Leading OFF

Red, white and new: Nats now rule October in Washington

WASHINGTON — October used to be football season in the nation’s capital. I remember those days. I was introduced to them the moment I moved here in the fall of 1984, when I started covering the NFL for The Washington Post and was informed by a colleague that if Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev somehow announced they had reached an agreement for world peace, the Dallas-Washington football game would still get better play in the next day’s newspaper.

A Major League Baseball team arrived in 2005, but it was no competition for the football team, especially when October rolled around. The Nationals weren’t very good anyway, so even while the football team – I won’t use the “R” word in this column, so let’s call them the Snydermen – got worse and worse, the NFL still owned October in Washington.

Then the baseball team became surprisingly compelling, but even so, it always lost in the first round of the playoffs. This happened in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017. The losses were legendary. Fans still shudder in their retelling.

So, while the Snydermen were spiraling downward, and the Nats were getting better, the early exits during baseball’s postseason meant that, even in spite of itself, the NFL team still owned October.

But then came the magical baseball season of 2019 in the nation’s capital. Left for dead after a 19-31 start through late May, the Nationals went on a majestic run, made the wildcard game, won that, upset the Los Angeles Dodgers in the division series and then swept the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS – meaning that, for the first time since 1933, a Washington baseball team is in the World Series.

At the same time, the football team is off to a dreadful start. Its record stands at 1-6, it has already fired its coach, and its stadium, a monstrosity of empty seats in suburban Maryland far from the energized core of D.C. culture, sports and night life, is regularly filled with a majority of fans who cheer for Washington’s opponent.

So, it’s not much of a reach to say that while it took him a few years to do it, NFL owner Dan Snyder has finally turned Washington into a baseball town.

The Nats have certainly helped. This season has been a journey of redemption and happiness. More than a few of us thought that the team just might be better off without Bryce Harper, who left for Philadelphia in free agency. Nothing against Harper. He’s a terrific player and every at-bat is mustsee TV. But whatever postseason demons surrounded the team when he was here are mysteriously gone now. Who knows why? Who cares?

There’s a boyish wonder to this team, led by Max Scherzer and Juan Soto and Nat-for-life Ryan Zimmerman and Gerardo Parra, who arrived just before the Nats’ fortunes changed and who remarkably has turned “Baby Shark” into the theme song of straight-laced D.C.

I attended Game 3 of the NLDS and Game 3 of the NLCS with family and friends as a spectator, and what I saw all around me – jubilant fans rising to their feet on nearly every pitch, lobbyists and lawyers and journalists and politicians all together as one – reminded me of what I watched from the press box at RFK Stadium during the glorious Joe Gibbs days of the 1980s, when the stands shook and everyone in town wore burgundy and gold. Now, it’s all Nats red.

Washington has always been a town that loves winning, perhaps even more than other cities. Politicians have to win something just to get here. That’s why Gibbs’ teams that won Super Bowls in 1982, 1987 and 1991 are such a part of town lore to this day. So too, much more recently, are the Capitals’ Stanley Cup victory a year ago and the Mystics’ WNBA championship earlier this month.

The Nationals invited the Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin to throw out the first pitch in Game 4 of the NLDS, then the Mystics’ Elena Delle Donne in the deciding Game 4 of the NLCS. The next night, Delle Donne was dropping the ceremonial first puck at the Caps game. Two days later, Scherzer followed her onto the ice, bringing a baseball rather than a puck. You can’t help but think they’re all in this together.

For a generation, D.C. parents with children born after, say, the late 1980s have felt a certain sadness that their kids would never know the true spirit of this fractured city when it was united behind a big-league team that actually won titles and championships.

How did that feel? What was that like?

Now they know.

BRAD MILLS/USA TODAY SPORTS In a city that loves winning, the 2019 National League champion Nationals are the talk of D.C. this fall.