After long journey, Nationals finally reach World Series
Washington sweeps away St. Louis in NLCS
WASHINGTON — It ended as these games end, with a pile of humanity in the middle of a diamond, and that’s the image that these Washington Nationals will hang on walls throughout the city. But at the bottom of that pile Tuesday night at the center of Nationals Park, so many memories were squashed. Repress them, Washington, because there are new versions now. Where grief was once expected, now there’s nothing but possibility.
These Nationals changed that for themselves and for their city. They beat the St. Louis Cardinals 7-4 in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, completing a dominant - if surprisingly dicey - sweep at a delirious ballpark whose denizens preferred not to, or simply couldn’t, sit down. In a town with a baseball history that can best be described as complicated, the significance of that victory is multilayered.
What matters, though, is just one thing: The Washington Nationals are going to the World Series.
Tuesday night began with an eruption and ended with fingernails hanging onto the edge of
“That sounds pretty sweet,” said first baseman Ryan Zimmerman, the only player who has appeared in all 15 seasons since this franchise returned baseball to the nation’s capital. “Been through a lot. Obviously, got close before. But this group of guys - wow.”
Zimmerman and his teammates, who moved from an on-field celebration into a Champagne-soaked clubhouse as Tuesday turned to Wednesday, praised one another for enduring not only a Game 4 that turned from tranquil to turbulent but for the season that preceded it - which is worth reviewing.
“It’s been quite a wild ride,” said General Manager Mike Rizzo, responsible for assembling the roster, “starting the way we started and finishing it the way we finished.”
It wasn’t finished until reliever Daniel Hudson induced a lazy flyball that center fielder Victor Robles allowed to settle into his glove, and that mob filtered from the dugout into the center of the diamond. But that emotional scene doesn’t begin to explain the evening, which began with an erruption and ended with fingernails hanging onto the edge of a cliff.
After one inning, the Nats led 7-0. The home crowd of 43,976 bounced with jubilation. The pennant seemed clinched. This was a walkover, and the crowd sensed it.
Here’s the problem: Washington’s baseball past is littered with calamities, and the Cardinals are one of the sport’s proudest franchises. Sweeps aren’t easy. Pennants aren’t granted. By the fifth, St. Louis was within three runs. In the eighth, the Cardinals had the tying run on base and the winning run at the plate. Anticipation had turned to anxiety. There would be joy. But torment had to precede it.
“I knew those guys weren’t going to quit,” Zimmerman said.
“I had a calmness about me,” Rizzo said.
Speak for yourself.
The heartache of previous Nation
als’ teams is fresh in the minds of so many who crowded in Tuesday night. But the angst that goes back generations here is rooted only in baseball failures but, worse, baseball’s absence.
Washington’s most recent World Series appearance came in 1933 - in a different time, with a different franchise. Back then, the Senators of Goose Goslin, Heinie Manush and Joe Cronin were no match for the New York Giants, losing in five games. Eight years prior, Walter Johnson - forever the best player in Washington history, a Hall of Famer - pitched Game 7 against the Pittsburgh Pirates. But shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh booted one ball in the seventh, another in the eighth, and the Pirates came from behind to win.
So 1924 stands as the high-water mark in Washington baseball’s development, the only World Series title, built not only on the right arm of Johnson, who came out of the bullpen for four shutout innings of relief in Game 7, but on the bad - or, in Washington’s case, great - bounce of Bucky Harris’s grounder to third, which scored two runs and allowed the Senators to come back and win the city’s only baseball championship.
Before this October, Harris’s ball off a pebble could have been considered the most recent meaningful bounce in District history. It was 95 years ago.
But at least in those days, there were bad hops - and lousy finishes - to lament. The Senators and their fans, a dwindling lot, suffered for decades.
One team left for Minnesota to become the Twins.
An expansion team replaced it for 11 seasons before it left for Texas to become the Rangers. Between them, from 1933-71, they combined for five winning seasons followed. You can’t be a baseball fan in the District of Columbia and not know the phrase, “Washington: First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.”
But then came 33 summers without baseball.
So for longtime Washingtonians, there has been a legitimate question as to what’s worse: the jarring pain from kick-in-the-stomach postseason losses, or the dull ache of not having baseball at all?
When Major League Baseball moved the Montreal Expos to Washington before the 2005 season, considering such questions seemed unrealistic. The re-branded Nationals were a mess of an organization that had been owned and run, nearly into the ground, by MLB itself. They made run-down RFK Stadium their temporary home.