Willful Blindness

Tim Brown at Yahoo! Sports has this story Monday on Nationals' manager Manny Acta's precarious job situation in D.C. where his team holds baseball's worst record at 16-46. Acta's firing is inevitable -- the old adage says that it is easier to replace a manger than a roster usually carries the day. We were struck, though, by this passage about National president Stan Kasten in Brown's article:

Still, Kasten told reporters this weekend, “I can confess to you how perplexed I am by this season, this team and the things that are going on.”

Really? Washington was regarded as a vitual lock for baseball's worst record this pre-season and the pitching staff - one of least experienced and least regarded staffs assembled in memory, has performed exactly as expected. Yet Kasten is "perplexed?" What irony that the one person that is "perplexed" by Washington's sorry state of affairs is perhaps the one person most responsible for assembing that very same sorry state of affairs in the first place. No one is blinder, it seems, than he who will not see.