Sometimes you look at a team like the Washington Nationals and think, "Well, at least things can't get worse." They lost 102 games last year, and their minor league system isn't particularly great. They have some decent young talent, but they're still a long way away from pulling this team out of the rut they've been in since before they bolted from Montreal for Washington. And then you read the news that one of the biggest signings made during the Jim Bowden/Stan Kasten era, that of Latin American super-prospect Esmailyn González, isn't nearly as great as it once looked because Gonzalez is actually Carlos Alvarez Daniel Lugo and four years older than the Nationals thought he was. Turns out the 19-year-old they believed was dominating the Gulf Coast League this summer is really 23.
The immediate temptation is to feel sorry for the Nats for being hoodwinked by a prospect and his buscone, but if you read Chico Harlan's piece about the situation in today's Washington Post, I promise that temptation will leave you pretty quickly. As it turns out, special assistant Jose Rijo signed Gonzalez/Lugo to his contract in 2006 without ever negotiating with his agent or even asking for any kind of age verification. Yeah, process that one for a second.
It's hard to be surprised that a guy is older than he said he was when you never bothered to prove how old he was in the first place.
Apparently, it wasn't even that difficult to guess Lugo's real age, as Harlan indicates that most of the GCL players that played against him guessed something was up. And Kasten suspects that someone in the organization had a hand in the deception. This is the second huge misstep in Latin America for Rijo and Bowden, who were both tied to a big bonus-skimming scandal last year which resulted in an FBI probe that hasn't been resolved yet.
How are these two guys still employed?
