Nats' Prospects Have Been Grim

Members of the Potomac Nationals, a Class A affiliate of the Washington Nationals, warm up before a recent game at Pfitzner Stadium in Woodbridge. (By Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)

Meantime, the traded prospects have flourished. Phillips is the starting second baseman for Cincinnati and is batting .294. Lee is 9-6 for the Indians. Sizemore is Cleveland's starting center fielder and has 16 home runs and 44 RBI.

Also in 2002, the Expos traded two minor leaguers -- outfielder Jason Bay and right-hander Jim Serrano -- to the New York Mets for infielder Lou Collier. Collier had 11 at-bats for the Expos. Bay went on to become the 2004 National League rookie of the year with the Pittsburgh Pirates and has 21 homers and 70 RBI this season. Serrano is pitching in South Korea.

That exodus of young talent occurred around the time when ownership of the Expos shifted to the 29 other major league teams. With no true owner, the franchise did not have the scouting and player development resources of other teams. It's still trying to catch up.

Nationals scouting director Dana Brown jokes about the white space at the bottom of the Baseball America directory page that lists the Nationals' scouts; the names of other teams' staffers creep toward the bottom of their respective pages. Brown said the Nationals have 16 scouts this season, an increase from recent years but still about six fewer than most clubs.

"What that means is that during the scouting season, they're in six more ballparks than we are each day," Brown said. "At the end of the scouting season, they've probably seen somewhere from 450 to 500 more games."

The team also did not have the money to draft and sign premium high school players, who command heftier bonuses than college players, some of whom might not have been talented enough to be drafted out of high school.

In 2002 and 2003, only one of the Expos' top seven picks each year was a high school player. In 2004, the top two selections, and 18 of the first 20, were from college. And in 2005, the first draft with the team in Washington, and still with no owner in place, only one of the first 11 players chosen was from high school.

The team's recent top draft picks before this season, Cordero (2003), left-hander Bill Bray (2004) -- who was traded to Cincinnati last week -- and Zimmerman (2005) all were from college, and all three have helped the major league team.

But drafting older players, who can reach the major leagues faster but are less likely to make the marked improvements that high school players can make, did nothing to restock the farm system. Without that annual infusion of new talent, the farm system's infrastructure has grown creaky.

"If you [draft and sign young players] two or three years in a row, now you're really building from the bottom up as opposed to signing Zimmerman and Cordero and Bray, who are going to really fly through the system," Brown said. "Whenever you rebuild, you can't think with this microwave age we live in. You have to think long term, more of a conventional oven. You have to let it bake, and it takes time."

Further handcuffing the front office was the lack of resources to devote to scouring international markets for talent, particularly in Latin America.

According to MLB.com, as of 2004 more than 45 percent of players in major league organizations were born outside the United States.