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Phil,

The problem with the "progress" you talk about is it is 3 years late. It is 2010, the 3rd year in the new park and 4th year of the plan and we are now having you media types finally tell us what we knew all along.....That is, we have been lied to repeatedly by Stan and Ownership. We were told that 2007 and 2008 were low payroll years because the money was going into scouting. That turns out to be a joke. WPost article just points out that Fans were correct all along. The Plan was a shame and Jimbo was a self promoting lair and Stan is nothing more than a used care salesman in a fancy suit. You get paid indirectly by the Lerners so I expect you will make excuses for them but you have always seemed to be an honest man to me......if I am wrong can you say so with a clear conscious? ============ Someday someone - maybe me, though I suspect someone will beat me to it - will write a book about the Bowden years. That book will reveal what was really going on in the Nats' front office. I won't pretend to know exactly what happened, but my hunch is that Mr. Kasten decided early on to give Jimbo as much rope as he needed to hang himself. Would it make Stan look bad in the eyes of some? Sure. But, inasmuch as I was told by multiple sources in 2006 that Stan intended to fire Bowden within an hour of getting the club - and then was blocked from doing so by ownership - I believe that Stan decided to bide his time. It took longer than he expected to get shed of Jim, but Rizzo was his guy all along. Stan is a baseball businessman who understands the politics of the executive offices. I still believe he's the right guy for that job, and he has the utmost respect inside the game, which is more than you can say for Jim Bowden. That aside, let 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.

Phil: Nice to hear this (the "depth" problems) from someone who has been covering baseball in the area for more than the last 15 minutes, so to speak. Signing Eldred at 1B in SYR in 2009 was the first move in that direction, imo. The SYR roster in 2010 will hopefully be more a mix of ML-capable players (read: insurance policies) and draft picks taking the last step to the majors, not just a collection of 4-A level 'wannabes & never-weres'.

Thank you Phil for confirming what so many of us have known for years. The results speak for themselves. This team should have been much better and further along but Lerners have cost two 100 loss seasons and 3 years of development time. They need to speak to that if they want fans to respect them or watch their product. ====================== Just a suggestion here, Jay. Try doing a little research. You might have a point if every other team in the game had shown huge improvement in the same amount of time. Take a look at other expansion teams. Who else had to pay $450 million for the privilege of joining the cluib? The club that moved here from Montreal was a shell of a franchise. No better than most first or second year expansion teams. If there's a villain here it's MLB, not the Lerners. If you don't like the way things are run, find something else to do. As to "they need to speak to that", pray tell, who's ever done that? Did the Nationals finish dead last in attendance last year? No, they outdrew six other teams, all of whom had better records. Instant gratification might be what you're used to, but it doesn't exist in this game.

"I won't pretend to know exactly what happened, but my hunch is that Mr. Kasten decided early on to give Jimbo as much rope as he needed to hang himself. Would it make Stan look bad in the eyes of some? Sure. But, inasmuch as I was told by multiple sources in 2006 that Stan intended to fire Bowden within an hour of getting the club - and then was blocked from doing so by ownership - I believe that Stan decided to bide his time. It took longer than he expected to get shed of Jim, but Rizzo was his guy all along. Stan is a baseball businessman who understands the politics of the executive offices."

You can take the sinister interpretation of all these events, Phil, or you can take the common-sense professional interpretation to them. That common-sense interpretation would be this: Sure, Kasten wanted to replace Bowden, but more so because he wanted his own guy in there, not because he necessarily hated Bowden all that much. But the Lerners said no, you can't have your own guy because we want Bowden. So Stan decides that although Bowden wasn't his first choice for the job, he'll try to make it work anyway. For three years, from all outward appearances Bowden and Kasten worked very well together. Even a year after Bowden was forced to resign because of the weight of charges against him - all still unproved, BTW - you don't hear a single murmur of one of them saying bad things about the other. Granted, MLB is a small fraternity - not unlike for instance the ex-POTUS fraternity - so you might expect them both to keep playing nice with each other just in case they end up working together again sometime. But there's more bad words spilled among ex-Presidents about each other than you see from Bowden and Kasten. No leaked comments, no anonymous sources, nothing. So based on all this, my interpretation of these events was that they were benign business activities that unfortunately did not work out in the end, not some sinister back-biting soap opera playing out in the Nats FO for three years. Would that be your interpretation as well?

And of course the reason I'm asking is because JayB is all over the internet right now quoting your words and putting the sinister spin on them like you've given your personal imprimatur to his rantings. Just thought you might like to know that. ======== One only needs to have done the most minimal research to know that what happened here with the Nats has happened elsewhere and will continue to happen over and over again throughout professional sports. We've seen it happen here before with the Capitals years ago, with the Redskins a couple of times, with the Orioles; I mean, there was absolutely nothing unique - or sinister - about it. I am curious about one thing: if all of these internet posters want their gripes to be taken seriously, why don't they use their own real names, so they can get proper credit when they have their "eureka" moment? Until they do, they'll never really be taken seriously by anyone in the media or inside the game(s). That's just a fact. You, sir, seem to have a fairly reasoned point of view, which I respect very much. The hipshooters out there seem to prefer the "I know what I know" approach, which doesn't go very far with me. As I said, I won't pretend to know exactly what happened in the Nats' front office, but I believe that they're on the right track today. If the ballclub had been floundering for a 10-15 years I might have a different opinion.

Don't really care why this happened....the issue is it happened. The farms system is in the bottom 1/3 of MLB teams still.....Team just lost 100 games for the second year. Team lead the NL in errors for the second straight year and Nats ERA was highest in baseball. The issue is that for 3 years team was a joke and Stan did nothing but sit on his hands. That is the problem we are still paying the cost of now.