The bucks stop on Jim Bowden's desk. All 1.4 million of them. When that bill comes due, will the Nationals' general manager pay with his job? For the moment, Bowden appears to have been the primary sucker in one of the most embarrassing scams ever used to defraud a baseball team. Now we have the mysterious case of what President Stan Kasten called the "player to be named later."

It would be farce if it weren't so mortifying. Three years ago, Bowden was perhaps the game's most gullible executive, a bumptious hustler so eager to impress his new bosses, the Lerners, that he talked them and Kasten into signing a 16-year-old Dominican named Esmailyn Gonzalez, who now turns out to have been a 20-year-old named Carlos Alvarez Daniel Lugo. Bleak humor about the Nats now bounces all around baseball. But this case, as Kasten says ominously, "will have big repercussions."

At one level, the FBI and Major League Baseball, both of which are investigating broad allegations of kickbacks to street agents and other improprieties in the Dominican Republic, will sort out the villains. The White Sox already have fired personnel because of the scandal. However, whether or not anybody in the Nats' front office comes up dirty, heads will probably roll. At least one executive, Jos?? Rijo, the team's Dominican head honcho, will almost certainly be fired. The bigger question is whether Bowden, the head dupe in this $1.4 million scam, may be shown the door, too.