Washington Nationals

The Washington Nationals have a lot riding on the upcoming season. Though 2012 is supposed to be the beginning of the team’s window of contention, a bad 2011 would be devastating. Every last bit of fan good will—if any remains—would be forever lost.

Six years of losing ugly is too much. A seventh year would end the Miracle in Washington before it ever started.

When the Washington Nationals signed Jayson Werth to a $126 million contract this past offseason, they plugged a hole in their outfield and brought in one of the few true five-tool players in baseball.

And because their first-round pick was protected thanks to their dismal 2010 record, all they had to give up was their second-round pick in this June’s MLB Amateur Draft.

Bad teams don't become good ones because of can't-miss prospects like Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper. First-round picks are expected to succeed at the major league level.

No, teams like the Washington Nationals must rely on late-round picks who have no business becoming major leaguers to fill the gaping holes in their roster. When that happens, fortunes change on a dime.

The Nationals need those kinds of players—players like J.P. Ramirez.

Coming to fans everywhere, the latest installment of Washington D.C. baseball...National Treasures: The Missing Strasburg. Starring the D-list celebrities of the fantasy baseball world: Livan “National League Harlot” Hernandez, Jordan “Not That Zimmerman” Zimmermann, and featuring Jason Marquis and John Lannan as trusty sidekicks.

Looking back at last year’s chapter of National Treasures, it seems like not many will buy into the 2011 version. 

By Todd Farino, www.thecloserreport.com

Well, here comes Drew Storen. 

Last February, I wrote about Storen and told my readers that he would eventually get called up, but wouldn't be the most effective pitcher in his rookie season.  In 2010, Storen put up solid numbers with a 3.58 ERA and a 1.27 WHIP. 

By the end of the season, he was closing for the Nationals and saved five games in seven chances. 

Jayson Werth really loves No. 28. He feels such attachment to it, in fact, that when he sat down at the negotiating table with the Washington Nationals, he and his agent demanded that a clause in the contract guarantee him that jersey number. The Nats obliged, much to the dismay of first baseman/outfielder Mike Morse, who wore the number in 2010.

The Washington Nationals have been adding players to their team who the cellar-dwelling Pittsburgh Pirates have rejected at one time or another. These are players there were among the most volatile, but also among the most promising ones on their original team. And their specific quirks, plus those of Washington, make them particularly useful to the Nationals.

As I believed at the time, the Nats got the better of the Burnett and Nyjer Morgan for Joel Hanrahan and Lastings Milledge deal in the summer of 2009.

With the sixth pick in the 2011 Major League Baseball Amateur Draft, the Washington Nationals select …

…Taylor Jungmann?

Maybe.

While it is way too early to be making this kind of prediction, I’m going to anyway. And really, it does make a lot of sense.

My big knock on the Washington Nationals’ offseason so far has been their failure to upgrade their starting rotation or bullpen.

Are you disappointed in how the Nationals’ offseason went?

So many seem to be, suggesting that the team’s relative inaction was the result of an ongoing malfeasance of management that still carries the stink of the Jim Bowden era.

But really, that isn’t true at all. All the non-deals left the team better off in the long run. Why wait all these years for the fruits of the farm system to ripen and then block their entry to the major leagues?