Press coverage? If you’re the Washington Nationals, you don’t need no stinkin’ press coverage.

Yesterday afternoon, an attractive female D.C. Writeup staffer seeking to gain press access to Nationals games was curtly rebuked yesterday after being told that only “print media” organizations were allowed to cover games without first purchasing tickets. Phyllis Schlafly would be proud.

As we hurriedly printed out copies of our Web page in hopes that this would qualify us as a print media organization, we realized how bizarre the whole ego-bruising situation was. The Nationals have, on average, 20,000 empty seats per home game. Even our fattest staffers couldn’t take up more than three a piece, and they couldn’t spare room for just one?

Rejection hit us like a ton of bricks. This was like junior and senior prom and most of college and the next two years after that all over again.

We weren’t sure why the Nationals denied our request, actually, so we searched for a reason. Maybe they actually want to minimize press coverage. So far this year, the Nationals have lost two thirds of their games and mishandled more balls than Michael Jackson.

Or maybe they hadn’t heard of us and didn’t believe we’re a legitimate organization. But this can’t be the explanation. All our moms tell us we’re doing such a great job!

To generalize haphazardly, we’ll just go ahead and say that this bone-headedness is indicative of how the Nationals organization as a whole is run. And no, that’s not a chip on our shoulder — we’ve been using performance-enhancing drugs.

In 2006, as you may remember, Major League Baseball essentially blackmailed the D.C. City Council into forking over $611 million of taxpayer money for the Nats’ lavish new stadium. The league warned that, if the city council didn’t give them the dough, they’d relocate the Nationals to another city. Somehow, this must be the National’s fault.

Also in 2006, the Cincinnati Reds accused the Nationals of trading them an injured pitcher, Gary Majewski, without telling them that he was taking shots for an injury. Vodka shots? Cortisone shots? Leave it to the Nationals to keep us guessing. They’re such a tease.

And in February of this year, Sports Illustrated reported that the Nationals were clueless about the age and name of their top Dominican prospect, 20-year-old Carlos Alvarez Daniel Lugo (they thought he was a 16-year-old named Esmailyn Gonzalez).

Then, this March, the Nationals’ general manager, Jim Bowden, resigned after allegedly skimming money from the signing bonuses of the Nationals’ other Dominican prospects putting together a terrible team.

If the Nationals were a person, they’d be a deadbeat dad secretly lacing your pot with enough opium to kill a horse. And he wouldn’t give you a press pass, to boot!

We’re fed up with the Nationals’ incompetence, which is why we’re calling on you, our readers, to boycott their games.

Actually, scrub that idea. Nobody goes anyway. (At least our boycott lasted longer than Michael Jackson’s summer concert tour.)

Let’s wrap this up by placing blame where it’s due. It’s become popular for D.C. natives to blame the Nationals’ struggles on “bad luck.” That’s ridiculous. The Nationals don’t lose because they have bad luck. No, they lose because they deserve to lose.

They deserve to lose because they’re assholes.

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