The Origin Story

If I'm the father of this blog, then Ladson's 2011 Nationals Season Outlook is surely its mother. The New Year's Day tradition comes in the form of '10 Burning Questions,' where Ladson raises (and answers) what he believes are the 10 questions that will most impact the 2011 season.  Let's skip down the list a bit:

9. Should the Nationals re-sign Willie Harris?

E-22.  At least he had 32 RBIs.

This is not satire. Question 9 actually happened.  To nobody's surprise, Ladson's answer was a resounding 'Yes':

"The answer is yes. [You've got to appreciate the overly emphatic, hackneyed start.]

Currently, the Nationals have no one who can play more than three positions [I understand providing your manager with options off the bench; however, this is a borderline non-sequitur unless MLB reduced the Nationals active roster to 12 players or something.  Extra points for the arbitrary cutoff of four positions, though.]

Harris can play every position except for pitcher, first base or squat behind the plate. ['Squat behind the plate' is technically not a position. On the topic of technicalities, anyone can play any position - they'll just do it really poorly. Kind of like Willie Harris will do it. Lastly, if Ronnie Belliard can play first base I'm pretty sure anyone can.]

He drove in 32 runs despite hitting under the Mendoza line last year. [How does hitting under .200 support the implication that 32 RBIs is impressive?  If sabermetrics has had ANY effect on baseball, it is that you should be excommunicated from the baseball community for believing an RBI total tells you anything useful by itself.  The simple fact is that Willie Harris' value - offensively and defensively - was below the replacement level in 2010.]

The Nationals continue to have interest in Harris, who probably will not sign with a club until after the New Year." [The Nationals did not offer Harris a contract.]

Based on Ladson's prior history of shilling for Willie Harris, I knew he privately thought Willie's status was one of the most pressing issues facing the team.  The shocking bit was that he was so public about his belief that re-signing a 32 year-old career bench player coming off a sub-replacement level season was a 'burning question.'  This isn't some guy on a message board; this is the Nationals beat writer. Shouldn't he be held to some kind of standard?  What criterion is he being judged on that allows him to keep his job?  Is he extremely punctual or something?  At this point, Ladson is a half-step away from posting soup recipes on nationals.com just to meet whatever his quota is. And getting away with it.  This is loony. So much so that it compelled me to start a blog.

(This isn't a 'Willie Harris is terrible' post, even though Willie Harris is terrible.  If you're interested in quantifying how poor, you can do so on his baseball-reference.com and fangraphs.com player pages.  Notice the high comparison score at BR for classic Expo and current MASN analyst F.P. Santangelo.  Nice.)