the state of the nats

The Nationals are 19-29, one game over .500 since Mike O'Connor went for his first win against the Pirates.

Of course, it took winning 5 out of 6 to get here. (Shhh.)

Chad Cordero has been pitching well. I was worried when he blew a save against the Braves. It seemed possible his grip on the job could slip. But he has a preternatural ability to forget the last outing, and even the last pitch. Watching Cordero, you are pulled into hopefulness for the next pitch. You have to acknowledge that he has been rocked a few times if we go back to late last year. But he always comes back strong, and he makes me hopeful that the Nats have a bona fide star in the pen. Time will tell. It's fun to watch.

Come on, Nats.

Robinson on Robinson

Robinson said he should have had catcher Brian Schneider activated from the disabled list on Thursday and start the game instead of LeCroy. Schneider is not eligible to come off the disabled list until Friday, and he had no choice but to start LeCroy. Wiki Gonzalez, who has a better arm, was unavailable because he was injured and Robert Fick, at the time, had not played a game behind the plate. It ended up being the worst game in LeCroy's big-league career. -Bill Ladson

The Nats beat the Astros 8 to 5, their 5th win in 6 tries, and Robinson spoke somberly to the press after the game, with tears in his eyes. The win was overshadowed by Robinson's move during the Astros half of the 7th inning to replace Matthew LeCroy at catcher after the Astros stole their 7th base of the afternoon.

After the press conference reporters talked and wrote about how sorry Robinson was to remove LeCroy, and how professional LeCroy was about it. They miss a fine detail. Robinson, the warrior, was sorry that he had started LeCroy, that he had put him in position to fail, that he had not quietly removed him between innings a little earlier. The damage was done before Robinson decided to make the switch. Robinson was apologizing for the damage done while LeCroy struggled out there. A player can handle being taken out of a game. But being put in a position to accumulate errors and hurt the team-- that's real embarrassment. That's the more serious embarrassment, the one Robinson didn't intend.

Oh yeah. Tony Armas, Jr. The other Nationals starter. The one I failed to name a couple of weeks ago. Five wins in a row.

Livan won his last time out and he goes again tomorrow. Armas with 5 in a row. Five starters on the DL now, sure, but Patterson will be back in a couple of weeks. Mike O'Connor looks good. Ramon Ortiz won his last time out. What's this? A big league staff coming together?

all the girls want to be carnal with me

Everything is Illuminated is an odd little fish, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's a road trip comedy through Ukraine and it's about the Holocaust. It stars the almost intolerable Elijah Wood, but it's Eugene Hutz's show. Wood plays a young American Jew traveling to Ukraine to find his roots, to find a place that doesn't exist anymore. Hutz plays Alex, his tour guide.

Alex communicates in a mangled patois that passes for English. His elocution is memorable for gems like "Grandfather's officious seeing eye bitch," and "All the girls want to be carnal with me because I am such a premium dancer." You might guess that the phrase "everything is illuminated" is Alex's, from his journal of their "rigid search."

Hutz is a Ukrainian emigre and the front man for the band Gogol Bordello, appearing also in the movie's soundtrack. He thus steals the show on two levels, because the soundtrack is excellent.

There is a nagging complaint. Hutz/Alex uses an implausible tongue. He speaks as one who is deliberately engaging in some thickly accented near doublespeak. His expressive wordplay reminds me more of Andrei Codrescu's deft essays on NPR than of a Ukrainian emigre getting his point across over the language barrier. It's great fun, just don't take it seriously. If you wind up listening to Gogol Bordello after seeing the movie, as I did, you'll find it more and more affected. Clever, and affected.

It is a minor complaint. Illuminated is much more comedy than drama, and when was the last time you saw a good comedy set against the backdrop of the Holocaust?

Certain books and movies inspire me to travel. This one opens up Ukraine like road stories set in rural parts of the States make me want to grab a pen and notebook and take off in a beat up car, eating in truck stops and sleeping in decrepit motels. It takes its place on my completely subjective and personal list next to stories like On the Road, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Easy Rider.

The movie comes to a poignant ending, with the grandfather in a dual role as anti-Semitic devil and Jewish victim, and Alex working his way through his own ignorance about Ukrainian history and finally demonstrating some depth of character. My advice: Don't think about it too much. That's more or less the conclusion Alex reaches, too. It's not an entirely satisfactory ending for a story launched by the Holocaust. But that is the point. In the end, the story expresses itself the same way Alex does, that is to say, awkwardly, and with humor.

the movie believes

..."Hard Candy" clearly believes pedophiles should be chopped into little pieces and buried in an unmarked grave... -Desson Thomson, Washington Post

Movies believe. Novels argue. Storytelling is the social equivalent of the corporation, in which, with a legal trick, men endow a conceptual shell with rights and enable it to act. "Incorporate" employs the verbal tricks of life and death. It gives material form, from the Latin corpus, body, whence of course also, corpse.

Ideas breathe life into stories. The movie believes. Fiction is real.

Monsters, Inc. indeed.

Griffey makes SportsCenter at Eischen's expense

The President of the United States knows Joey Eischen. Joey was giddy last year to be in Washington, and what ballplayer wouldn't be after playing for an ownerless club in Montreal for years. The President threw the ceremonial first pitch of the Nationals' 2005 season and visited with the team after the game. He recalled that when he was in the Texas Rangers' ownership they had traded Eischen away for Oil Can Boyd. "Bad trade," said the President. The President!


A couple of weeks later, Eischen fell fielding a ground ball and broke his arm. But the Nationals' only lefthanded pitcher came back to appear in 57 games, one of the reasons the Nationals surprised baseball by posting an 81-81 campaign, leading their division early before slowly but surely falling off the pace.

Now suddenly it's 2006 and the Nationals stink, and Joey Eischen is one of the reasons. He has an ERA over 10 in 16 appearances. Thursday night in Cincinnati, with the Nationals up 4-2 in the 11th inning, Joey Eischen gave up a 3-run homer to Ken Griffey, Jr. I hope Junior is happy. It's a nice little addition to his highlight reel. But it's a pretty lousy way for a 35-year-old standup guy to wind down a career.

SportsCenter likes Griffey's blast, but Eischen's story is also the stuff of drama. Eischen and Griffey were born less than six months apart. During all of Griffey's famous career, Eischen has been there laboring away at the same game. Griffey came up in 1988. Eischen came up in 1994, and he wasn't in the big leagues between 1998 and 2000. He has pitched in 318 games, 292 innings. His won-lost record is 11-9. He has 3 saves. Through hard work, Eischen has fashioned what one could call a career out of being lefthanded and able to throw a baseball. It's not pretty to see it blasted into the night air in Cincinnati.

A 5-spot and a win

PIT 100 200 010 4 8 0
WAS 005 000 00x 5 9 0

WP - M. O'Connor (2-1)
LP - Z. Duke (2-3)
S - Cordero (3)
HR - WAS: Guillen (3)


Five runs gets you a win this time, with O'Connor hanging on, and Cordero nailing down the 4-out save. Guillen provides the muscle.

Ah, this is baseball. Nice work Nats.

Do you know this man?

Taking a page from Norman Chad. $1.25 to the person who can name this man:

That, friends, is Mike O'Connor. The Nationals season depends on him. Never heard of him? Well, at least he has that going for him. He threw a nice game his last time out. I'll be more excited when he does it against hitters who have seen him before. It's all very nice and convenient to blame the hitting and the defense, but the truth about these Nationals is that the starting rotation is awful. This team isn't so much different than last year's, to this point, except gone are the 4-3 wins. The 2006 Nationals are as able as last year's squad to put up 4 or 5 runs a game. But that wins only a third of the time this year, down from half of the time last year. That, friends, is the difference between a competitive ballclub and a terrible one. The Nats are 10-21. O'Connor goes for them today against the Pirates.

Go Mike.