So Phil Wood and Jim Bowden Walk Into a Bar

The always diplomatic and patient JayBeeeee went after Phil Wood yesterday with a rant somewhat related to my post from yesterday. His question isn't important, but Phil's answer is. But Phil's answer is really two answers/observations that he blends into one, which sort of makes a muddle of the discussion.

The first part is good ol' gossip. He throws out the idea that Stan Kasten is a brilliant mastermind: He wanted to fire Bowden, but Bowden's first-class ass-kissery to Cousin Mark made him an untouchable. So StanK played politics, giving ol' Leatherpants enough rope that he could hang himself.

Interesting idea, and I can definitely see parts of it. Question though: if the Smiley thing hadn't surfaced, would StanK still be sitting on the sideline waiting for Bodes to trip up? That explanation seems awfully convenient, in some respects, even if there's probably a grain of truth to it.

Anyway, where Phil goes off the rails is in the second part:

[L]et me ask you this: Have you ever heard any big league executive in any sport come out and say, "Hey, we got nothing. No hope here." Of course you haven't. No one has. If painting a pretty picture is lying to the fans, then everyone's guilty. And "the plan" wasn't a sham. It's exactly what they're doing now. No plan will work if the guy in charge doesn't follow it, and that was happening until last March. And, while I'm occasionally semi-conscious, I have a clear conscience. As for indirectly working for the Lerners, their share of MASN is pretty tiny, and if you want to work as a baseball broadcaster in this market, you have no other options. I can say this, they take well thought out criticism very well. It's the shoot-from-the-hip kind that falls flat.

There's a difference between painting a pretty picture for the fans and the outright kinds of lies they made. They didn't say "We have an improving scouting operation." They didn't say "We're light-years ahead of where we were when MLB ran the club." They didn't say "we're well on our way to having a first-rate scouting operation."

They said they had EVERYTHING THEY NEEDED. They said that they ALREADY were in tip-top shape.

Those first examples are examples of how to spin something without it being a lie. What they said, instead, were lies. How to rectify Chico's story saying that they've been running on the cheap with Svrulga's old story about how they were already doing it first-rate? You can't.

Yes, every team needs to spin. The team, ownership in particular, has been far too tone deaf and inattentive to these things. But there's a difference between trying to influence the debate, even via propaganda, and obfuscation and spinning.

He says that "The PLAN!" wasn't a sham. But how can he say that? The team's current scouts admit it was. The key there is the past tense. "The PLAN!" might not currently be a sham, but it almost certainly HAS been.

He says that "The PLAN!" didn't work because of the guy in charge. Certainly true to an extent, but that's making the assumption that Bowden had all the financial resources he needed, just that he chose not to use them. Maybe that's true. I don't know. But I look at a situation like with Aaron Crow and JP Ramirez, where the latter's signing happened only because the former didn't, and wonder how much of a financial backing the guy had. Did the Nats run a bare-bones scouting operation (the words of one of their current, recently hired scouts) because Bowden didn't want to or because he had to?

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One last point... It might've got lost in yesterday's disjointed rant, but that wasn't meant to be so much of a criticism at what Rizzo's doing now. For all we know, they're on the right track -- although their continued lip service to an international and not just Dominican presence is disappointing.

The point I tried to make was that, even if they ARE doing the right thing, none of us can possibly know that now, by virtue of the lying (or spinning, as Phil would say) they did before. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt; they're going to have to earn it.