Blanked

St. Louis at Washington. Series Report.

Cardinals 6, Nationals 0.

It's amazing how the weekend can make Friday feel like a million miles and a thousand years ago. Like when you get in the car Saturday morning and drive up to a B&B in the Shenandoah Valley and by the time you're back on I-66 Sunday night you can't even remember why you wanted to throw that chair through your computer screen at work on Friday.

Or like when your batters make the dregs of the Cardinals pitching staff look like Nolan Ryan, except better because Nolan actually gave up a lot of walks in his day and the Nationals batters this weekend couldn't have reached base if you spotted them three balls before coming up to bat and then made the pitcher throw six strikes. After all that, it was easy to forget just how good the Nationals played on Friday.

And then there was Sunday's story in the Post, in which it was revealed that Frank Robinson is pretty much the only guy left in the world who doesn't realize that bunting is just about the stupidest thing a person can do on a baseball diamond most of the time. The list of really dumb things that will get you in trouble every time pretty much reads, "(1) Kill a pigeon with a ball in Toronto; (2) Issue intentional walks; (3) Bunt."

Because, as anyone who's ever, you know, watched a baseball game can tell you, all that feel-good pablum you hear from Ken Burns and George Will about baseball being the only game without a clock is a lie. Baseball does too have a clock, but instead of counting minutes it counts outs. You get 27 of them, just as surely as a football team gets 60 minutes. If a football coach came up with a plan that involved giving the other team two extra minutes on offense, no sane person would call that a good idea. But in baseball, there are still a few holdouts like Frank Robinson who think it's a great idea to take the equivalent of two minutes off the clock.

But as the Post reported, Frank is one of the only pro-bunt holdouts left. Even his own old manager Earl Weaver (.583 winning percentage with four pennants and one World Series title) kind of told Frank (.476 winning percentage, no pennants) off for loving the bunt so much. BallWonk has long observed that, if Barry Bonds was a National and he came up to bat with no outs and Jamey Carroll on first, Frank would tell Bonds to bunt. BallWonk has never, ever been kidding. He believes with all his heart that this is what Frank would do.

Anyway, point is that Jose Guillen apparently saw the Sunday Post and read the sports section and said to himself, "How dare these fools attack my adopted father like this? If Frank says a bunt is as good as a double, then that's good enough for me." So of course Guillen set out to vindicate his adopted father by bunting with runners on first and second and no outs in the fourth. Our best hitter, in our best scoring opportunity of the weekend, and he bunted. He freakin' bunted. Into a fielder's choice, of course, which put a runner at first to set up the DP and a runner at third to activate the Nationals third-base curse.

You know, the season-long thing where the presence of a runner on third absolutely prevents any Nationals batter from getting a hit or even a sac fly.

And, true to the curse, Preston "King Suckerman" Wilson grounded into the DP to end the inning and, effectively, the game. We went on to notch 21 straight scoreless innings on the series, which pretty well proves the argument against Frank-style bunting. You play offense the Frank Robinson way and, well, you too can play .476 ball like the teams Frank manages average. You too can make Cal freakin' Eldred look like Roger Clemens. You too can lead the third-most talented team in the division to fifth place.

So from now on, BallWonk would like to ask the School Board to require the Nationals to attach this sticker to the Nationals playbooks every spring:

All hope is not yet lost. We have a lot of games against the NL East left, and we've pretty much had Atlanta's number most of the season, and we're still four games above .500, which is something considering all the sucking we've been doing for two months now, and we still have three solid pitchers, and Drese might have surgery, which improves our rotation significantly.

But for crying out loud, can we please stop bunting with our best hitters when the game's on the line? Strike that; can we please stop bunting?