Bad Nats offer little hope for good ... but they swept the Dodgers!

We have on occasion found reason to mock the Washington Nationals for being so, well, Nat-like -- a bad operation, short on players, shorter on vision, almost bereft of listeners or viewers, with frankly no earthly reason to exist save Bud Selig's fascination with keeping Congress happy.

Ryan Zimmerman takes a moment to enjoy his home run against the Dodgers. (AP)

But fair is fair, and when the lads do something well, as they did in impaling the Los Angeles Dodgers, they should be acknowledged. They might not be very good now, but at some point ... well, there might be a 1969 Mets in their future.

It's just that unlike the Mets, the Nationals have pursued their dream in so many bad ways that their '69 might not happen until 2069. It is, after all, the way of this town and its historical place.

While the Red Sox, White Sox and Cubs have made rather a fetish of the long time it took to win a World Series, the Nationals say nothing about their own suffering. As the Montreal Expos, who were basically anthraxed out of existence, they never got to the World Series. As a city, Washington hasn't smelled the rich leather upholstery of a title since 1933. That's 75 years ago, and in truth, what with the Depression and being jobless and having nothing to eat and nowhere to live and all, the citizens probably didn't enjoy it as much as they should have.

In fact, Washington has had by our count five winning seasons since 1933 as Senators-turned-Twins, Senators-turned-Rangers and now Nationals, which might explain why they are such a hard sell in their own market now, even with a new ballpark.

There is, frankly, no institutional memory for fun baseball times in town unless you have lived in Washington for at least 80 years. The Redskins didn't always own the town, but the baseball teams haven't either, not even when Walter Johnson roamed the earth. Washington is at its heart a political town, and truth is everyone's favorite team is someone else.

Add to that the funk given off by the current operation, where the general manager has legal trouble and the owners are a tribute to inertia in the marketplace and you can understand why they are such a hard sell. With a brand new ballpark which by all accounts is state of the art, they are still filling it at only 70 percent capacity, and that's the number they announce rather than the numbers actually inside. That this is the high-water mark should cause anyone serious concern that what baseball has given the people of Washington is another Marlin-esque disaster, only worse because the new stadium isn't fixing what ails the franchise.

And the TV and radio ratings, despite having a top 10 level broadcaster lineup of Charlie Slowes and Dave Jageler (ahh, the beauties of satellite radio) have been so horrifying -- 4,000 listeners and a TV audience that does not register enough viewers to reach the margin for error -- that they have become an Internet talking point.

The obvious solution in this case would be winning, and logic suggests that is the only way to make this whole scheme work. And yet, we have seen in other venues that winning isn't the cure-all either, at least not yet. Even in Tampa, it has taken a long time to convince the populace that the winning is real, not because Tampa is a bad baseball town, but because crowds don't suddenly jump on a bandwagon any more. It takes a good year and sometimes more to convince folks to spend the kind of money teams demand of citizens, and in this economy it could take even more than more.

No, it might just be that what Washington has wrought, both recently and historically, puts it in a hole it might never escape. They are the second team in a one-team town (and second is probably putting it generously), with an excruciatingly bad product, no parents-sharing-stories-with-children history, and only a keep-our-antitrust-exemption-alive motivation for having the team there in the first place ... in all, not much of a compelling reason for the team to exist at all.

Except maybe this. The people who do like them deserve something for their blind faith (as long as they don't whine about being long-suffering). The broadcasters deserve a wider audience because they really are a pretty good group in an increasingly bad landscape (again, the beauties of satellite radio). Manager Manny Acta is considered a smart baseball man, and the players are pretty much free of the dog-like tendencies that many losing teams exhibit.

So give them their Thursday, where they snuffed the flattering Dodgers and moved to within 2½ games of San Diego in their heroic battle for 15th. It might suck being a National, owning a National, watching or listening to a National, but everybody should get something, sometime. Watching the Dodgers get swept might not be a big thing to you or I, but for a Nationals fan (there you are, we see you) it's sort of like puppy love. It means nothing to anyone except the puppy.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.