Doing the right thing in our capital

Mike Burke

BRAVO to the Washington Nationals for hands-down the best week of their five years in the nation’s capital. And if anybody needed a good week, it was the Natinals.

Getting the four-year, $15.2-million deal in place with No. 1 draft pick Stephen Strasburg less than two minutes before the signing deadline is win-win for everybody involved. It’s good for Strasburg, he of the 102-mph fastball; it’s good for his agent Scott Boras, as though any of us really care about that; and it’s good for the Nationals, a franchise that has been the poster child for ineptitude since planting roots in Washington, if planting roots in D.C. is possible for anybody or any MLB team to do.

Not long ago, it said here this deal wouldn’t get done. It says here now the reason it got done is because of the work of Mike Rizzo, who until yesterday, was the Washington interim general manager. Rizzo was said to be one of three candidates being considered for the permanent GM position, but on Thursday Nats president Stan Kasten essentially told him, “There has never been anybody else, you big palooka.”

Things like this are nice to see, because not only is the 48-year-old Rizzo being trusted with the welfare of a franchise for the first time, he’s being rewarded for a job well done, which is rare anywhere in this day in age, much less in professional sports, and much less in Washington, D.C.

All Rizzo has done since taking over for the disgraced Jim Bowden, is reshape the Nats’ pitiful bullpen with minor-league signings and then acquire Nyjer Morgan and reliever Sean Burnett in a deal with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Third baseman Ryan Zimmerman may be the face of the Nationals franchise, but Morgan is the reason you watch the Nationals play. He’s a flat-out old-school ballplayer with flair. Simply watching him run is worth the price of admission, and he’s made a huge difference for Washington playing center field. Of course, these are things Pirates fans already knew.

Short of hiring Branch Rickey (which would have been pretty amazing since Mr. Rickey died in 1965), the Nationals would have lost even more face in their town and around baseball had they told Rizzo after all he’s done, including broker the deal with Strasburg, that they still wanted to take things in another direction.

The Nationals are hardly a juggernaut, but since the Morgan trade and since Jim Riggleman was made interim manager to replace the fired Manny Acta, they have become a baseball team worth the occasional watch for a non-Nats fan. Under Riggleman, Washington entered last night’s game playing one game over .500, which would have been unimaginable at the All-Star break.

The Nationals actually play a pretty decent game of baseball; they finally play like a professional baseball team, thanks to the way Riggleman handles a game and holds every player accountable.

Should this brand of play continue, and even improve, through the remainder of this season, the first hire Mike Rizzo should make as the permanent general manager of the Washington Nationals is Frostburg State University’s Jim Riggleman as permanent manager of the Washington Nationals.

THE NCAA has deemed new Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari is not “at risk” in light of his former team, the Memphis Tigers, being nailed for an unknown person taking the college entrance exam for a player on the 2007-08 team. However, Memphis will be forced to vacate the record 38 victories from its Final Four season, in which it lost to Kansas in overtime in the national championship game.

Everybody in Calipari’s new Old Kentucky Home, from Gov. Steve Beshear to the school’s athletic director Mitch Barnhart, has gone out of their way to say they’re not concerned with this following the slicked-back coach to Lexington as he embarks on making the Wildcats a national power again. Yet it certainly followed him from Amherst, Mass. to Memphis, Tenn. as this marks the second time a Calipari team has had to forfeit a Final Four season, with the coach’s 1996 Massachusetts team being the first.

By the NCAA’s definition, there is a difference between “at risk” and being a risk, and given his history it cannot be said hiring Calipari isn’t a risk, particularly for a university that has put together a rather colorful NCAA violations resume itself through the years.

It’s funny that the previous Final Four team of Calipari’s to be stricken from the record came in 1996, for that was the same year Kentucky won its national championship under coach Rick Pitino.

Calipari has always been linked to Pitino for a variety of reasons as their careers have followed similar paths. The big difference in the two, college basketball observers have long said, is Calipari is slimy and Pitino is not.

Just as there appears to be a difference between being “at risk” and being a risk, given who and what’s been in the news of late, there appears now to be two definitions for slimy as well.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.