“The Braves are a team that always seems to find good pitching and they’re always lacking offensive punch. When Chipper Jones is healthy, he adds the punch that they need and the stabilizing force they need in the lineup. But any time he’s injured, that lineup becomes offensively challenged. I just don’t think they have enough offense to challenge the Phillies. THey (sic) have good pitching, but not enough offense. Pitching is great, but you still have to score runs to win.”

- Joe Morgan, in his chat this morning at ESPN.com…saying the same exact thing five times in the span of five written sentences.

Has anyone noticed how much ESPN.com, especially their “MLB” page, sucks over the weekend? Maybe not, since the time when most people most obsessively check the internet is during the week, when they are at work and supposed to be doing other things.

But now that I am living in Japan, where due to timezone differences my weekend hardly overlaps with the US weekend, I really notice it. The front page hardly gets updated. Web gems don’t get posted at all. Don’t even think about new columns or blog posts. And breaking news stories and trades sometimes don’t get posted until as late as an hour or two after they are covered elsewhere.

All of which is in contrast to the workweek, when ESPN is pretty on top of things. Overall, the feeling is of a web enterprise that only has a couple people in the building on weekends.

In this day and age of the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, and viewers around the world, it really makes no sense for a website as prominent as ESPN.com to all but shut down over the weekend.

It’s cute and all when some sort of mega-news goes down over the weekend and a video gets posted wherein Buster Olney looks like he just got out of bed, but if a site like mlbtraderumors.com can afford to hire people to cover the weekends, ESPN should too.

Perfect evidence of why stats are so important to give a more realistic evaluation of defense, as opposed to just going on observation alone, can be found in the Baseball Tonight Web Gem leaderboards, which have finally appeared on ESPN.com’s “Baseball Tonght Clubhouse” page after weeks of claiming on air that the leaderboards were there when they were actually not.

Because which major league team is at the top of the leaderboards for most web gems by a single team? Why none other than the Washington Nationals, with 17 appearances by one of their players on Baseball Tonight’s web gem sequence. Yes, the same Washington Nationals who are in fact probably the worst defensive team in all of baseball, by any statistical measure.

I can only presume that the Nats players have to dive so much because they reach the edge of their range so quickly.

What the heck is up with ESPN.com’s wack new policy of treating singular cities and team names as if they were plural nouns in their news headlines, as in “Tribe acquire Anthony Reyes” or “Arizona triumph over the Giants” rather than “Tribe acquires” and “Arizona triumphs”?

Has anyone else noticed this? Because it’s been happening all the time lately.

Did ESPN secretly get bought by the British or something? Bring in a whole bunch of British editors? Because that’s not how we ever said those things here in America, and last time I checked, Bristol, Conn., was still firmly in American hands.

I just hope this weirdness doesn’t catch on with real Americans like that stupid “untracked” crap.