{"id":393,"date":"2010-02-05T01:44:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-05T05:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/?p=393"},"modified":"2010-02-05T01:44:27","modified_gmt":"2010-02-05T05:44:27","slug":"nats-make-right-decision-not-signing-hudson-bring-in-kennedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/2010\/02\/05\/nats-make-right-decision-not-signing-hudson-bring-in-kennedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Nats make right decision not signing Hudson, bring in Kennedy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Wash<a href=\"http:\/\/view.picapp.com?iid=3065815&amp;term=%5c%22adam+kennedy\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"border: 0pt none\" src=\"http:\/\/cdn.picapp.com\/ftp\/Images\/c\/3\/f\/5\/Adam_Kennedy_holds_b569.jpg?adImageId=9922246&amp;imageId=3065815\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Adam Kennedy holds J.T.\" width=\"234\" height=\"351\" \/><\/a>ington Nationals agreed to a deal with Adam Kennedy late Thursday night. The team had been in the market for a starting second basemen with Kennedy and Orlando Hudson being the teams primary targets.<\/p>\n<p>In recent weeks it appeared that the club was heading towards a signing with Hudson but with his salary demands being at $5 million the club began to sour on him earlier this week. Hudson has since signed with Minnesota where he will take over at second.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also more likely that Hudson will benefit the Twins then he would have the Nationals. The Twins are a contender for the AL Central while the Nationals are trying to climb out of the cellar in the NL East.<\/p>\n<p>The result was the signing of Adam Kennedy, 34, who had a bit of a resurgence last season batting .289\/.348\/.410 with 11 homers and 63 RBI while playing with Oakland.<\/p>\n<p>Kennedy is simply a solid veteran player who will buy the organization some time.<\/p>\n<p>The biggest plus to signing Kennedy over Hudson is there will be no $5 million obstacle in the way of the team bringing up prized prospect Ian Desmond.<\/p>\n<p>Desmond, 24, combined to hit .330\/.401\/.477 between Double-A and Triple-A last season while notching 7 homers, 24 doubles, 32 RBI and was 21-for-26 on the base-paths. While the Nationals hinted earlier this winter that they would entertain the idea of starting Desmond at second base, this buys the team some additional time to work on a smooth transition.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align:right;margin-left:5px\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Washington Nationals agreed to a deal with Adam Kennedy late Thursday night. The team had been in the market for a starting second basemen with Kennedy and Orlando Hudson being the teams primary targets. In recent weeks it appeared that the club was heading towards a signing with Hudson but with his salary demands [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30494,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,59,262,659],"coauthors":[675],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized","tag-adam-kennedy","tag-baseball","tag-ian-desmond","tag-washington-nationals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}