“You’ll get over it,” they say. “It’s just a game, after all,” they console. “There’s always next year; we’ll get ’em next year,” they ebulliate. It’s all been said to Twins’, Rockies’, Red Sox’, Indians’, Diamondbacks’, and Washington Nationals fans during this Major League baseball playoff season, and it will be said to the fans of three more teams before it’s all over in just a few weeks’ time. These kinds of shocks are not the end of the world, to be sure. They’re not like 9/11 or Donald Trump becoming President of the United States. But they’re not the quotidian cuticle annoyance either.
Losses in big games are usually presumed to be hardest on younger fans—kids in that age zone after toy superheroes but before puberty. Maybe so, the reasoning being that sports hero worship has yet to be displaced, or joined, in such young souls by weightier concerns; and, for some, dreams of working into high-level competition, even the Majors, have yet to be quashed. But I’ll tell you straight-up: It’s just as hard on some of us older fans, especially us long-suffering types who have waited for baseball autumn glory to match that of the stunning foliage we are gifted with each season by the Author of all things.
So in recent times the misery scuttlebutt has invariably come ’round to those most frustrated of franchises. It focused until last season on the Chicago Cubs, and all true baseball fans felt their pain. Some of us had memorized the late Steve Goodman’s brilliant and hilarious ode, “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request,” particularly those of us with relatives or good friends in Chicago. We all remembered that hapless fan who reached out over the left-field seats at Wrigley, just past third base, to foil a valiant Cubs left-fielder’s effort to bring victory to the Windy City. (He’s since been forgiven; the Cubs even showed a touch of class by awarding him a 2016 World Series ring.)
So it’s not just that needy teams lose big games; it’s how they lose big games that matters, ways that stick in the craw all the way to the next spring training, and often long after. Just think of the 2011 Texas Rangers, twice a single strike away from victory—and, somehow, they still lost. That sort of thing leaves a mark. No, more like a wound that only a championship will heal.
The misery beacon has focused some on the Indians, too, since the Indians have not won a World Series since 1954. So the 2016 World Series was a no-lose proposition in that regard: Somebody had to win, and one kind of drought or another was going to end. It did, for the Cubs. Goodman smiled from the great Beyond. But the 2017 Indians managed to pull off an amazing 22-game win streak, gulling their fans into thinking they had peaked at just the right time. The purpose of that, it is now clear, was to make the pain of losing to the odious wild-card Yankees that much more unbearable.
Before the Cubs (and Indians) we focused some years back on long-suffering Red Sox fans, thought to have been afflicted by Babe Ruth’s curse. Yes, mysticism has its place in baseball and so, for that matter, does sex: Who can forget Susan Sarandon’s role in Bull Durham as rector of the Baseball Church of God? But that focus has diffused since the Red Sox came up big a few years ago, redeeming decades of misery by humiliating their archenemy, the same New York Yankees, before going on to win it all in four.
Personally I bathed in that wonderment, not because I ever was a Red Sox fan, but because I hate and have always hated the New York Yankees—of which more below. The Red Sox have been too good since to feel bad for, and worse, their string of successes has turned a lot of their fans into “entitled” types, people who haughtily expect success and who turn on their heroes and their managers with vinegar and tobacco spit juice if they don’t deliver. They have become nearly as repugnant as Yankees fans, such that the next season they crap out will be occasion for mild joy in my schadenfreudian heart.
Bad teams do not always summon sympathy, any more than bad weather is cause for surprise or excitement. Take the Philadelphia Phillies, the baseball franchise that has lost more games than any other. The Phillies have been good in fairly recent years; they even won a World Series in 2008 (and in 1980). They also lost one in spectacular fashion in 1993. So they’ve done the cycle of losing, winning, and then losing again, such that this year’s last place finish actually restores one’s faith in the predictability of at least something. These days that can count for a lot.
The problem is that in this retinue of storied misery almost no one mentions the heart-stabbing, soul-searing, brain-lobotomizing Washington Nationals. And the reason, in part, is that misery is reckoned by franchises rather than by cities. This is not right, although the reason for the error is obvious: The two most often go together. So it flosses my frontal cortex every time I heard someone moan and groan about those poor Cleveland Indians.
Since 1954—OK, that’s a long time ago. Eisenhower was President; Bob Feller was great; the cars were very cool, not least since you could tell them apart. But what about Washington?
Yes, the original franchise Washington Senators (they had earlier on been called the Washington Nationals) left town after the 1960 season to become the Minnesota Twins, and that has been an admirable and successful franchise by and large despite the disadvantage of its being stuck in a small media market with small revenues. That same year a new “expansion” franchise came to Washington, called by the same name—the Senators—which is a source of much confusion for minor-league quality fans. That franchise won nothing and left in 1971 to become the Texas Rangers.
There then began an excruciating period of 34 years during which there was no Major League team in the nation’s capital. The blame for this outrage falls in no small part on a single man: Peter Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who figured that keeping a team out of Washington would help his nearby Orioles financially. Despite this Snidely Whiplash-quality plot, some Washington baseball fans, in an act of wildly misdirected gratitude, turned into Orioles fans, since driving up to Camden Yards was the closest way to a Major League stadium. I’m sorry: These people, who in essence fed the mouth that bit them, can never be forgiven.
The current Nationals team came to Washington via Montreal, in time for the 2005 season. When you watch games you can hear the announcers talk about records with the Expos being the historical referent. This bothers me. Who here in Washington ever gave a flapping fart about the Montreal Expos? No one I ever met.
So, since 1954? Suck it up, Cleveland: There hasn’t been a World Series champion in Washington since 1924! Coolidge was President; Walter Johnson was better than Bob Feller; and the cars all pretty much looked alike then as they do now, but for very different reasons.
And this Cleveland-plus-thirty-years drought is very personal. I was born in Washington. Both my parents were born in Washington, in 1905 and 1907, respectively. All nine of my father’s siblings and all six of my mother’s siblings were born in Washington, and they were all Washington Senators fans. Griffith Stadium was a second home to my Uncle Myron, and why not? His actual home was almost as crowded. Myron even kept vigil outside the hospital where the great Big Train lay dying of cancer on December 10, 1946. Afterwards, he used to go to Rock Creek Cemetery, where Johnson and his wife Hazel are buried, and put messages in the cracks of the tombstone as if it were the Wailing Wall.
I have to admit I’ve gone there several times on the yahrzeit, too. I left messages; others left old mitts with letters stuffed inside, and old baseballs with messages written between the stitches. One time I went the day after a windstorm had sent a tree limb crashing down onto the tombstone, knocking it askew. I immediately got in touch with the family to let them know.
My father was 19 when the Senators won the 1924 World Series. You think I did not hear about this when I was a kid? I loved going to Griffith Stadium with my dad when I was a boy. I can still remember the intoxicating smell of the bread baking at the Bond Bread factory nearby. All those years when I was coming up in the 1950s the Yankees used to beat the living tar out of the Senators, and it hurt my boyish feelings. It also built character, I think; I guess that remains to be seen. When the White Sox knocked off the Yankees in 1959, I was in diamond delirium.
That was about when I first saw the film Damn Yankees, with Tab Hunter as Joe Hardy, Gwen Verdon as Lola, and Ray Walston (yes, later our favorite Martian) as Applegate (a.k.a. the Devil in this brilliant Faustian rip-off). To say that, at age eight, I could identify with the emotional charge in the film is perhaps the understatement of post-Mesozoic time.
Yes, the Nats dropped that last game to the Cubs 9-8, and it was a pretty interesting game. Arguably the best pitcher, and certainly one of the best, in baseball messed up in relief. One of the better defensive catchers in the game made three stunning mistakes in that straight-from-hell fourth inning: a passed ball right between the feet on a strikeout that would have ended the inning with no damage; a wild throw on retrieving the passed ball that never should have been thrown at all; and a catcher’s interference call that turned into a run that made the different—but in a one-run game lots of things can be said post hoc to have made the difference. The left fielder lost a ball in the lights that led to a run—another made-the-difference datum. And yes, the team’s great one, its first baseman, struck out not once or twice, but three times, with two outs and runners in scoring position.
But real fans, by which I mean people who know the game from having seriously played the game, saw something else, too. In that calamitous inning the big blow was a double grounded hard between the third-base line and the third baseman that scored two Cub runs. Credit to the hitter is due for squaring up a good pitch. But if you look closely at the film, something I noticed at the time but the announcers did not remark upon, you’ll see the Nats’ third baseman standing straight up, his knees not bent and his body not in proper crouch position, just as the pitcher let loose with the pitch. Had this third baseman been in proper defensive position, as all infielders are trained to be, he very likely would have been able to at least knock the ball down diving to his right, preventing it from rolling into and rattling around in the dark dungeon of the left field corner.
Cosmic payback justice, perhaps? In the deciding seventh game of the 1924 Series, the Senators won because not one, but two, fairly routine grounders to third hit a pebble and bounced past New York Giants third baseman Freddy Lindstrom. Bucky Harris hit the first grounder, which scored two to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth inning. Earl McNeely hit the second one, winning the game in the bottom of the 13th.
Third base here in Washington could be the navel of the universe. Baseball can make you believe in the Devil, if not also in God.
Baseball is a lot like history, too. Things happen. Things fail to happen. There are counterfactuals. You cannot really go back and untangle reality into discrete causes. You can learn a lot about logic from baseball, and also a lot about pain.
The Senators, my beloved Senators, left Washington after the 1960 season ended in early September of that year, and my beloved mother left this life in October, a victim of breast cancer. I was nine years old, and an only-child. Ever since the pain of these two close-rolling and close-roiling events has mingled in strange and maddening ways in my soul. The result is that when the Nats continue their 0-for-October streak, as they did most recently on October 13, now for the fourth time, it precedes by only a few days my mother’s yahrzeit. One thing has nothing to do with the other, of course. Except that, for me, it does.
Nowadays this time of the year also marks the thickest overlay between the end of the baseball season and the long-since-begun professional football season. Here is another irritation: Baseball, the most sublime and philosophical of games, infinite in time and space, has been vanquished as the national past-time by the gladitorial brutalities of football, a game modeled after turf warfare. It’s certainly a sign of the times, and not a good sign. A colleague wrote a book some years back bemoaning the militarization of American society, and I thought the book a fairly vast exaggeration. I still think it’s an exaggeration, but maybe less vastly so.
Baseball’s core philosophy is a deeply comforting one: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.” Football, meanwhile, as some wag (probably George Will) said, combines two of the worst propensities of American culture: violence and committee meetings. There is no “Football Church of God,” and there cannot be.
What else is there to say? Here in Washington we’re at 93 years and counting.