CASUAL WASHINGTON NATIONALS ROSTER PREVIEW

I am a casual baseball fan, at best, and adopted the Nationals as my own the day they moved to D.C. from Montreal, though technically it took them more than a day to move there, plus unpacking, and picking which lamp looked best in the family room, etc, etc. But I have contemplated even getting that “listen to MLB games on the interwebs” thing, though I probably won’t because let’s be honest here – am I gonna listen to old dudes describe baseball games or scour music blogs for obscure Iranian psych-funk from the early ‘70s? What is this – 2012 or 1943?
I thought though that it would be important, in this year of Nationals Hope that Something Great is Beginning, where even the possibility of playoffs has been bandied around like slop rags at a Tijuana donkey sex show, that I should go through the roster, and share my thoughts.

PROJECTED LINE-UP POSITION PLAYERS
SS IAN DESMOND – One of the dudes who is supposed to be awesome who has not gotten awesome yet. Baseball is full of guys like these. His name is Ian, which judging from the baseball card collection of my youth, is a promising name for a solid middle infielder.
2B DANNY ESPINOSA – He is the other guy who is just like Ian Desmond. I guess if one of them ends up awesome, this is great, and they are both still considered young and developing by baseball standards. But also the dudes who put together baseball teams will always be like, “Oh shit, that dude is a motherfuckin’ crystal cut diamond in the rough, you wait and see,” and you wait and wait and don’t ever see shit.
3B RYAN ZIMMERMAN – Just re-signed to a gazillion dollar contract, but is a solid dude, so I don’t mind. The kind of guy you can feel good being the veteran star of your team, although there is a certain Will Clark Bomb aspect to Zimmerman where we might find out in ten years he hates anybody who is not white and used to throw fried chicken at Dmitri Young in the locker room. Of course, perhaps out of stubborn militant pride, Dmitri Young gave up fried chicken, which is why he lost so much weight there that one magical stretch. Where is Dmitri Young? He should be our AA batting coach. I hope he was. I think a few four-hour bus rides sitting next to Dmitri Young going from Bumfuck, Pennsylvania, to Bumfuck, Virginia, probably would’ve been very good for Bryce Harper.
LF MICHAEL MORSE – Sort of came out of nowhere last year to be good. Unfortunately, contrary to what those dudes who put together baseball teams will tell you, in 2012 this is not always indicative of someone finding their stroke, but perhaps some weird experimental European PED. Still though, I have a friend from high school named Mike Morse who is a morning DJ in the Raleigh/Durham radio market, so because of that I support this other Mike Morse who instead plays baseball.
1B ADAM LAROCHE – I don’t know man, at 1B we had Dmitri Young, then Adam Dunn, both of whom are personable as fuck. Thus, Adam LaRoche is useless to me. Do we have some super dude coming up? Wasn’t there a reason they didn’t let Harper play 1B? I think as a casual fan instead of a super baseball dork, there’s something I’m missing here.
RF JAYSON WERTH – Lol, Shaggy Werth got a fat sack of Scooby snacks and all of a sudden wasn’t worth a shit. And now people are convincing themselves that he will start being good again. Whatever man. I can dig it. In order to go from being the Washington Nationals sucky team of eternity to Washington Nationals legitimate franchise, you have to show the world you are willing and able to blow money on useless shit, to show you are able to compete with the Yankees and Phillies and Tigers and Red Sox of the world. I would rather see them blow it on Werth and draft a bunch of dudes who are going to be good one day, just wait and see, than do what the Marlins did where they blow a ton of money at their new ballpark by hoping flashy names and a kitschy park will somehow make people care. At least the Nats are building something, and any long-term building project needs some overpaid stoner guy to be considered an elder and just kinda watch things come together and go, “Yeah, this shit is good.”
C WILSON RAMOS – While other people were dicking around in the offseason, Ramos got kidnapped and ransomed. At one point, motherfuckers were worried he was already dead. But then he was air rescued and now he’s back to catch baseballs. Fuck all other catchers.
CF RICK ANKIEL – Holding Harper’s spot for now, and is the rare occasion where when pitchers suddenly remember all sorts of repressed sexual abuse memories that happened at the hands (and penis) of a little league coach and can’t suddenly remember how to pitch a baseball anymore, he was able to turn it around. It took a of therapy and a complete positional change (remember, the dude was an MLB pitcher at one point), but he’s here, and he’s not queer. Or maybe he is. I don’t know. I’m good either way to be honest.

OTHER NOTABLE POSITION PLAYERS
OF BRYCE HARPER – He’s starting the year in AAA, for long-term contractual reasons, but make no fucking mistake bros, The Ultimate Harper is about to be unleashed upon the Universe, like a thousand Josh Hamiltons, blessed with the power of magma molecules from deep inside the dark mountains of Nevada/Arizona wastelands, not so much born as found under a joshua tree, surrounded by coyotes, standing on their hind legs, who gifted him to his parents, and thus gifted him to us all.
IF MARK DEROSA – I think I have a baseball card of this dude, which means he has to have been playing for at least 30 years. Wasn’t he and Manny Trillo boys or something?
IF STEVE LOMBARDOZZI – Rookie offspring of former wrestler The Brooklyn Brawler, whose cousin is fat bearded white rapper Action Bronson. I tell you this so you go watch some Action Bronson videos on youtube.

PROJECT PITCHING ROTATION
RH STEPHEN STRASBURG – I know he is supposed to be the greatest thing ever to have ever done anything, but I have to be honest with you – his goatee makes him suspicious in my mind. I do not have Excel spreadsheets and algebraic formulas to break all this down, as is the norm nowadays; I am old school, and I trust my gut, and something in my gut tells me this Strasburg kid is going to end ugly. Still though, I’ll take what we can out of him. Kerry Wood the motherfucker for all I care.
RH JORDAN ZIMMERMANN – The great thing about the possibility of Strasburg being the most awesome fucking thing ever is that Jordan Zimmermann also has some immense potential to be awesome as fuck, so in a game of hoping shit breaks well for you in terms of player development, our potential high watermark is really fucking high. As am I.
LH GIO GONZALEZ – The thing I love about the way the Nats continue to build their team is it is almost like somebody somewhere this off-season said, “You know, I know we have to let Livan Hernandez go, because he will most likely be murdered by Cuban drug lords at some point in the next two years, and we want to be removed from that. But there’s a lot of degenerate money-spending 30-something types who absolutely love Livan Hernandez. Perhaps we go throw a bunch of shit at the A’s and get this Gio Gonzelez kid, because he’s fairly insane, but he’s also young, and can eat up some innings, and might actually be pretty fucking good. But he’s crazy, so people will love him. And he most likely won’t get murdered by Cuban drug lords for at least another eight or nine years.” So they got him, and now we can all be dumbasses who go “NAT GIO” because it is a play on National Geographic and we are all retards nowadays, or at least slightly autistic as a whole, so simple stupid play on words like that make us giggle inside but we don’t call it giggling we call it lolol which feels weird to type an –ing after so I just left it like that. Man, shit is confusing nowadays.
RH EDWIN JACKSON – His name, to me at least, sounds like a gospel singer, and when I think of gospel singing, or more appropriately gospel sanging, I think of this song –

LH JOHN LANNAN – He is the fifth guy in our rotation. On the surface, that might not seem like a thing, but he has been as high as our #2 starter in the past, so trust me when I say it is a thing.

BULLPEN
RH DREW STOREN – With Joba Chamberlain’s bizarre ankle/blood-letting injury, Drew Storen now is the flattest hat in MLB, having picked that up from the Chief Chad Cordero, who is already retired apparently. Man, relievers have really become sports’ biggest bitch, haven’t they, used up and spit out like Russian whores in Prague. Storen is white as fuck. Like seriously, I bet that dude gets stoked to go to Applebees.
RH TYLER CLIPPARD – He is our set-up man, and he can go for multiple innings, which will be necessary as two of our five starters are using robot arms, one of them is old, and the other one is the crazy guy from Oakland. I know that’s only four, but fuck you. John Lannan is the other guy and I couldn’t think of how to disparage him. He’s just a hard-working second-tier starting pitcher who will help make 162 games disappear, and then hopefully sit in the bullpen during the playoffs.
RH CHIEN-MING WANG – He is already broke I think, which is a bad sign, as the key to our haphazard experimental surgery pitching rotation working was for nobody to break too badly. The fact our Wang is sore and we haven’t hit opening day is not a good sign.

So there you have it, friends. I could have also talked about Davey Johnson being a weird fucker as a manager, but weird fuckers as a manager are a dime a dozen nowadays. Davey Johnson is the perfect manager for this team at this point, to instill tradition in a tradition-less franchise, at least in this town. Maybe we get somebody else to managineer things in the future, but for now, there is nothing more perfect than Davey Johnson, who will say crazy things and take all the heat off of the young budding superstars as we wait and see, wait and see, wait and see.