Former Commie Wily Mo may or may not be a great addition to the team at a very low price. But for the love of Pete, can someone please tell Bowden that it's high time he gets over the fact he's not with Cincinnati anymore?

With all those young pitchers we're relying on to build the foundation of future championships, here's hoping the new ballpark plays a lot more like RFK Canyon than like the HO-scale Citizens Bank Park in Philly or the hobbit-sized Great American Ballpark in Cincy -- even with the 10-foot-closer wall in right center.

Philadelphia at Washington. Phailers 4, Nationals 2

Blah blah blah excellent Nationals pitching blah blah blah no run support blah blah blah. Mumbo jumbo, in the wild-card race with even average batting, mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo. Yadda yadda fifth consecutive game the Nats should have won yadda yadda instead they're 2-3 over that span yadda yadda, yadda yadda.

Sigh. The big news on the day was not that the Nationals took another easy win handed to them on a red-and-gold platter by the pitching staff and flushed it down the clubhouse toilet. Been there, done that. No, the big news on the day was the details of the Jack McGeary signing, which completed a stunning 20-for-20 signings sweep of the team's top draft picks. It's a signing that could revolutionize the drafting of prep athletes. Gone could be the old paradigm battle between crusty old trust-your-gut scouts drafting high school stars and Moneyball-era empiricist GMs drafting college stars. Heck, gone could be the structure of the farm system as we've known it since Branch Rickey.

With the McGeary signing, the Nats have become the first team to open a ROTC program.

Here's the deal: The Nationals will give McGeary a full-ride scholarship to attend Stanford. In return, McGeary must follow a strict regimen of supervised training and drills during the academic year. Then he goes on active duty and serves full-time over summer, participating in Nationals training exercises in Viera, Vermont, Potomac, Harrisburg, or even Columbus. His actual assignments each summer will vary. Then, once he graduates, he will owe the Nationals three or four years of full-time uniformed service.

The key for BallWonk is that McGeary will not be allowed to play NCAA baseball for Stanford, thus upholding baseball's status apart from the NFL and NBA in not totally exploiting college athletics as a free-labor training plantation. If the Nationals' ROTC experiment works out, and McGeary gets his degree and joins the rotation in Washington in June 2011, BW hopes the signing might become a model for other athletes. Attend college, play ball, and get paid for your labor.

On the other hand, it must be noted that the Nats farm system is now filled to the brim with high-potential pitching prospects, an amazing number of them lefties. Too bad hitting is the team's most desperate need at the big-league level. Our jury-rigged staff and bullpen can already silence the biggest bats in the league most nights, but our lineup is still consistently making even the sorriest has-beens, aren't-yets, and never-will-bes look like Cy Young candidates.

Those early morning drills at Stanford could get awfully lonely for young cadet McGeary. Next year, perhaps the Nats can send a batting prospect or two to join him.

Item! The Nationals signed the McGeary kid, who will now become a professional baseball player in the Nationals organization instead of going to college. Yay victory of sports over education! All of a sudden, the amount of probable quality pitching in the Nationals system is starting to look a little scary. There are now enough plausible two- or three-spot lefty starters in the system that we could be trading arms for bats in the next couple of years. And just like that, BallWonk's faith in The Plan is a lot stronger.

In other news, the Army Corps of Engineers announced late last night that it has scrapped its plans for rebuilding the flood defenses around New Orleans. Rather than relying on mechanical gates and pumping stations, the Corps now proposes to install Ray King and Luis Ayala as floodwalls.

Said Corps spokesman Lt. Col. Albert Drowner, "If King and Ayala could get out of a no-outs, bases-loaded situation with Branyan, Rollins, and Iguchi due up without giving up a run, they may be the most effective disaster stoppers known to human science." Accordingly, the new Corps plans for New Orleans call for King and Ayala to be placed at either end of the city's vulnerable canal system to hold back future storm surges.

Because Ayala not only got the last out of the catastrophe-averting seventh, but also faced Burrell, Howard, Rowand, and Helms in the eighth and notched two strikeouts looking and no runs given up, the Corps expects to place him on the Lake Pontchartrain openings of the canals, which is expected to face greater sustained stress in any future flooding event. King will be deployed along the eastern edge of New Orleans, where the levee system faces shorter, more intense strain in some circumstances.

Nationals general manager Trader Jim Bowden is said to be in discussions with the Army Corps of Engineers about a trade for the two relievers. Sources close to the negotiations say Bowden is demanding either Alex Rodriguez or Adam Dunn in compensation. Senior Corps officials who asked not to be named said they were growing frustrated with Bowden's outlandish demands, and are considering seeking authority from Congress to draft King and Ayala into the armed forces.

His second decisive home run in three games, and both times Church kind of looked disappointed. All the longballs are putting him off pace to hit 50 doubles this year. "Aw, jimminy," you could almost hear him thinking, "I hit that one too hard. That's gonna be four. Heckity darn." The pitching has remained consistently strong. But the Nats offense has of late been making mooks like Kyle Lohse look like Brandon Webb. So when Ryan Church steps up to make himself the little engine that slugged game-transforming home runs in consecutive wins, he chugs back down the hill with back-to-back Majority Leader honors.

Delegate Count: Cowboy Randy 12, Z-man 9, Dmitri 6, F-Lo 5, Big Fella 5, Church 5, Chief 4, Power Austin 4, Officer Schneider 3, Belliard 2.