Time to Go

OK, the World Series is over. Congrats to the White Sox, they earned it, but I still haven't decided whether Game 4 was 9 innings of good pitching or 9 innings of bad hitting. Jerry Reinsdorf should be in a good mood; maybe now he'll drag himself down to DC and finish negotiating the stadium lease. And now that the World Series ban on major baseball announcements has expired, we can get serious about anticipating an ownership group.

On the home front, an announcement regarding Jim Bowden's six-month contract extension is expected in the next few days. There is some concern in the blogosphere that Bowden's retention spells the end of Cap'n Hook's tenure as manager. A decision on the future of the coaching staff is expected in mid-November (concurrent with an ownership decision?) Certainly Tavares/Bowden and Robinson have repeatedly been identified as warring camps, but with everyone essentially working on month-to-month contracts I don't see drastic change as all that likely.

The other possibility though, is that these personnel moves can be interpreted as clues to the identity of the Nats eventual owners. There have been suggestions that one or more ownership groups have pledged to retain Bowden (and possibly Tavares). If that's true, Bowden's extension and Robinson's dismissal could foreshadow MLB's decision. But deciphering all that involves the extensive reading of chicken entrails, and I'm not prepared to go there.

Federal Baseball and The Curly W take on a topic I have more or less ignored: Tony Tavares musing about messing around with single game ticket pricing for next year. Of course, the reason I didn't pay much attention is that the NTP crew are season ticket holders (Thanks Dave!) so individual game price fluctuations don't affect us.

While variable pricing and its bastard child package purchasing aren't new or unique, applying these policies to the Nats does come with some risk. One of the joys of the inaugural season was strolling up to the box office and purchasing a $7 outfield ticket to see the Nats play just about anyone. If those tickets suddenly become $10 when the Mets or Phillies are in town and $15 when the Yankees come to RFK you risk alienating Nats fans. Sure, visiting team fans will probably pay the premium, but do we really want to turn RFK into Camden Yards South, where visiting fans outnumber home fans at almost every game? The Nats don't have the kind of established fan base that will tolerate this kind of money-grubbing BS from a team that made $25 million last year playing in an dank hole of a stadium.

Brendan & Basil explore the subject in much greater detail, check them out.

Finally, the numerical whiz kids at Baseball Prospectus have identified the key to the Nats 2006 campaign. Everyone needs to stay healthy. Hope they didn't burn out their slide rules on that complex statistical analysis.

He's Tan, Rested & Ready

Bowden in '06! The Post reports that the Nationals are working on a short-term contract extension for sharp-dressed GM Jim Bowden. It seems a little sketchy that our team president, whose contract expires next week is negotiating an extension with our GM, whose contract expires next week, but the whole thing has to be approved by MLB anyway, so that's okay.

The contract extension would allow Bodes to get to work luring overpriced and/or undertalented free agents to RFK, but would not guarantee him a job once the new ownership group is announced. Say it with me now people: "Bodes in 'o6! 4 More Months! 4 More Months!"

On the Hallelujah! front, in the same article MLB President Bob DuPuy suggested for the first time that new owners might be named before the new stadium lease is finalized. Given that there was never any reason to impose this artificial deadline in the first place, MLB's flexibility is refreshing, if they stick to it.

Anybody got any tylenol?

So per our annual homecoming tradition my fraternity held a touch football game over the weekend. This game is always a fun time and this year we had fourteen people. Fourteen people who are now so sore they can't move. I consider myself to be in decent shape and I'm still hurting three days later.

I can't imagine what an NFL lineman feels like after a game. I realize they're in shape and they work on conditioning year round but you can't escape the fact that they're punishing themselves every game. Baseball is a little different but I think the catcher deserves a little credit for being a tough guy.

Filler

Slow news week, but I haven't quite been reduced to inventing pantomimes for Ozzie Guillen to use when summoning relievers out of the 'pen. A quick spin around the media dial:

In the Times, Thom Loverro implores the city to keep a close eye on stadium architects HOK, lest we end up with a carbon copy of the yawning mediocrity that is U.S. Cellular Field. Thom cites the train that runs along the top of the stadium in Houston as an example of local touches that give a stadium character. I'm all for making ballparks distinctive and unique to their cities, but I don't do cutesy. Unless we can get a replica Washington Monument to rise out of a strategically placed centerfield silo after every homer, limit the celebration to fireworks.

Jose Vidro tells Nationals.com that his knee is feeling better, and he might pass on surgery. If Vidro wants to wait and see how the knee responds to additional therapy that's his business, but if this is a case where he's eventually going to need to go under the knife he should get it over with, so he can start rehab and be ready to go in March. In other injury news Luis Ayala is scheduled to have surgery this Friday to remove a bone spur from his right elbow.

Also on Nationals.com, Bill Ladson proves once again that he will not be hindered by the absence of actual news. Insights from the latest Q&A: Preston Wilson probably won't be back, Cristian Guzman probably will; Vinny Castilla's job is in jeopardy and Keith Osik is still retired. (I sense the possibility for a running, SNL-like "and Franco is still dead" joke here.) Tune in next week when Bill reveals that declining seasonal temperatures will likely lead to increased home heating costs.

Reason No. 2 to Root for the Astros

Reason #1 is of course Jerry "I'm far too busy and important to get up off my fat ass and finish negotiating your stadium lease" Reinsdorf.

Reason #2 is the White Sox unofficial theme song, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing."
"That's manly. Journey is manly. Why is Journey not manly? I heard Joe Theismann say on the radio that Journey was his favorite group, and Theismann was pretty manly, wasn't he?"
--Pierzynski, when asked why they didn't choose a song that's more manly (MLB.com)

Legends of the Fall

No, this post will not be a paean to Scott Podsednik. (Though man alive, if you're going to save up your homers for the postseason, you can't do much better than Brad Lidge in the bottom of the ninth in the World Series.) Nor will it be a tribute to another of Dave & Watson's titanic semi-annual drinking binges. Rather a somewhat pedestrian update on the Nats' Arizona Fall League sluggers:

• Brendan Harris continues to dominate AFL pitching. His .533 batting average leads the league, and his 1.337 OPS ain't too shabby neither. The knock on Harris has been his defense, but he has 0 errors in 11 games in Arizona, playing 2B, 3B and SS behind some very shaky pitching. If Jamey Carroll gets too expensive this offseason, Harris is one possible replacement part.
  
• Larry Broadway's .368 average is second on the team, with an impressive 1.023 OPS. But Larry's problems have been well chronicled. He's a Nick Johnson clone on a team with no shortage of left-handed hitters, so he might just be putting on an excellent audition for other teams.
  
• Ryan Zimmerman took a couple weeks off to recover from his MLB debut, but he's picked up right where he left off, hitting .353 in 4 games, including one 5-5 performance. Dutch took Tony Blanco's spot on the roster, and Tony left the team after hitting a respectable .286 in the AFL.

Condolences

A tip 'o the NTP cap to the late Ted Bonda, the former Cleveland Indians owner who gave Cap'n Hook his first managing job back when he was just an Ensign. From the AP article:

"When Cleveland was in danger of losing the Indians in the 1970s, [Bonda] led a coalition of business owners who bought the club. The group lost revenue each year, but Bonda used his own money to keep the team in town."

Are you listening, Dread Pirate Smulyan? His own money.

A Redskins Moment

Yes I know, wrong sport. But I can't pass up an opportunity to abuse Washington's worst sports columnist, Mike Wise. Wise never met a bandwagon he didn't attempt to hijack for his own purposes. Today he uses the Skins 52-17 victory to declare that we are all bad people for criticizing Mark Brunell last season.

Apparently Brunell's teenage daughter was driven to tears by chants of "We Want Ramsey!" at FedEx Field last year. I myself was sometimes driven to tears by what happened after we got Ramsey, but that's beside the point. Brunell was god-awful last season. By any objective standard he was one of the worst starting QBs in the NFL. Benching him wasn't anything near as close a call as Joe Gibbs made it. It was a mercy demotion.

Brunell is playing much, much, ridiculously much better this season. I'm happy for him and for the team. But that doesn't mean I was wrong to boo him last year, or that I regret it now. There are very few opportunities in life to simply coast on past performance, and that's as it should be. Honest competition, in sports, business or politics, increases the odds that the best people will be put in key positions. If Mike Wise understood that, he would be able to celebrate Mark Brunell's resurgence without demonizing those who recognized his obvious decline. But then Mike Wise wouldn't be the hack columnist I love to hate.

XM pays off again

So I was listening to XM 175, which is MLB Home Plate, this afternoon. As I turned on my car this afternoon, the "The Show" with Kevin Kennedy and Rob Dibble was on. And the guest of the day was our very own Jim Bowden.

Now I tuned in a little late, so I didn't hear everything. The topic they were on was that of ownership. Jim was explaining that his take on the situation was that he anticipated an ownership announcement after the World Series, and that ownership team taking control quickly after that. Kevin and Rob then asked about the current situation. Jim explained that while one of the scouts had a long term contract, he didn't think it wise to do any other long term staff or management contracts since he anticipated that the new owner would want to do it their way. He then explained that it made the most sense for the Nationals organization to make it easy on the new owners to take control and put their own people into place.

Kevin and Rob, after the interview closed, noted that the Nationals had a great year, and did much better than anyone anticipated. They pointed out that Washington had "an amazing fan base", totalling the 2.7 million fans for the games, and that they anticipated it would only get better with the new stadium.

Nate and I talked on the phone after this, and I relayed this to him. My observations on the topic were the following:

1. From a business perspective, Jim is right. He's positioning the Nats new owner to be able to put people into place quickly, rather than displace/disturb/deal with existing deals for the internal staff.

2. I was pleased with the "national level" coverage. We focus so much on the Washington press, bloggers, etc, that sometimes it's nice to step back and look at the perspective of those who are looking at the bigger picture.