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Nationals: Five things to know
VIERA, Fla. -- It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. There's a phone in Washington, D.C., and it's ringing.
Who do you want answering?
Boy, the Washington Nationals sure would prefer that it isn't their president, Stan Kasten.
That's why the Nats followed up their acquisition of the infamous Elijah Dukes with one of the winter's most intriguing personnel moves.
They hired an ex-cop named James Williams and named him "special assistant for player concerns", which, loosely translated, means bird-dogging Dukes 24/7 and making sure he doesn't A) Hurt someone; B) Hurt himself; C) Commit any illegal acts and, D) Embarrass the Nationals.
Yes, it's a dangerous world out there, rife with red phone moments. And Dukes, whose talent is off the charts, isn't simply another guy looking to take advantage of a second chance.
In fact, Dukes isn't even the sole redemption project here in camp. The Nationals acquired from the Mets outfielder Lastings Milledge, best known for high-fiving fans along the railing on his way out to right field following a home run soon after he was summoned from the minors two summers ago.
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| Can Elijah Dukes keep his head down this season? (AP) |
And catcher Paul Lo Duca, one of the chief villains of this winter's Mitchell Report. And ill-tempered catcher Johnny Estrada, who clashed with teammates in Milwaukee last season and might be one of the least-liked players in the majors among his peers.
Hell, even Darnell Coles, who once argued with Sparky Anderson in the middle of a game in Detroit and heaved the baseball from the mound clear over the roof of old Tiger Stadium, is here as a minor league coach.
The Nationals are the Island of Misfit Toys, and general manager Jim Bowden is Santa Claus.
"It is, and Jim likes that," says Boone, who first played for Bowden in Cincinnati in the mid-to-late 1990s.
"I think we're better than some people think we are," says outfielder Austin Kearns, whose relationship with Bowden also extends back to their Cincinnati days. "Some people on the outside of the organization may question some of the guys, but we've got a good group of dudes here. Everyone gets along.
"It's fun."
Bowden flinches at the "Misfit Toys" label -- "Only one of them," he says, referring to Dukes -- and makes no apology for a career-long willingness to grant second chances to players badly in need of a guardian angel.
"When you don't have big-market payrolls, when you're not going to be able to sign guys for $15 million a year, the only way to get them is to trade or give a chance to a guy who, for whatever reason, his career has gone backwards," the GM says.
Historically, it's paid off for Bowden more often than not.
"Three years in a row in Cincinnati, we had Kevin Mitchell, Ron Gant coming off of that bad motorcycle accident and Eric Davis coming back from an injury," Boone says. "And they all had big years, too."
It was Bowden who last year extended a helping hand to Dmitri Young, whose career in Detroit crashed and burned in 2006 when he went through a divorce, entered a rehabilitation facility for drugs and alcohol and pleaded guilty to assaulting a woman. Young thrived in his mulligan with Washington, hitting .320 with a .378 on-base percentage, 13 homers and 74 RBI.
He was selected to the National League All-Star team and earned a shiny new two-year, $10 million deal. Though he's battling diabetes and reported to camp overweight this spring, he's emerged as the Chief Spokesman for the Misfits.
"I know some of these guys through my brother," Dmitri says, referring to brother Delmon -- now playing for Minnesota after spending 2007 as Dukes' teammate in Tampa Bay. "He tells me straight up, 'With Milledge and Dukes, you've got nothing to worry about.'
"You've got to look at the situations. There were no veteran black players with the Mets (Milledge) or Devil Rays (Dukes) to show these guys how to be big league players on and off the field."
Unquestionably, Dukes is not only Bowden's biggest gamble, he's the biggest risk undertaken by any team this spring.
We're talking about a guy, 23, who has been arrested at least three times for battery and once for assault since 1997, according to court records. A guy who has fathered at least five children with four women between 2003 and 2006. Two of those children were born within eight days of each other. A guy who last summer had his very own Ricky Williams moment and admitted consuming marijuana the way other folks drink coffee.
The ugliest moment by far came last May when he threatened his estranged ex-wife and her children with a menacing voice mail that became part of his police record: "Hey, dawg. It's on, dawg. You dead, dawg. ... Your kids, too." The Rays suspended him for the remainder of the season in June, one more in a trail of suspensions dogging Dukes from the minor leagues to the majors.
His problems appear to run far deeper than simply playing on clubs lacking veteran black leaders. Nevertheless, Young says he's here to help.
"With Dukes here, me, Ray King, Willie Harris ... we have veteran black players who have been there, done that," Young says. "Guys who will give him support."
That's what Williams, the ex-cop, will do 'round the clock. The Nationals expect Williams, who is off-limits to the media, to keep them apprised of Dukes' comings and goings, from what time he steps into the men's room to what he had for lunch. "We want to help him off the field," Bowden says. "He's made mistakes in life. We want to help him, help with his personal life, with his financial life, his baseball life, any way we can help him and make him a better player."
Getting away from his native Tampa, and the sketchy characters he's known much of his life there won't be a bad thing for Dukes. At a press conference on his first day in camp, the kid said as much, noting, "Being young and being at home is just not a good thing for someone who probably is not mature enough. ..."
By and large, Dukes -- and the rest of the Misfits -- seem to be, ahem, fitting in.
It's early but, so far, no runs, no hits and no terrors.
"No, no, not at all," Kearns says. "We definitely have a different mix of guys, but it seems like we're always having fun. There are rarely any problems."
In separate interviews, Young and Ryan Zimmerman independently began giggling when bringing up Milledge's high-five incident.
"He hits a home run and gives out high-fives, and everyone thinks he's a criminal or something," Zimmerman says.
Says Young: "I thought that was absolutely classic. It's never been done before. I wish I'd have thought of that. People were like, 'That's not baseball.' Well this isn't baseball of the 1960s or 1970s. Society's changed. That's about as fan friendly as it gets, right there."
Adds Bowden: "You jump into the stands in the NFL, nobody complains. To me, this is a great kid. Anyone who says anything else about him just doesn't know him."
Milledge caused a further uproar in New York last summer when he released a rap CD containing explicit lyrics but, so far, he's kept a lid on his musical tendencies in Viera.
Meanwhile, the guy who perhaps unexpectedly has opened the most eyes so far is the lefty Perez, 30, who signed a one-year, non-guaranteed minor league contract that will pay him $850,000 if he makes the club -- with the chance to earn more through incentives.
He, too, is the perfect Bowden reclamation project: A one-time big ticket item who, with any sense of maturity and self-discipline, should be making $9 million or more a year.
"Sensational," Bowden says. "He's lost 15-to-20 pounds, I'd guess. His arm is working great. He's got a chance to be a real surprise.
"I've been through this with guys like Tony Fernandez and Benito Santiago, and I look Odalis in the eyes and I see that same sense of mission. I think he's embarrassed."
The Nationals are attempting to build from the ground up both structurally -- they're moving into a new stadium this season -- and internally, where they've amassed a solid core of prospects like pitchers John Lannan, Matt Chico and Ross Detwiler and outfielders Justin Maxwell and Christopher Marrero.
Much of the method to Bowden's madness while working within a limited budget is simply to stretch things as far as he can until the Nationals again can fertilize a minor league system left barren from the days when the Montreal Expos were a threadbare ward of the other 29 major league clubs.
So until the Lannans and Chicos and others begin arriving with regularity in Washington, it remains "give us your tired, your poor, your overweight and your charged-with-assault-and-battery."
The Nats will work with all of them ... and work overtime to avoid those 3 a.m. phone calls.
