Fouled-Off Bunts: Now With 100% Unoriginal Content Edition

Nats 320 is back with the second and third parts of their interview with Kasten. Other than the news that they're phasing out Screech, Part 3 has all the good stuff.

The big news is that he overruled his staff on Soriano. Bowden, it seems, wanted to trade him for the best offer at the time, but Kasten didn't think it was a good enough deal: "We were about to trade him for NEXT TO NOTHING!! And that’s, when I had to step in, and say--NO!!. We are not going down that road. WE ARE NOT GOING TO DO STUPID THINGS!!."

(Presumably, Kasten didn't speak in CAPS)

He does get off another dodge about payroll:
"I couldn’t tell you what our Opening Day payroll will be yet. I just don’t know. Part of it being, I don’t know what my revenues will be, until I get closer to Opening Day."

This is where you have to parse the language again. He damn well knows what his revenues are going to be. They know what they're getting from local and national media. They just don't know how many tickets they're going to sell, but they certainly have a pretty damn good idea of how many. They're not going into the process blindly, especially this late in the offseason.

In scrapheap pitcher news, Ryan Franklin signed a $1 million deal with the Cardinals -- too rich for our blood! And John Thomson signed a $500K deal with the Blue Jays. Too rich for our blood! (Damn those minimum salaries preventing us from paying our players what they're really worth!)

Ho-hum. The Nats signed four Dominicans.

Apparently Jacobson had the scoop. Only now, after being spoonfed it at a press conference, do the Post, Times and MLB.com get around to reporting the no job for Frank story. (One of those stories is not like the other two, which is quite interesting. Quite interesting, indeed.)

Frank's cantankerousness (Is that really a word) in the two that aren't like the third, really comes off the wrong way, I think. I'm supposed to feel sympathy for him, which I do in some respects, but his bitterness really makes that difficult.

At the bottom of the MLB.com article is some actual on-field news. Acta says that Nuke Logan will be the assumed starting center fielder heading into spring training. (Memo to Church: Apparently there's no competition either!) Acta cites improvements needed in the defense. To be sure, that's something that really needs to be tightened up, especially with the pitching staff that's trotting out there, but I really worry about an offense that's carrying him and Cristian Guzman (not to mention Schneider and, potentially, Casto).

I'm interested, too, to see how Lopez adjusts to second. Range-wise, he's basically average, maybe a bit below. But it's his throwing that's a problem. At second, he has more time, and the throw isn't as long, but it's a more intricate play for the 2B on the DP. He's certainly going to be a 10-run (or more!) improvement over Vidro, but... We'll see.

The team also plans to carry 12 pitchers. I think that's a bit of a mistake, especially starting out on Opening Day when traditionally, a boatload of offdays allows you to skip your fifth starter for two weeks or so. But I also think that that's a bit of a mistake in the NL, where a bench is so vital.

12 pitchers and 8 starters leaves 5 spots. One goes to Flores, the other to Fick. You need a backup MI (Wilson?), a fourth outfielder (Church, who's out of options or Snelling -- is he out? He's gotta be close), and then there's just one spot left. That really eliminates flexibility, especially for PHing and Double switching, which, with Guzman and Logan, are going to be necessities. Where's Daryle Ward when you need him?

And Crushing all faith I had in his ability to be a competent manager, Acta says that Cristian Guzman is the leading candidate to bat second. Refuckingdiculous. Hopefully that's just Acta talking up a crappy player, but even Frank Robinson, the worst strategic manager in the history of the game, gave up on the Guzman batting second experiment halfway through '05.

Brian Schneider would literally be a better #2 option than Guzman. With a higher obp, why not? (I'd prefer Church or Snelling, but eh, who asked me?)

Those of you with RSS feeds of this ol' blog have seen a bunch of strange entries pop up over the last week or so. When I debuted the ol' Organizational Tree earlier, I mentioned that I'd be adding things to it. I've started creating little mini pages/profiles/scouting reports of various players -- works in progress. I got a little bit of feedback from a few people that they enjoyed the capsules, so rather than backdating them, I'll probably just run them as I do them.

If you're interested, these are the ones I've done:
Luis Ayala
Chad Cordero
John Patterson
Jon Rauch
Brian Schneider
Nick Johnson
Ryan Zimmerman