Baseball's team to beat in 2013 was a laughingstock just three years ago, but ?step by step? it stayed patient, focused and got a little lucky in its rebuild
THE BIG READ
BY JOE POSNANSKI
updated 12:09 a.m. ET March 29, 2013
VIERA, Fla. - There probably have not been 10 teams in all of baseball history that were quite as hopeless as the 2009 Washington Nationals. They lost 103 games ? the second year in a row that they lost 100 ? and were the worst team in baseball.
But it was worse than that. The Nationals had just moved into a new park a year earlier ... and nobody in the nation?s capital seemed to care. They were 13th in the National League in attendance. Their television ratings appeared to be a misprint. The Nationals averaged just 12,000 homes. That?s ?Wayne?s World? territory. And that was WAY UP from what their ratings in 2008.
But it was worse than that. Their farm system was seemingly barren. Baseball America ranked them 21st among the 30 teams. They did not have a single prospect ranked in anybody?s Top 30. The future seemed about as hopeless as the present.
But it was worse than that. The present wasn?t just hopeless, it was hideous.
Their right fielder, Elijah Dukes, had been involved in so many off-field incidents, the team hired a former police officer to watch him at all times (though not too well since Dukes would talk later of smoking pot before Nationals games). To play center field, they acquired Nyjer Morgan, who said his on-field name was ?Tony Plush? and would show a special talent for barreling into catchers.Their best player, Adam Dunn, was so bad defensively in left field and at first base that despite hitting 38 homers and posting a .398 on-base percentage, the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic still rated him worse than a replacement player (his minus-43 fielding runs is the worst fielding performance in baseball history).
The pitching staff's 5.00 ERA was the worst in the National League. The starting pitching was such an irreparable mess that, in desperation, they signed 34-year-old Livan Hernandez, who had pitched for five teams the previous four years. And one of those teams was the Washington Nationals.
When it gets this bad, what do you do? Where do you even begin? And how does it then become baseball's best team in three years?
?Step by step, without skipping steps,? GM Mike Rizzo says.
Can it really come down to a simple cliche?
* * *
Mike Rizzo spent 12 years on the road as a baseball scout in the Upper Midwest back in the 1980s and '90s. Who knows what a baseball scout thinks about as he drives along those long roads up in Iowa and and Minnesota and Michigan looking for ballplayers? All Rizzo ever really wanted to do was play ball. It was what his father, Phil, wanted to do before he became a baseball scout. In fact, it was Phil who told his son that the dream was over, that he just wasn?t good enough to play in the big leagues, that he needed to find a different way to stay in the game.
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So for 12 long years, Mike did what his father did. He drove those wet and icy roads of the Upper Midwest, enduring the frost, predicting the rain, showing up at muddy fields in the hopes of seeing any game at all, much less a fastball with good sink or a shortstop with range. Rizzo never claimed to be able to see what other scouts could not. But over time, sure, he picked up a few things. He developed a few theories about the game. He came to believe that the best ballplayers ? the WINNING ballplayers ? combined two things: Talent and attitude.
The Washington Nationals' rise began in June of 2009, when Rizzo was still the interim general manager. They had the first pick in the draft ? and it was a good year to have that pick because one of the most exciting young pitchers in baseball history, Stephen Strasburg, was coming out of San Diego State. The Nationals took him, of course. And with the 10th pick, they took another college pitcher, Drew Storen. They liked his makeup.
To give you an idea of where the Nationals were at that time, here was their most used lineup of 2009.
- Anderson Hernandez, 2B
- Nick Johnson, 1B
- Ryan Zimmerman, 3B
- Adam Dunn, LF
- Elijah Dukes, CF
- Austin Kearns, RF
- Jesus Flores, c
- Alberto Gonzalez, SS
Um ... yeah. Rizzo realized pretty quickly that of those players (and other regulars like Cristian Guzman and Josh Willingham), only Ryan Zimmerman ? the Nationals' first-round pick in 2005 ? was good enough to play every day for a winning National League team (Dunn?s bat was good enough, but only in the American League, where he could be DH). The news was no better on the pitching staff ? only 2007 draft picks Ross Detwiler and Jordan Zimmermann seemed good enough.
So Rizzo went to work. Nick Johnson and Anderson Hernandez were traded away just before Rizzo was officially named GM in August. Dukes: Released. Kearns: Granted free agency. Cristian Guzman: Traded. Josh Willingham: Traded. Adam Dunn: Granted free agency. Pitcher after pitcher was let go. It was a two-year flurry. As Rizzo told a friend, he was getting rid of the untalented and the a-------.
?We had a plan,? Rizzo says. ?We knew that we had a lot of work to do. We weren?t going to be able to build it one way. We needed to acquire as much talent as we could and in as many ways as we could acquire that talent. Trades. Free agency. The draft. Everywhere.?
?Let me tell you something about Mike Rizzo,? Nationals manager Davey Johnson says. ?I don?t think the guy ever sleeps.?
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More newsHow Nats went from ugly to elite
Posnanski: The Washington Nationals used to be a laughingstock. And when that happens, where do you even begin to rebuild? And how do they then become baseball's best team in three years? ?Step by step, without skipping steps,? GM Mike Rizzo says.
Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/51365732/ns/sports-baseball/
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