That was the start of entirely different game. In that game, while the Nationals pitchers were great, the big bats came up over and over and failed to deliver. Nine times the Nationals came to bat, needing only one (g*dd#$m f&^cking) run to win the game, but that never happened. It got colder and colder. And later and later. It felt like it was never going to end. And 18 innings later, we were left to make the very cold, very long bike ride home after a Nationals loss. While the series continued after that game, that was essentially the end of the Nationals’ playoff hopes in 2014. We’ve spent the last six months trying to recover.
My love of baseball began when my sister and my mom started watching Cubs games on WGN, so I was a Cubs fan first. When Colorado got a team in 1993, I became a Rockies fan. The blessing of being a Cubs and a Rockies fan (which I never recognized at the time) was that they never had any real chance of winning. While this seemed like a downside at the time, it limited the amount of possible heartbreak involved in following them.** Between 1996 and 2003, when I lived in Southern California, I followed the Dodgers, but I was never really a Dodgers fan. Therefore, my love of baseball waned between 1996 and 2012. While I’d gone to several Washington Nationals games a year since the team came to town in 2005, I’d never followed them closely.
In 2012, that all changed. I noticed that the Nats were doing pretty well. Because we don’t have cable and can’t get the Nationals games on TV, I asked Mike if he wanted to listen to a game on the radio. While neither of us realized it at the time, that question changed our summer and our lives. We started listening to every game on the radio and we both became hard core Nats fans (although Mike will still claim he only follows them for me). We listened to the games sitting on the front porch enjoying the summer heat. Sometimes our neighbors stopped by and listened for an inning or two. It’s became a summer tradition.
2012 was the first time the Nationals broke our hearts. On another October night that got colder and colder, and sadder and sadder as time went on, we listened to the Nationals quickly pull ahead to a 6-0 lead and a trip to the NLCS seemed just around the corner. Then, we listened as they slowly gave it all up, once again losing in the 9th inning and failing to advance to the next round.
But that year wasn’t just about heartbreak. The first playoff game I ever attended was on October 11, 2012. On that evening, we saw the Nationals carry a 1-1 tie into the 9th inning and then win it and keep their hopes alive following an incredible 9th inning homerun from Jayson Werth. And as much as the eventual loss hurt, we had the joy over the season of watching the Nats come from nowhere to make it to the playoffs and win more games than any other team in baseball.
We faithfully made it through the following year when the Nats failed to live up to expectations and didn’t even make it to the playoffs. Then, last year, the Nats once again won their division. Expectations were high and hopes were even higher. We all know how that turned out. This year expectations and hopes are even higher. Just about everyone has, once again, picked the Nats to make it to if not win the World Series.
Mike and I have spent the last six months contemplating whether we want to go through it all again. Baseball is a major time commitment since we spend just about every evening listening to a game (sometimes two) on the radio. I also feel a sense of guilt associated with filling our evenings this way. Mike had no interest in baseball until I got him hooked. It’s not just my life that’s impacted. While the hope of hearing the Nationals win – or at least reach the World Series – is tempting, they’re just as likely to lose and leave us heartbroken again.
Opening Day is on Monday. While we won’t be at Nationals Park like we have been the past two years, I’m pretty sure we’ll be following them. We hold onto the hope that we will feel once again what we felt when Werth hit that homerun and an entire field – and town – erupted in ecstasy. But there’s more than hope pulling us back. The start of baseball is proof that we’ve made it through the winter. And there is Dave and Charlie, the Nationals’ radio announcers. For night after night, their voices fill the summer night creating a picture for us. They share our pain, our anger, our joy. They’re our friends. Spending time with them again is a major force pulling us back. That, and the hope that, as much as it hurt to see the Nationals lose, that’s how good it will feel when they finally win. Ultimately, will it be worth it or will it only result in more heartbreak? Only time will tell.
And even if the Nationals win the World Series, the season will end, summer will be over, it will get cold again, and eventually the next season will begin from scratch as though the previous season never happened. Why are we doing this again? Why do we love this game?
I don’t know. I can only say: Go Nats!
** It is true that the Rockies made the playoffs in 1995, but the expectations were much lower, and just making it to the playoffs was awesome. The Rockies also it to the World Series in 2007, but I had long ago stopped following them closely, and, while I watched the Series, I was not really invested.
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti
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