Nationals have become a tough sell
On a warm and sunny Wednesday afternoon, the videoboard in center field at Nationals Park showed a familiar face: Max Scherzer, not in a ball cap but in a hard hat. The clip honored Scherzer as the Nationals’ nominee for the Roberto Clemente Award, which goes annually to the major league player who best demonstrates a commitment to community involvement and philanthropy. So there was Max in the District’s Ward 8, where a ballfield that will be named for him is under construction.
“Thank you, Max, for all your efforts,” boomed the voice of public address announcer Jerome Hruska, “and congratulations.”
It felt, in some ways, posthumous. Within the hour, a 27-year-old lefthander who has undergone two Tommy John surgeries and been cut by the god-awful Baltimore Orioles took the mound. Josh Rogers pitches for the Nationals now. Max Scherzer does not. There were 16,309 folks scattered about the ballpark to take in that reality.
Something was lost for the Nationals since the waning days of July, when a purge of players — as necessary as it was painful — sacrificed the club’s present in hopes of a better future. Restocking a bare cupboard is sound strategy, but man, this is hard.
Rogers has an interesting story and every right to try to pitch his way into a big league job next season. But Scherzer is a Hall of Famer. He was not going to pitch this Nationals’ bunch back into a pennant race. He was, however, going to be a reason for fans to show up at the yard every fifth day. Right now, there is the day-in, day-out magic of Juan Soto — who is absolutely mind-blowing — but at every other spot … room for growth, to be generous.
So there’s a central question for the Nationals as they wrap up their penultimate homestand of the season Sunday and head toward a winter unlike any they have experienced in a decade. There will be holes on the roster to fill, and General Manager Mike Rizzo and his front office will be entrusted with filling them.
There’s also the matter of filling the seats. Which means: Who, in 2022, will be worth pulling out the wallet to see in person? Soto, and …?
Some data points: That crowd on Wednesday wasn’t the smallest of the homestand; that would be the 13,916 listed for the first game of a day-night doubleheader last Saturday against the New York Mets. And that wasn’t as small as the smallest of the season. The smallest, since Nats Park opened to full capacity June 11? Sept. 2 against Bryce Harper and the Philadelphia Phillies, when just 12,280 people bought tickets.
Since baseball returned to Washington in 2005, just five announced crowds (not counting those limited by the District’s coronavirus restrictions) have been smaller than that intimate gathering that came to see Nats-Phils. They were all from 2010. That was the summer of Strasmas, when Stephen Strasburg made his debut and injected a previously foreign energy into the franchise and the fan base. It was the summer Harper was drafted and signed. It was the first time there was real hope that the club could be something other than a doormat.
Attendance, though, isn’t only about the fate of the team in a particular summer. It’s tied quite closely to the season(s) that preceded it. That 2010 season followed back-to-back 100-loss campaigns. From 2006 through 2009, no franchise lost more games than the Nats. The shine of the new ballpark, which opened in 2008, had worn off. Putting money down for 81 games of that product? Over the winter before the 2010 season — the time when decisions about whether to buy season tickets are made — it made people pause.
What does this history have to do with the current Nats? Covid, of course, has wrecked so much, so its impact on the fortunes of a sports franchise are trivial. Still, it’s undeniable that the Nationals’ ability to build off the 2019 World Series championship was completely gutted by the pandemic that shortened the 2020 season to 60 games and locked out fans. That continued into this season, with partial capacity over the first two-plus months.
So here we are, concluding the first 162-game season in which the Nationals will have a losing record since 2011. Crowd size at an individual game is linked to a team’s season-ticket base, because the announced attendance in Major League Baseball isn’t how many bodies come through the turnstiles. It’s how many tickets have been sold.
The Nationals’ charge: Develop more pitchers and players who are worth paying good money to see, because that’s when September can go from its current sleepy state back to electric, which is what we became used to around here.