Polar Bear Phan wrote:...and there were discussions on whether Nick Pivetta was enough for Papelbon.

Or maybe, it was a conspiracy to get the Nats to take Pabelbon off our hands. HMMM

Bucky wrote:

Bucky wrote:Rube is genius

Paps is trojan horse

Owner Ted Lerner still makes deals (like the $210 million one for ace right-hander Max Scherzer) directly with mega-agent Scott Boras with little more than an okay-by-you nod to his front office. That can work; the Detroit Tigers got to a World Series stacked with Boras clients. Having so many Boras stars — also Harper, Stephen Strasburg, Anthony Rendon and Jayson Werth — causes valid concern about where power lies. But Boras also has a powerful incentive to have those teams win and maximize the “brand” of his men.

However, when one hand never totally knows what the other hand might do, how does that help? This year, it left a clubhouse with Nationals stars like Ian Desmond and Jordan Zimmermann, who almost certainly will leave as free agents this winter, to wonder where their money went and who influenced the Nats’ last-best offer.

The Lerners also set sufficient yet inflexible budgets. Bizarre? This leads to budget pinches in other areas, like signing little-wanted Casey Janssen to replace Tyler Clippard to save a few million dollars.

Also, the Nats wanted to get in talks for strong left-handed hitter Gerardo Parra at the July 31 trade deadline, but they never had the chance because they didn’t have the budget flexibility to pick up any of Parra’s contract.

In what now seems toxically ironic, the Nationals’ ownership didn’t want to add 2015 payroll to get a quality reliever at the trade deadline, so they got Papelbon by guaranteeing his 2016 option year — an $11 million obligation. How penny-wise does that look now? What return could you get for such damaged goods?

Doll Is Mine wrote:

Maybe the best word to describe it all is this: Arrogance.

The Nationals have accomplished great things over the last four years. Say what you want about the disappointment of missing the playoffs in both 2013 and 2015, but what qualifies as disappointment around here is 83-to-86 wins. That’s markedly better than any of the franchise’s first six seasons in the District, when the mere notion of a winning record was cause for celebration.

Yet this organization, from top to bottom, too often acts like it has accomplished far more than it really has. The Nationals fly the largest division championship banner in baseball, high above the scoreboard in right-center field. (The 2012 NL East champions banner still resided up there throughout the 2014 season, long after they had ceded the title to the Braves.) They boast no fewer than three highly visible reminders to the world that they’ll be hosting the 2018 All-Star Game, an event that won’t take place for another 34 months. They spent the entire first half of this season playing intentionally annoying slow-jams over the PA system when the opposing team took batting practice, for no reason other than to thumb their noses at the rest of the league. They continue to show replay after replay after replay of Jayson Werth’s walk-off homer in Game 4 of the 2012 NLDS — an admittedly wonderful baseball moment — while completely ignoring what happened only 24 hours later to render that moment a mere footnote.

Winner — Phillies fans

This was understandably overlooked in the moments after the incident. It shouldn’t be. Imagine, in just after the Papelbon trade, that you asked Phillies fans to concoct a dream scenario for how this transaction would play out. Would any of them have suggested that the Nats would almost immediately begin to slide in the standings after Papelbon’s arrival, that Storen would wind up punching a locker and breaking his hand, that Papelbon would be suspended for throwing at Manny Machado, and that it would all culminate with Papelbon choking Washington’s franchise player, in the dugout, on fan appreciation day, during a blowout home loss to the Phillies, the day after the Nats had been eliminated from playoff contention?

It’s unimaginably worst-case for Washington, which makes it unimaginably best-case for Philadelphia. Fans of a last-place rival team shouldn’t get to be this happy.

Loser — kiddie Nats fans

Look, I’m usually above trying to spare the innocent kiddies from sporting unpleasantness, and I suppose this was fairly mild all in all. But Harper is beloved by youngsters in a way no other Nats players are. And to see this fight was, I’m assuming, more than a bit jarring for many of them. It sure was for my 8-year-old, who literally said she didn’t feel like eating dinner after watching the incident.

@paulloduca16

UPDATE: Papelbon is at home listening to Slayer and Harper is at the salon getting a manicure