Ricky Barnes and Lucas Glover. Really? Watching the two of them play this morning has been almost unbearable. If I had to pick one of 'em, I'd say Glover looks like he's managing to keep it together just a hair better than Barnes. They both seem to be falling into that nastiest of golf traps, though, trying to race through their round without screwing it up. There is no more surefire way to blow up your scorecard. Lefty looks strong all of a sudden. Wouldn't that be storybook? Meanwhile, I don't know if Tiger's knee is still bothering him (I don't think it is) but his play so far this year has been just erratic enough to give the rest of us hope. He's human after all! Of course, the fact that he's already won twice this year after being out of commission for about nine months is enough to put the fear of God back into you. Maybe he really isn't human. One thing that's really overstayed it's welcome? "GET IN THE HOLE!!!!" every, single, freakin' shot. Another? "YOU DA MAN, TIGER!!!!!" Seriously. No offense to Tiger; all offense to tired meatballs. Speaking of meatballs, anybody noticed the what's going in the National League East? OK, judging by the acres of empty seats at Nationals Park, no, clearly none of you have noticed what's going on in the division whose basement your team calls home. First, the cellar-dwellers recently ripped off four wins in a row, heroically clawing their way up to that benchmark of institutional success, a .300 winning percentage. Good for a lifetime batting average; less than stellar as the representative sample of an entire team's body of work. (By the time you read this, it's entirely possible they'll have given most if not all of those wins back.) But what's really a puzzler is the fact that a team this bad, this late in the season, is still within reach of the division lead. OK, realistically, the Nats aren't getting within spitting distance of the division lead until the first day of the 2010 season, and only then for a week or so. But at only 16 back of first place there's still really a chance that Manny Acta's fairy godmother will sprinkle some pixie-dust on this tragi-comedy of a season. In the National League West, 20-47 is enough to park you in the sub-basement, 26 games separating you from the big dogs. But luckily for the Nats, and even more so for the less-than-awful Braves and Marlins, neither the World Series Champion Phillies nor the heavy-walleted Mets appear particularly interested in plucking the low-hanging fruit that is the NL East title. The Phillies, essentially a carbon-copy of their 2008 version minus that year's best closer, always seem to be warming up, only to stumble and face plant their way to 6 losses in a row as they recently did. And just a few stops up the Northeast Regional, the Mets are looking more like the Mess, or the Meds, if the number and quality of players they've tucked away on the DL is any indicator: John Maine, Oliver Perez, J.J. Putz, Billy Wagner, Jose Reyes, Carlos Delgado. And those are just the starters. Angel Pagan and Ramon Martinez are also on the shelf. Oh, and Carlos Beltran is "day-to-day," which is baseball-ese for "we don't know what the problem is but we hope it's not serious." I bet Omar Minaya, the Mets GM, wishes he'd overpaid for Derek Lowe right about now…. If the Lerner family has a shred of common decency, they'll give Manny Acta at least one or two more years after this one. You know, one or two more years with a GM who's not the baseball version of Bernie Madoff. I think the Lerners should spend a LOT less time letting their manager flap in the breeze and a lot MORE time explaining to everyone how they've botched their baseball experiment so badly. If they're not careful, the Lerners might just give the Danny a run for his money for title of biggest disappointment of a team owner in the nation's capital. Speaking of the Danny, how's that Six Flags investment working out? Oops. Sometimes, people really are as smart as they think they are. Usually though, not so much. Grip it and rip it, Lefty, grip it and rip it….