Thomas Boswell wrote for the Washington Post on Friday,

This Nationals team does not have the dismal attitude, the dreary clubhouse atmosphere, the palpable cloud of depression that follows a breathtakingly awful team. An upbeat club, even if it lacks talent, can only be so bad. Knowing that you can’t be a good team doesn’t curse you. Hating your situation, rather than working realistically to improve, is what blights a season.

Boswell is refuting comparisons made between the ‘07 Nats with the ‘62 Mets and the ‘88 Orioles. The difference? A positive attitude.

I don’t want to dwell on all the negatives today. Sure, pitching wasn’t so great and having four errors in a single game is atrocious. But, the Ryan Church incident speaks to - or contradicts - Boswell’s praise. It’s still a bit fresh and without knowing much about Acta’s reasoning, I’m hesitant to be too critical of Church. Church has been a powerhouse on the team, currently batting .299 with 8 RBIs. But, the reality, Acta realizes, is that this season will be abysmal without a positive attitude. If he saw a problem with attitude, it’s better to deal with it now. Hopefully, Church - and others - take Acta’s lesson into Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Enough with the gloomy. Let’s focus instead on the notable positive moments of today’s game. FickFabulous, a take off of the hit ABC drama Grey’s Anatomy’s creative Mc-nicknames, can run! How impressive it was to see Robert Fick fly around the bases, almost beating Snelling home to score the 2nd run.

Robert Fick
Photo Credit: Doug McKinney, FeaturePresentations.com

It was also nice to see backup catcher Jesus Flores have some big hits, driving in Snelling and FickFabulous.

Last, but certainly not least, was Zimmerman’s grand slam in the top of the ninth. We knew it was only a matter of time before Zim would start to produce at the plate again. How sweet it was to be in front of last year’s NL ROY winner and the third-place contender, Hanley Ramirez and Dan Uggla, both of whom started the 2007 season off much stronger than Zimmerman. With the grand slam, his career first, Ryan’s average is back up to .241, with 8 RBIs. This should be a great confidence builder for the young star, given all the recent talk about a potential sophomore slump.

Ryan Zimmerman
Photo Credit: The Washington Post

Boswell closed his article with this thought:

With luck, we’ll never know how ugly this season might have been. Troops are on the way. Soon, Zimmerman will start to hit again. Logan and Guzman will return and a thin bench will start to look decently deep. By early May, reliever Luis Ayala and starter Jason Simontacchi will be back. With each outing, Patterson will probably prod the radar gun a bit higher. Some fine day in midseason when his leg is well, Nick Johnson, the team’s best hitter, will be back at cleanup, too.

Eliminate the tragic defensive errors and this team will start to be quite solid. It can only get better from here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Game Recaps, Manny Acta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.