The Washington Nationals have signed former St. Louis Redbird and Kansas City Royals outfielder Rick Ankiel to a one year, $1.5 million deal — according to SI’s Jon Heyman. Ankiel becomes a fourth outfielder in the Nationals’ outfield mix, but is expected to compete for a starting job with Roger Bernadina. The Ankiel story is well-known: after burning up the league as a left handed hurler with the Cardinals, Ankiel lost his control and decided to become an outfielder, enjoying a dramatic talk-of-the-league 2008 campaign in which he hit 25 home runs. Ankiel signed as a free agent with Kansas City, before being swapped (with Kyle Farnsworth), to Atlanta last year. This is a good signing for the Nationals, it gives them another outfield option or (at a minimum) a good bat off the bench. Then too, Ankiel is still only 31 — and while his production at the plate has fallen recently (his BA hovered around .230 during his last year in St. Louis), he’s a solid defender who can sometimes hit the long ball.

The Washington Nationals’ search for a top-of-the-rotation pitcher continues, with Kansas City ace Zack Greinke headed to Milwaukee, where he will lead a revamped Brewers’ rotation. The Brewers landed Greinke on Sunday (along with Yuniesky Betancourt and $2 million) in exchange for Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, Jeremy Jeffress and Jake Odorizzi — a packet of four young, up-and-coming wannabes. Greinke is the second top pitcher acquired by Milwaukee this offseason: the Brewers landed Shaun Marcum in November. While the Royals gave up a top-of-the-line hurler, this was a haul for the Monarchs, who received an exciting shortstop, a near can’t-miss outfielder (in Cain), and two former first round pitching prospects. Milwaukee, however, received a best-of-the-best, top-of-the-rotation former Cy Young winner who — with Marcum, Yovani Gallardo and Randy Wolf — provides them with what should be a playoff bound rotation.

And the Nationals? Sometimes it’s what you don’t do that works out for the best. The Nationals were in the running for Greinke, but would have had to part with three of four top youngsters, including Danny Espinosa, Ian Desmond, Drew Storen and, perhaps, Jordan Zimmermann. The trade would have left huge gaps in the team’s middle infield and sacrificed a middle innings reliever who has proven to be a solid addition. Kicking in Zimmermann (if that’s what it had taken) would have meant that the Nats had given up on a “can’t miss” front-of-the-rotation guy, albeit one who has yet to really prove himself. In our estimation, the swap wouldn’t have been worth it. We’ll never know if Mike Rizzo would have pulled the trigger on such a deal, as Greinke vetoed a trade to Half Street because the Nats aren’t slated to go to the post-season.

Ben Goessling speculates that a Brewers-like trade with the Nats would have yielded a package that might not have been as steep (Zimmermann, Desmond and minor leaguer Michael Burgess), but then issues this judgment: “That would have put a bigger hole in the team’s major and minor league systems than getting Greinke would have filled.” We agree: sometimes the bad news is good. The addition of Greinke would have solidified the Nats rotation, but at a cost that would have been too steep. Zimmermann and Desmond aren’t untouchable, but the fact that they’re not on the first plane to K.C. isn’t exactly a tragedy. The Greinke swap to Milwaukee leaves the Nats pursuing Twins semi-ace Carl Pavano (who seems likely to re-sign with the Twinkies), Matt Garza (who’s being dangled by the Rays), or Arizona free agent Brandon Webb — who has a tin cup for a shoulder.

Here is the new starting rotation of the Philadelphia Phillies: Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, Cole Hamels — and Cliff Lee. Lee, the cherry-on-the-cake free agent of major league baseball, has signed a five year $120 million deal with the Phillies, a surprise for the Yankees and Rangers (who reportedly outbid the Phillies), and one that probably puts the N.L. East out of reach for the Braves, Marlins, Mets and Washington Nationals. The Phillies are now the favorites to win not only the division, but the N.L. pennant, as they feature the best starting rotation in the game. What can the Nationals do? The current thinking is that the best response for Mike Rizzo & Co. would be to sign a front-of-the-rotation pitcher (like Carl Pavano) or swing a trade for Matt Garza or Zack Greinke that would make the club competitive. The Nats are, seemingly, in no hurry — though all three of their prospective targets could easily sign elsewhere: the Twins likely have the inside track to sign Pavano, Garza will cost the Nats more than they might be willing to pay (perhaps Ian Desmond, certainly Jordan Zimmermann) and Kansas City has already let it be known that the Nats do not match up well on a Greinke trade.

Lee’s decision to re-up with Philly (where he had pitched before being shipped out to Seattle), has shocked the baseball world. The Yankees and Rangers were thought to be Lee’s first choices, with the Rangers seemingly leading the pack. A third “mystery team” was said to be in the mix: we at CFG had guessed it was the Angels. It’s easy to see why Lee signed with the Phillies, though — as a line-up that includes Halladay, Oswalt and Hamels looks unbeatable: which would give Lee the World Series ring that he covets. Indeed, the Phillies starting rotation may be the best in baseball since Greg Maddux and John Smoltz anchored the Braves starting four in the mid-90s.  MLB Trade Rumors draws some important lessons from the Lee signing: don’t make any assumptions about what a player wants, players can leave big money on the table, teams can change their minds (the Phillies made a mistake in shipping Lee to Seattle — and brought him back), the Yankees don’t always get their man, every off season has its share of surprises and you can never have too much pitching. All of that sounds right.

How should the Nationals respond? Our view is simple: they shouldn’t. While Mike Rizzo has let it be known that there are two “untouchables” on the Washington Nine (Ryan Zimmerman and, now, Jayson Werth), we would add a third: Jordan Zimmermann. What’s the point of developing pitching if you’re going to ship it to Tampa or Kansas City? Zimmermann has the command and control to be a front line pitcher in the N.L. — and neither Garza or Greinke are going to give the team the horse they need to compete with Philadelphia. It would be better to sign Pavano, if possible, or swing a trade for a mid-rotation righty that would upgrade the starting staff without gutting either the farm system or trading away the future. Anything can happen in baseball, and Philadelphia’s signing of Cliff Lee is not a guarantee that they will outgun and outpitch the Nationals this year. But let’s be realistic: the Phillies aren’t suddenly the odds-on favorite in the NL Least by accident.

Washington Nationals fans, all agog over new team ace Stephen Strasburg, have come back to earth. That reality is reflected in team blogs, in newspaper reports — and in the young phenom’s own judgment. In a classic pitcher’s duel, Strasburg went head-to-head against Kansas City’s Brian Bannister, whose command of the strike zone and an up-and-down-in-and-out fastball and curve made the difference in the game. The result was a 1-0 Royals’ win, albeit with a dink and dunk, Texas leaguer contest in which the Monarchs refused to fold and (over the course of nine innings) slapped out nine hits. Strasburg lost the game, but took the booby prize: he eclipsed Herb Score’s strikeout record for the first four games of an MLB career — Score had 40 strikeouts in his first four, Strasburg had 41.

Jim Riggleman praised Strasburg, but there was a back handed caveat: “This time he was really good. The other times, he’s been spectacular,” the skipper said in his post game comments. Riggleman also took note of the difficulty of taking on the Royals’ order, a deceptively productive line-up that produces serial singles and station-to-station runs — if not wins. “The Royals have the highest batting average [in major league baseball] and Stephen competed with less than his best stuff today. They know how to hit.” Former Nats outfielder Jose Guillen was more specific: “He still has a little to learn about how to pitch in certain counts,” Guillen said. “He got me 1-2 or something and threw me a fastball right down the middle.” Those who sat through the sweltering oven of a game will add this — that Brian Bannister, lacking the Strasburg fastball (and slider, and change, and hook for that matter), won the duel, pitching six complete and giving up five hits. Bannister walked two (Strasburg none), but the final tally told the tale. When the Nats needed hits, Bannister shut them down.When the Royals needed hits, they got them.

Despite the loss, Strasburg remains the ace of the staff, garnering praise from teammates and opponents alike. It’s not everyday that your manager calls you a “treasure” (a descriptive used by Jim Riggleman in a post game interview), or that your teammates are lavish in their support. Ryan Zimmerman has, at least lately, been outspoken in his support and it seems that Pudge Rodriguez actually seems to like the kid. It shows that Strasburg is starting to fit in — not an insignificant challenge for a 21-year-old who just arrived and needs to show that he can not only pitch, but wants to win. He seems to have convinced the doubters, if there ever were any. This morning Tom Boswell reported that Strasburg summarily dismissed a reporter who asked about an auction of his rookie card on eBay. “Let’s focus on the game,” Strasburg said. “It was a tough loss for us.”

That kind of comment has to bring a sigh of relief to Riggleman and Rizzo, who have focused a lot of their attention on building a united clubhouse, which (at least in baseball) is a minimal condition for building a winning team. Gone now too (we hope) is all this talk of whether Strasburg should be an All Star, that he deserves to have his name mentioned among the NL’s probables — who might well constitute the best group of senior circuit starters in many years: Jimenez, Halladay, Lincecum, Carpenter, Pelfry, Hudson, Latos, Johnson, Wainwright, Cain, Oswalt and Silva. That’s a veritable gaggle of greatness. If Wednesday’s rare-back-and-throw hot-as-a-firecracker duel in the sun proves anything it’s that Strasburg is not there. Yet.

Monday’s 2-1 win at Nationals Park may be taken as “Exhibit #1″ that pitching — good pitching — wins ballgames. While the Nationals squeezed out only three hits against the more-than-mediocre Bruce Chen (et. al.), Livan Hernandez mastered the Royals line-up through seven complete innings, scattering eight hits and striking out five. The Nats relied on the long ball, with super-sometime-starter Mike Morse and second sacker Cristian Guzman providing the fireworks. The victory was closed out by Washington’s “Clipp & Save” crew of Tyler Clippard and Matt Capps — who notched his 21st save. Nats starter Livan Hernandez returned to his winning ways, and his by now traditional slow-slower-slowest methods — a turnaround from his last outing against the Kalines in which he was scorched. “I left the ball up a little bit, but the slider was working very well,” Hernandez said after his victory. “The cutter was working perfectly. I had a bad game in Detroit, so today I knew I had to come through and stop the losing streak.”

The Wisdom Of Section 1-2-9: There’s a familiar touch that comes from sitting in the same section, game after game after game. It’s not like you’d want to live with these people, but after ten games (or more), you learn to value the comments of your section. Or not, as the case may be. There are times when you want to turn around, facing the guys in the row behind you and say: “Hey listen, I understand that your sale of software is important, but Gavin Floyd is pitching a great game here. Not to mention Strasburg.” You don’t do it, because people come to the ballpark for all kinds of reasons, some of them apparently having nothing to do with baseball. There’s no legislating intelligence, as they say. Still, there are those valuable moments that only a new set of eyes can see. A fan looked over my shoulder, two weeks ago, as I was scoring. “Remember, there’s no RBI on a run scored on a double play,” he said. I looked down at my score book, eraser poised. Mmmmm. Right.

“Nyjer’s act is wearing thin,” a 1-2-9 partisan said this week. A man two rows up leaned forward: “Tony Plush!” — which brought groans from down the row. The guy next to me weighed in. “He has trouble with a fastball, it’s all this dink and dunk stuff, bringing the bat down to bunt and pulling it back. That’s a clear message — he can’t catch up to the fastball. And he doesn’t read pitchers well.” There was silence through the next inning, until Morgan came to bat. He faked a bunt to third, running down the first base line. Strike two. One pitch later he was on the bench. Heads turned, checking his BA on the scoreboard. .251. “So what do we do?” Silence, and then this: “Center field is Bernadina’s natural position and Morse needs playing time.” A dissent was issued, one row back, where talk of software had been ceded to the game on the field. “We wouldn’t be saying this last year.” Two batters later, the response came, from a bright new Nats Cap three seats away. “We were a different team last year. Last year Nyjer Morgan looked like our salvation. This year he looks like a .251 hitter.” True.

While Nats fans focus on the shelling Nats’ bats are capable of imposing — evidence of which was on full display at Cincy’s Great American Ballpark on Saturday – victims of the Anacostia Nine wonder how their team can lose to a club that is “a joke” and “one of the worst teams in baseball history.” Reds fans are the latest such whiners, trodding ground already worn by the footsteps of bloggers from Miami. ”This year I haven’t really considered the Washington Nationals a real team. They’re just so bad, it’s hard to take them seriously,” Cincinnati blogger Red Hot Mama writes in the wake of the Nats pasting of the Reds. ”I mean, they’ve consistently been winning only a third of the team [their games] for most of the year. In the world of bad teams, that’s truly atrocious.”

Red Hot Mama (the most interesting of all Reds’ blogs — in my humble opinion) is not alone in underestimating the Nats. For baseball beat reporter John Fay, it’s not so much that the Nats are good, it’s that the Reds are bad. This path is also well-worn: when the Nats beat up on Dan Haren at Nationals Park last week, “Baseball Tonight”  commentators attributed the loss not to the Nats ability to hit, but to Haren’s unusally poor outing. When the Nats are bad it’s because they’re bad, when the Nats are good it’s because they’re lucky. Of course, not only are the Nats not even close to being the worst team in baseball history, if they continue to win games at the current rate they may well catch the other “worst” teams in the MLB: The Kansas City Royals, Pittsburgh Pirates and San Diego Padres. It’s even possible to make the argument that the Nats post-July 4 record is not only pretty good — it’s a lot better than the other “atrocious teams” in the majors. The Nationals have played forty games since Independence Day, and they’re 20-20. That’s enough to vault them out of last place in the ESPN power rankings — ahead of the Monarchs, Ahoys and Friars. That hasn’t happened yet, but it should. And just think, this from ”a joke” and “one of the worst teams in baseball history.”

It’s no secret: the Nats’ revival is more due to their ability to swing the wood than throw the horsehide. This was on full display in the ballpark beside the Ohio yesterday. When the Reds came to bat in the fourth, the Nats were leading 7-0 and starter Johnny Cueto was sitting on the bench next to a shell-shocked Dusty Baker. By the time the game had ended (with Nats’ smiles all around), our Anacostia boys had pulled out a 10-6 victory. The Nats’ attack included fourteen hits and an Adam Dunn home run. Morgan, Belliard (Belliard!!), Zimmerman, Dukes, Gonzalez and Nats’ starter J.D. Martin had two hits each — the nail-in-the-coffin stroke coming from a still struggling Alberto Gonzalez, who scorched a double just inside the bag at third, scoring three. The Nats needed all the hits they could get. Starter Martin was game, but not that effective (the Reds threatened in nearly every inning), while reliever Logan Kensing (usually effective — after being recalled from Syracus), gave up four earned runs and lasted less than an inning.

It’s true: the Nats have been “truly atrocious” — as Reds bloggers would have it. They’ve won only 42 games. They’re 33 games under .500. They’ve “struggled” all year. But hope springs eternal: they could catch the Padres, Pirates and Royals in the standings. Why, they could even catch the Reds. In the world of bad teams (teams like, ah . . . the Cincinnati Reds), that’s really amazing. Or maybe it isn’t.

The New Rule: Taking advantage of a new Major League rule, the Washington Nationals are considering trading 1st Baseman Nick Johnson for “a player to be named much, much later.” While the Nats front office would not name the player, it is thought to be young Bobby Bailey, a T-baller with the Overland Park, Kansas T-ball league. Bailey is believed to be a prized prospect in the Kansas City Royals scouting system.”He’s an integral part of our decades-long effort to rebuild our team,” a Royals’ scout noted proudly. While only six years old, Bailey is viewed by the Nats as a potential future player whose upside is that “while we don’t know whether he can run, hit or catch, he never gets injured.” As one Nats insider told River-Dogz: “This kid is just a stud, he just rolls with the punches.”

Okay … well, heartless as this may seem, the truth of the situation is even more heartless. In many ways, Johnson was more valuable to the Nats than Ryan Zimmerman; he was a silent clubhouse presence who led by example. His second deck home run earlier this year was a sign of things to come — a prodigious shot. He’s gone for the remainder, after a wrist failed to heal. While “Meat Tray“ is a very fine . . .  yes, indeed a very fine hitter (and leader too), you can see why other teams pursue Johnson, while passing on his replacement. The front office quietly has it that Nick is snakebit. Maybe. But for pursuing scouts, anxious to land a leader and trade some prospects, Johnson appears fragile. There’s a world of difference.

This is a disaster. 

On another note: We mourn the passing of Ryan Langerhans to Triple A Columbus, where he will attempt to break out of his career-long slump. We have heard from sportswriters of the BBWA that the motion to change the phrase “Mendoza Line” to Langerhans Line has been tabled, pending the outcome of Pete Orr’s tenure as Langerhans’ replacement in the Nats’ lineup. We wish Ryan well. Everyone struggles in baseball, but he has struggled more than most.

The Grey Eagle: You can make the argument (you can make it, but you would lose) that Tris Speaker was the greatest center fielder of all time. That would place him ahead of Babe Ruth and Willie Mays, of course, and that’s not possible. But he’s certainly in the top five and perhaps in the top three. There’s a reason for that — and it had nothing to do with his deep friendship with that world-class chump, Ty Cobb. Speaker was the first in a long-line of unappreciated Red Sox: brilliant players who were eventually cast away for money or bums because the owner thought they were too expensive, washed up …  or just because.

The list includes Ruth, Fisk and Clemens. But Speaker was the first to go — and the worst decision in Red Sox history (yes, worse than Ruth because in Speaker at least they knew, yes the keepers of the asylum just knew), and Boston fans talked about it for years afterwards. Speaker went to Cleveland, of all places (in 1916), and for a few bucks and some prospects. That’ll show him!

So if Cincinnati is a place where pitchers go to die, then Boston is a place where great players go to get traded. Still.

Anyway. I was reading about Speaker the other day (there’s this) and I was just stunned by his statistics. Two in particular. The retro-sheets show that Speaker played so shallow in center field that he sometimes covered second during double plays: 6-8-3! He holds the record for double plays by an outfielder (139). Of course this was the dead ball era, but still. Then there’s this: in over 10,000 at bats he struck out 220 times.