A chance to laud baseball’s rebirth in D.C.
City and team are finally getting the attention they so richly deserve
For the past 117 years, Washington has often existed on the fringes of Major League Baseball as a laughingstock team or as the town that lost two teams — how careless. Once, D.C. was exiled from the sport for 33 seasons. Even in the best times, this city has seldom been at the centre of MLB’s attention. Since ’01 — that’s 1901 — only one Washington team has won a post-season series. And that was 94 years ago.
D.C. has gone 49 years without staging even the all-star game, which, aside from a World Series, is the one time the entire sport assembles in one place, not just to celebrate the game but also to remake its acquaintance with the host city.
Have you opened a new park? What has changed here? Tell us about yourselves. We never thought you’d ask.
Please forgive D.C. (and me) if we treat Tuesday night’s all-star game at Nationals Park as more than an exhibition, albeit with great players, but as a symbol of a city’s successful emergence, finally, as a central spot on MLB’s map.
Very good team, not very bad. Not “first in war, first in peace and last in the American League,” but first in the National League East four of the past six years. No, nothing more than that. Washington is the last town where fans likely will demand more than their due, because they’ve never been due anything at all.
Who will throw the first pitch of this all-star game? Nationals ace Max Scherzer, who has won the National League Cy Young Award the past two years, is the favourite again this year and is far along a Hall of Fame career arc.
“So many emotions when you know that you’re pitching in your home park. This is such an honour for the All-Star Game to be here,” Scherzer said Monday. “In previous All-Star Games, seeing the hometown players and how the fans get behind them, it’s always been a special moment just watching from afar. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like to have the Nats fans here . ... To go out there and start this thing — this is just a dream come true.”
The Nats will say, as they should, that their goal is a championship. But let’s be serious. No one knows if the next World Series title in D.C. — to match that one in 1924 — will come along this year or in 50 or 100 years. Ask around. Unless you root for the Yankees, those things arrive when the fates allow.What Washington does have is a sense that it belongs at the centre of a five-day MLB celebration.
To the current generation of Nats fans who’ve watched their team win 95 or more games four times in recent years, the idea that players as excellent as Scherzer and Bryce Harper, the 2015 National League MVP, would play for their team is normal.
That didn’t take long, did it? Only an eternity, plus a year.
Devoted fans of the Cubs, Red Sox and others talk about their multi-generational droughts between world titles, about their devotion and patience as they make do with a few Hall of Famers to keep their summer nights energized until the next World Series arrives.
The last Hall of Famer to wear a Washington uniform in his prime was Harmon Killebrew in 1960. That’s patience. That’s devotion to baseball, although perhaps of a slightly odd, masochistic kind.
We also appreciate Pudge Rodriguez’s 155-game cameo in 2010-11. Really, we do.
Now, all that second- or thirdclass baseball citizenship is dead. For a day, Washington should declare a baseball holiday and bask. And if it rains Tuesday night, just wait for the sun to come up again and do the chestout, ear-to-ear-grin thing all over again. After such a wait, just enjoy the glow.
“Maybe this (all-star game) helps show everybody the sports city that D.C. really is,” said Nats reliever Sean Doolittle, who must miss the game because of a toe injury. “I didn’t know until I got here. Then the city was so alive for us in the playoffs last year. When the Caps won the Stanley Cup, everybody went crazy. D.C. is known for other things, but it really is a sport city, and the fans are incredibly passionate.”