What an unbelievable and unlikely baseball journey it’s been for my adopted (hometown) team, the Washington Nationals. A week ago, at 11:08 p.m. Eastern Time, the Nationals completed a four-game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 2019 National League Championship Series. After beating the Milwaukee Brewers in a winner-take-all Wild Card game, then prevailing over the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Division Series, the Nationals captured the team’s first pennant in its brief history since the franchise grew out of the defunct Montreal Expos after moving to Washington, D.C. in 2005. It’s been a time to remember.
Not since the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 has there been a World Series played in the nation’s capital city. It involved the original Washington Senators, who played their games at the long-since-torn down Griffith Stadium in the Shaw neighborhood, near Howard University. Those Senators left town three decades later and are now the Minnesota Twins. Then, a second Washington Senators franchise arrived in 1961 and promptly left town in 1972 to become the Texas Rangers.
In 1904, the Senators were playing so poorly that well-known baseball writer and humorist Charles Dryden famously wrote: “Washington – first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.”
Finally, Washington’s baseball fortunes all changed a week ago on October 15.
⚾️ Prize least expected.
⚾️ Pop the corks. Raise the pennant.
⚾️ Improbable team.
Now, the Nationals will face the mighty Houston Astros in the 2019 World Series starting tonight. Pretty good for a Nationals team that was 19-31 on May 23 and seemed hopeless. The team wasn’t hitting in the clutch, it wasn’t pitching effectively, it wasn’t fielding particularly well. The team’s manager, Dave Martinez, was on the verge of being fired.
Then, the team started winning – and people started paying attention.
“Since baseball time is measured only in outs,” the esteemed longtime New Yorker baseball writer Roger Angell wrote in The Summer Game, “all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
While I’ve long been a fan of the San Francisco Giants from living 21-plus years in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to suburban Maryland two years ago, I’ve (finally) begun taking an interest in the Nationals, too. After all, Nationals Park is only 6.5 miles from our home just across the District line – and I’ve been a baseball fan all my life.
As longtime Washington Post national baseball columnist Thomas Boswell, who’s been around the nation’s capital city writing about baseball through good times and bad – mostly bad – wrote upon the Nationals’ pennant-clinching victory over the Cardinals: “What the Washington Nationals have done this season is like going into your backyard with a spade to plant petunias and, instead, striking oil.
“Their appointment with the World Series, just 14 days after facing elimination in the wild-card game, is like spilling water on Grandma’s painting of an old farm house and finding out she had painted over a still-pristine Picasso.”
Last week’s Game 4 pennant-clinching victory over the Cardinals – another “Curly W in the books” as the team’s radio play-by-play broadcaster Charlie Slowes bellowed in a celebratory tone across the air waves – was part comedy, part horror show. But in the end, the Nationals won 7-4. Indeed, as NLCS MVP Howie Kendrick of the Nationals said, “Some of the best things come from the unexpected moments.” Indeed, they do. How else do you explain the “Baby Shark” phenomenon that’s unified the Nationals and rallied their fan base? I witnessed good fortunes for the Giants in 2010, 2012, and 2014. Maybe, good fortunes will come to the Nationals, too.
So, I say: “Congratulations to the Nationals and good luck!
#STAYINTHEFIGHT
A World Series postscript:
The Washington Nationals won their first World Series title on Wednesday, October 30. They beat the Houston Astros 6-2 in the decisive Game 7 of the best-of-7 series and won the series four games to three. It brought the city of Washington its first World Series title in 95 years.
⚾️ Can you believe it?
⚾️ World Series Curly W!
⚾️ A great victory.
#FIGHTFINISHED
Photo: Courtesy of Google Images.
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