, would anyone really notice?
Surely the baseball world would survive, perhaps even thrive, without its worst team, one that is 36-60, is batting a majors-low .239 and has been shut out a majors-high 12 times heading into Friday’s game at Atlanta.
Washington is a team that has no superstars, a ton of injuries and not much personality. A team so uninteresting that a meager 9,000 households – the fewest by far in the country – are watching the average game on television in the local market.
They are the nondescript Nationals, a bad rebuilding team that’s barely on the radar.
“Big picture, we feel great. Long term, we feel great,” team president Stan Kasten said. “But the daily bumps and bruises are still painful to go through.”
Kasten was speaking metaphorically, but bumps and bruises and worse helped doomed the season not long after it started. During the first half, the Nationals made 20 disabled list moves involving 15 players, with All-Star shortstop Cristian Guzman the only opening night starter not to visit the DL. Manager Manny Acta has used 82 lineups in 96 games.
“The constellation of misfortune is striking,” said Dr. Ben Shaffer, the very busy team orthopedist. “It seems biblical. But the reality is there are a number of different events that are not related, and most of them are traumatic and unavoidable.”
And yet injuries are just part of the story. There’s also the matter of performance.
Austin Kearns and Wily Mo Pena, two-thirds of an outfield that was supposed to provide some pop to the lineup, are both hitting .205 and have combined for six home runs. Ronnie Belliard, of all people, leads the team in homers, with nine. The starting pitching has been decent for the most part, but the team ERA ranks among the bottom third in the majors.
With the second half of the season a wash, the Nationals have already started promoting prospects from the minors, players who are key to Kasten’s plan to rebuild the franchise from the ground up. A promising sign that doesn’t grab headlines: The three top farm teams all have records well over .500.
“It’s clear what extraordinary progress we’ve made in just two years,” Kasten said. “It’s been a very short amount of time to do that, and yet it’s happened, and nothing good could come until that happened.”
Meanwhile, what little attention the Nationals are getting isn’t positive.
Last week, two fans died while on the upper deck of a bus arranged by the team to carry fans to its stadium from a distant parking lot.
General manager Jim Bowden became the first name to surface as a person interviewed by the FBI as part of a probe into the skimming of bonus money from Dominican Republic prospects.
Owner Ted Lerner is withholding millions of dollars in rent for the new ballpark and is asking for $100,000 per day in damages because he claims the stadium wasn’t finished on time, a case that hardly plays well in the public eye when considering that the $611 million facility – paid for by taxpayers – did host its first game as scheduled.
After a half-season, that new stadium, Nationals Park, is starting to look as plain as the team. Sure, it’s a clean and pleasant place to watch a game, but it’s short on distinctive features that would make it a must-see attraction.
The cherry trees beyond the left-field bleachers – supposedly the distinctive Washington-flavored feature – are barely noticeable. The Capitol dome is visible only from a few sections in the upper deck. At least the Nationals could boast that they were playing in the country’s first certified environmentally friendly ballpark – until they cashed in that goodwill by inviting in ExxonMobil as a sponsor, prompting a protest outside the gates at a game last month.
Attendance is averaging a middle-of-the-pack 30,000 per game, even with the spike that comes from curious fans who just want to see what the new park looks like.
Last-place teams often remain interesting because they have colorful or standout players – Seattle, for example, has Ichiro Suzuki, at least – or because the team is imploding. Elijah Dukes, Lastings Milledge and Paul Lo Duca have made more than their share of off-the-field news in the past, but Dukes and Milledge are on the DL, and Lo Duca lost his starting catcher’s job to Jesus Flores.
That leaves Nationals fans to root for nice guys who don’t have much to say. Asked last week about a victory that ended a six-game losing streak, Kory Casto offered this gem: “Any time you can be on the winning end, it’s a lot better than being on the losing end.”
Acta sets the team’s steady, matter-of-fact tone, rarely raising his voice or calling out a player. His assessment of the team’s first half was par for the course.
“We’re not frustrated. We love what we do,” the manager said. “We just had a tough half. We’re looking forward to the second half – for our offense to get better, to play better defense and have a better second half.”
And maybe to get a few more people to pay attention.
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AP freelance writer Daimon Eklund contributed to this report.
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