It Ain't Heavy, It's My Team

By Charles Krauthammer

It's late August in Washington, and I'm miserable. Uncharacteristically miserable. I used to love August in Washington. The heat? I love the heat. The crowds? There are no crowds. Washington is empty. Congress is gone. The President is at the ranch. The Supreme Court is shut down. There are seven people left in the city, and our job is to make sure that the furniture doesn't get stolen while nobody's home. There's no traffic. You can park anywhere. It's perfect. It's paradise. Except for one thing.

For 33 years this city didn't have a baseball team, and there was no suffering in August. No annual Red Sox collapse. No summer Cubs swoon. No pain.

No gain, to be sure. But blissful boredom beats suffering any day.

Then came the Nationals. They weren't even born until April 4, and yet they blossomed instantly and improbably into not just contenders but winners. The perennial doormat Montreal Expos, transplanted to the swamps of the Potomac--in first place at the All-Star break. Third best record in the entire major leagues!

Sure, they couldn't hit. So what? They could hit just enough to scratch and claw and steal a run to win. Literally, a run. At one point, in games decided by one run, they won 12 straight. And then it came. A complete July collapse, followed by an August swoon, a zombie death march. Thirteen straight one-run losses.

They began losing games in ways that even the Cubs hadn't invented. Why, they blew one game on a walk-off balk. Now, any kind of balk is as improbable as a lunar eclipse. But to have your newly acquired veteran, Mike Stanton, come on to relief pitch in the bottom of the 10th, a man on first and third, and have him lose the game with some imperceptible twitch of a muscle, spotted only by a man in blue 70 ft. away who then waves home the winning run without the benefit of a single batted ball or even a pitch--that's Halley's Comet. That just doesn't happen. And when it starts happening to your club, you start suffering.

But that's the thing. My club? I never heard of these guys until they moved here from Montreal a few months ago. The only Expo I ever heard of was Vladimir Guerrero, who wasn't even an Expo anymore, having walked away like all the great Expo stars who tired of playing on a field with foul lines marked in meters.

My Nationals? I had forsworn baseball fandom when Bill Buckner let the ball roll through his legs and the Red Sox blew Game 6. When my son did his mandatory second-grade family essay, he called his one-pager "My Dad and Baseball" and wrote, "But after the 1986 World Series he decided he'd had enough."

So I gave it up. Not baseball. Fandom. I watched Baseball Tonight, read the sports section, of course. But no rooting. Didn't care about anybody. Fandom never made sense to me in the first place. The whole idea is absurd. It's one thing to admire sport and watch it for its beauty and elegance. That makes sense. But to care and cheer and stomp for other grown men to win? That's bizarre. These brutes throw chairs at fans. They take steroids and pretend it mysteriously got into their cereal. They curse and spit and scratch their groins and then whack the cameraman who chronicles their every move for the worshipful masses. And make 5 million bucks for it.

They change teams for the money and strike for more money. They don't care about you, but you care about them. When that happens in real life and goes on for decades unrequited, people get committed. I don't mean relationship committed. I mean asylum committed. It makes no sense. And I was cured. Bill Buckner cured me 19 years ago. Or so I thought.

Then the Nats move into town. I begin to follow their games. They begin to win, and I'm hooked. By night, I listen to them on radio. By day, I follow pitch by pitch on the Nats' website--when I'm supposed to be writing. When they lose, I'm grumpy. When they win one, which is rare these days, I'm up. This is really crazy. It's one thing when your childhood is at stake, you've grown up with the team, and you tell yourself you're rooting on behalf of your late father of blessed memory. But I have no such alibi. These hand-me-down no-name castoffs are strangers. And torturers, I tell you. They stop the swoon and win four in a row. They're in the thick of the wild-card chase. They're coming back! But I'm no fool. I've been here before. It's a setup. It's a tease. The idea is to raise my hopes again so they can ruin my September.

I confess. I'm desperate for a Nats winning streak. But if I can't get that, and I can't get therapy, what I need is fall: cool air, falling leaves, oral arguments at the Supreme Court. And no baseball. Hurry.