After my experience in Baltimore last month my feelings about baseball on the beltway were undoubtedly a little disheartened. To be sure, I knew that the experience of watching baseball for any team aside from the Yankees was going to be rather different and most likely not so rosy, but the contrast to Baltimore was appalling. Any semblance of hope or excitement of the game seemed to have vanished from their sports consciousness and in its place remained a general malaise of despair. Thankfully, I am fortunate enough to live near two baseball teams in Northern Virginia and the team by the Potamac, the Washington Nationals, has presented a much brighter and hopeful glimpse of baseball fandom. As I stated before, Washington, D.C. is hardly a great baseball town because it lacks a rich history or a dedicated fanbase and the hopes of changing that were not great initially. The Senators (both incarnations) had long left town by the time the Expos moved down here, a team that has been notoriously bad and cheap, and subsequently there was very little appetite for the game. This is because by all accounts, D.C. was then and is now a fervent football town; Washingtonians love themselves some Redskins football, and regardless of how much Dan Synder screws things up and makes them a laughingstock they care about that team 365 days a year. However, a new star in the making has emerged for the Washington Nationals and has brought hope to the team and created a great deal of excitement and good feelings about our national pastime. His name is Stephen Strasburg, you may have heard of him if you’ve heard anything about sports recently, and his arrival on the big stage has transformed sports landscape here in D.C., and brought hope to a formerly hopeless sports town.
This past July 4th weekend I attended my first Nationals game, also against the Mets, where Strasburg was pitching, and my experience at the game could not have been more different than the one I had in Baltimroe. Of course, it’s really not fair to compare a game by the Orioles pitched by one of the worst starting pitchers in the game right now (Millwood has an embarrassing 5.77ERA) to the hottest pitching prospect in recent years because the expectations are so different. Truly, who gets excited about a guy pitching to a 5.77 ERA? While this may be true and the expectations are different, as time as gone on I have seen these games to both represent the zeitgeist of the team at this time; these games serve as a microcosm for where the team is heading and the pulse of the fan base. While Baltimore’s prospects have fared poorly and overpaid veterans have failed to deliver and provide no hope, in Washington the hope and excitement is palatable. From the time I got onto the Metro to the time I arrived I was surrounded by people of all ages dressed top to bottom in National Red, excited and anxious to see the great Strasburg pitch on a beautiful (if not sweltering) afternoon. Indeed, as someone who takes the metro everyday to work this summer I’m used to be crammed like a sardine everyday on my commute, but this was unprecedented; the metro stations were literally packed to the gills with fans hoping to get to the game early. By all accounts my experience here was dramatically juxtaposed to my experience in Baltimore; everyone in town knew about Strasburg and the promise he had and they were ready, these people wanted to be baseball fans and this kid was their chance.
When I finally got to the stadium the fans there did not disappoint my expectations that had been built up on my 50 minute metro ride to the Navy Yard at all. Washington also has a new stadium, Nationals Park, although it has hardly gotten the same acclaim that Camden Yards has had showered on it over the years, but for my money it did not disappoint. The actual structure of the stadium was rather unimpressive, but the buzz around the streets surrounding the stadium and in the park itself made it somewhere that you wanted to be that day. Everywhere you went the streets and hallways were packed, the bars overflowing with young and old ready for a day of baseball and sun. In the park, the large bar in the middle and indeed everywhere was full of people coming and going, giving it the feeling of a party of sorts with a few thousand of your closest friends and that feeling did not dissipate with the beginning of the game.
Despite the buildup of the game, Strasburg pitching, a FOX national broadcast with everyone’s favorite broadcast team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver (that was sarcastic to those who couldn’t pick it up) the game itself left something to be desired. Mired in the unbelievable heat, the Great Strasburg looked uncomfortable and unsettled, battling himself and the elements as much as the Mets hitters for five innings, however this did not diminish the atmosphere of the game. While there was a loud vocal Mets minority (as Mets fans are wont to be) the Nats fans endured the heat and cheered on their Savior to gut through his outing, which he did allowing only two runs in five innings despite a number of walks and hits that were rather uncharacteristic of him. And even after his departure the majority of the fans remained, hoping to see their team break through the Mets soft bullpen, which it did finally against my least favorite reliever, Francisco Rodriguez (seriously K-Rod, you throw 88-90 now, you kind of blow, spare me the gyrations on the mound). All and all it was a big day for the Nats and Nats baseball fandom as well. Unlike the brow-beaten fans of Baltimore, the Nats fans wanted to hope and were willing to see Strasburg struggle and not lose all despair; they fought back in the end and their patience was rewarded.
Although this Nationals team has a lot of work to do before they’re really in competition with the big dogs of the Senior Circuit (their rotation after Strasburg is still iffy and their lineup has some glaring holes) but at the very least hope springs eternal for baseball in Washington D.C. Armed with Strasburg and now Bryce Harper, a prospect Sports Illustrated called the “LeBron James of Baseball,” (in regards to talent and not him being an arrogant prick like LeBron) the Nationals are laying a promising foundation of young talent that is already showing some success at the major league level. Such boundless possibilities with such talented players have made Washington yearn to have what so many other cities in America have and become a great baseball town. It remains to see whether these hopes come to fruition or if Strasburg and Harper can live up to such lofty expectations, but at the very least the groundswell of support has begun and the possibility of a better tomorrow has come into focus here in our Nation’s Capitol.
