Numbers Might Add Up to One Shot in the Arm

The Nats, with a ludicrous 36 pitchers in camp, have now become the first franchise to corner the market on Real Life Replacement Pitchers. The unique twist is that the '06 starters had no value at all above a replacement pitcher. In fact, they had a distinctly negative value compared with a collection of warm bodies you could round up on baseball's street corner.

So say hello to the warm bodies. Take Redding. He went 10-14 with a 3.68 ERA for Houston in '03 and thought: "With any run support, I'd have won 15 games. I was young, so I thought I had the world by the tail." He didn't. Arm trouble. Fuss with the front office. Traded. Back to the minors. Good morning, Charlotte. There, he went 12-10 with a 3.40 ERA last season, including five complete games. Then he headed to Venezuela for winter ball, desperate to catch anybody's eye.

"What are you doing down there?" Bowden said when he reached Redding by phone in South America. "You just pitched 190 innings. You proved your arm's healthy."

"I don't exactly have people knocking down my door with offers," Redding recalled.

"Get home," Bowden said. "You've got a job."

Bowden has assembled two dozen Reddings. All have plenty of smudges on their résumé. But who cares? Bring 'em on -- in waves. They can't all stink. That's the theory anyway. So, for the next few months, and perhaps all season, the Nats won't really have a rotation. Think of it as a carousel. The Nats plan to carry 12 pitchers on Opening Day, with another dozen on speed dial. Anybody who gets sent to the minors and sulks needs psychiatric help. With two consecutive quality starts at Class AA Harrisburg and no felony arrests, you could be No. 3 man on the staff by next Thursday. The Nats may summon so many pitchers from the hinterlands that we'll have to change the name of our airport to Reagan Nationals.

At the moment, handicapping the rotation is impossible. So let's try. Acta loved managing Redding in the minors; he seems a lock. Hill's sinker has Schneider and Fick raving about its "kick." Perez showed poise in September at RFK and had the kind of 3.11 ERA at Harrisburg that usually translates into an NL ERA a whole lot better than the 5.43 of last year's Flawed Four. As for Chico, the bulldog left-hander who was the main chip in the Hernandez trade, Acta says: "I'd like to take him back with me. He's 24 [in June]. That's not rushing him." Of course a rookie such as Chico out of Class AA has to give Acta evidence.

"People talk about how many games we'll lose," Ryan Zimmerman said. "They have blinders on. They don't see what's here."

Perhaps more important, few realize the importance of what isn't here anymore. The starting pitchers who've departed were subtracted by choice. Soon, the core of the Nats' new season will come into view. Will the starting pitchers who've been added, and they are truly the meek of the baseball earth, prove they're worthy of the rotation they have suddenly inherited?