The restoration of D.C. pride: In Washington, baseball drains the swamp

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Though a resplendent city with its monuments and malls and vistas free of skyscrapers, Washington has been a dispirited town to live in the past three years. The pall of politics, rancid politics, hangs over every corner, every landmark. Conversations inevitably and despondently wind up there.

Ah, but there’s relief now, something to counter the gloom. The gallantry of a baseball team has brought brightness to bleak house.

The Washington Nationals’ enthralling, uniquely-rendered victory against an overdog Houston Astros club brought the city its first World Series triumph in 95 years.

It came on the eve of the House of Representatives approving a resolution of impeachment against President Donald Trump, one which authorized a path forward.

But the story that will no doubt live in the hearts of Washingtonians is the baseball achievement. There’s populism, not in the form of politics. There’s populism of a much finer sort, in the human drama of sport. If only the lawmakers could show some of the mettle and character displayed by the Nationals’ players.

Throughout the playoffs and the World Series final, the Nationals faced five elimination games. They trailed at some point in every one of those games. They won them all. In the final series, they won all four games in the hostile surroundings of the enemy ballpark.

The national capital, they say, needs leaders. How about the iron grit of hurler Stephen Strasburg, the superiority of the laconic Anthony Rendon, the bristling power of 36-year-old Howie Kendrick, the swashbuckling cockiness of youngster Juan Soto?

This was a team which, for the first third of the season, was an embarrassment, compiling a record of 19 wins and 31 losses. No team in major-league baseball history has come back from such misery to win the whole thing.

Washington has never been known as a great sports town. It got as much notoriety from the golf fixation of presidents – Bill Clinton’s many mulligans, Mr. Trump’s dubious scoring arithmetic, holes in the Oval Office floor left by Dwight Eisenhower’s spikes – as sporting triumphs. It got more notoriety from Mr. Trump’s objection to football players taking a knee to protest against racism and from championship-winning players rejecting Mr. Trump’s invitation to celebrate at the White House.

It’s a sports town now. Just a year ago, the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup. A few weeks ago, the women’s basketball team, the Washington Mystics, won the national championship.

But the morale-building baseball victory was the biggest. The gods finally smiled on this team, the successors to the Montreal Expos, in a way they never did for the Quebec franchise which had a spectacular winning season, undone by a players’ strike.

In previous playoff encounters, the Nationals were castigated as a choking outfit. They lost the deciding game of a series on three separate occasions. They were on their way to another sad fall in the wild card game against the Milwaukee Brewers this year. They were down 3-1 with two outs in the eighth. Then came a succession of terrific breaks. A pitch hit the edge of a player’s hand giving them a man on base. A blooper hit with a broken bat got another on. Then a Milwaukee outfielder brutally misplayed Mr. Soto’s drive, letting the ball skirt past him. The winning runs were scored.

They were valiant in a comeback win against the allegedly superior Los Angeles Dodgers and then swept the shell-shocked St. Louis Cardinals before taking out the Astros.

It’s only baseball and Mr. Rendon put it in perspective.

“I feel like there’s bigger things going on in this world,” he said during the celebration. “A baseball game might get magnified because it’s the World Series, but we’re not taking bullets for our country in Afghanistan or wherever it might be.”

There are, of course, much bigger things. But the opiate of the masses was needed in this city and it has arrived in spades. In the Stanley Cup win, led by the Russian Alexander Ovechkin, thousands jammed the blocks outside the arena to watch on the big screen. For the World Series final game in Houston, 36,000 fans attended a watch party at Nationals’ park.

The restoration of pride was palpable. Delirious fans filled the streets after the triumph. The pall of politics was far from their minds. Baseball, the great American pastime, was draining the swamp.

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