If you’re a Washington baseball fan — D.C., not Seattle — this season has been sort of heartbreaking.
It was easy to write off the partial season played in 2020 because of the pandemic, and those of us who follow the Nationals were able to say that the last time there was a full season, our team won.
It’s strange of me to have reached a stage in my life when I can call a team “my team.” My 17 years as a sportswriter kept me from saying or feeling anything of the sort, and I can still hear the response if I were to refer to the team as “we.”
“We? You got a mouse in your pocket?”
But I left sportswriting in 1995 and gradually became something of a fan again, mostly following the Nats in baseball, the Washington Capitals in hockey and the University of Virginia in college sports.
Things got really good in the second half of the last decade. Virginia’s baseball team won the College World Series in 2015 and the Caps won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 2018.
But it was 2019 when my teams hit a sort of trifecta. In April, Tony Bennett’s Virginia basketball team won the NCAA championship and at the end of the year, the Wahoo football team earned a spot in the Orange Bowl.
But it was the Nationals who really came through, recovering from a 19-31 start to make the playoffs and then going all the way to the World Series against Houston. In one of the strangest Fall Classics ever, the visiting team won all seven games and the Nats wrapped up the title in Houston.
They had a rough offseason, losing the wonderful Anthony Rendon in free agency. Things never went well in 2020, and they started slow again this year. Losing ace pitcher Stephen Strasburg for nearly all of ’20 and ’21 didn’t help, but approaching the halfway point, they were 40-38 and just two games out of first place in their division.
That was it, though. Since then they have gone 5-16 to fall out of contention, and the reality is they have been mediocre or worse in three of the last four seasons.
The team was built around starting pitching, but with the exception of Max Scherzer, the pitching as either been injured or awful. Now they will almost certainly trade Scherzer this week to start a rebuild.
Things look glum, but they can’t take 2019 away.
There are 28 other teams that have waited longer than that to win.
And that’s something.