By Preston Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 19, 2006; E01
Assessments of the Washington Nationals' minor league system read like movie blurbs from a box-office bomb:
"Barren," says Florida Today. "Tattered," reports the Los Angeles Daily News. "Dry," intones MLB.com.
Other recently published descriptions of the team's talent pipeline: "depleted," "in disarray," "lacks both marquee prospects and depth," "a shell of what it used to be," "stripped down to the bare bones" and "bereft of talent."
The scouting department and minor league system that once produced Randy Johnson and Vladimir Guerrero has been almost ignored since 2002, when Major League Baseball took over ownership of the franchise when it was still based in Montreal. In each of the past four years, Baseball America has rated the Nationals' farm system 24th or lower out of 30 teams, including 30th in 2004.
It is an organizational weakness that incoming team president Stan Kasten addressed on the day the Nationals' new ownership was announced: "The questions we should be asking: Are you going to be spending money right away on the minor leagues? Are you going to be spending money on scouting? . . . And the answers to all those questions are yes."
Minor league systems are more about developing big leaguers than winning games. But in recent seasons, the Nationals' system has done little of either. On the Nationals' 25-man active roster, only catcher Brian Schneider, second baseman Jose Vidro, third baseman Ryan Zimmerman and pitchers Chad Cordero, Roy Corcoran and Mike O'Connor are products of the team's farm system.
And from 2003 to 2005, the franchise's six North American-based minor league affiliates posted one winning record while finishing a combined 275 games below .500. The lone winning farm team during that span was Class AAA Edmonton, which managed a 73-69 record in 2003. The organization's current affiliates -- New Orleans, Harrisburg, Potomac, Savannah, Vermont and a Gulf Coast League team -- are a combined 201-229 this season.
Years of losing have damaged morale among many of the franchise's farm-system players.
"It kind of hurts a little bit," said Class AA Harrisburg left-hander David Maust, who has played in the system since 2001. "We've got some good guys in the organization. . . . Who are [the critics] to say, and who are they to know?"
"People say, 'Oh, you can't make a trade with them because they really have nobody' " in the minors, Potomac infielder Trey Webb said. "It's because of you being part of a losing organization for the past years."
The draining of the organization's talent pool began in 2002. With his money-losing franchise teetering on the brink of possible contraction by Major League Baseball yet vying for a wild-card berth with a 41-36 record, then-general manager Omar Minaya traded first baseman Lee Stevens and three minor leaguers -- infielder Brandon Phillips, left-hander Cliff Lee and outfielder Grady Sizemore -- to Cleveland for ace right-hander Bartolo Colon and minor league pitcher Tim Drew.
Colon went 10-4 with a 3.31 ERA for Montreal, but the Expos finished 83-79, 12 1/2 games out of wild-card contention. Colon was traded in a three-way deal involving the White Sox and Yankees for pitchers Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez and Rocky Biddle, utility player Jeff Liefer and cash after the season to trim payroll. Drew appeared in 13 games for the Expos before signing with Atlanta in 2004.
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.
"Look at any organization that signed Latin American players from 2002 to 2005, take all those players out of their system, and tell me what you've got," Brown said. "And that's what you're looking at with us."
Kasten's plan is to revitalize the farm system within a few years. That's what happened when Kasten was in charge in Atlanta, where the Braves have won 14 consecutive division titles, largely with homegrown talent.
Washington had four of the top 70 selections in the June amateur draft and chose high school players with its first six picks. There also is speculation that the team might swap big leaguers such as Alfonso Soriano and Livan Hernandez for additional prospects before the trading deadline at the end of the month.
"We went young this year," said Brown, with obvious satisfaction, calling himself "a kid in a candy store" now that the team's new ownership group headed by the family of Theodore N. Lerner has lifted the financial restrictions of recent years.
The team made inroads internationally earlier this month by signing coveted 16-year-old Dominican shortstop Esmailyn Gonzalez to a contract that includes a $1.4 million signing bonus.
In the past year, some reorganization has already occurred -- General Manager Jim Bowden has promoted Bob Boone to head the player development department and, among other moves, hired former big league manager Davey Johnson as a special consultant who will scout players inside and outside the system -- and the Nationals also have been more active in Latin America this season, with Jose Rijo, a former major league pitcher and a special assistant to Bowden, running an academy in his native Dominican Republic.
"We have a presence, where before we were just piecing it together," Brown said. "It was more like having replacement players in the Dominican just to keep the operation going. Now we're going to really build it the right way because we have the facility and are aggressive at signing players."
A different philosophy going into the draft and creating inroads into Latin America are just the first steps.
"We're now marching to a different beat," Brown said. "You win in the minor leagues by just flooding the system with talent. Just continue to pour talent into the system until it overflows. That's when you develop top-end players. The guy in the middle, he's going to have to learn to fight for a job. When it's competitive at the minor league level, that means your big league team is going to be better."