Nationals Will Get Better But Will Their Fans Wait For Them?

Oh, those poor Washington Nationals; no team in the major leagues has lost more games in 2009. No team has committed more errors. No team has a higher ERA. No team has more blown saves.

No team has both an interim general manager and manager.

No team has fewer fans following them on television or radio. Only two other teams in the National League have drawn fewer fans to their home games, but they really don’t count.

The Pirates and Marlins don’t seem to be trying very hard, after all.

The Nationals’ fans—those that remain, anyway—look upon the team with a near deadly combination of both malaise and apathy. Fan sites such as ballparkguys.com, which used to have a dozen or more open threads about the team at any given time, now have just two or three on a good day.

It’s even spread to Bleacher Report. I wrote my first story here in January, and it garnered more than 500 reads. One story about Steven Strasburg came close to 4,000.

Today, it takes the confluence of a good story and a major news event to get that counter to click towards the 100 mark.

There's no question that things are going to get worse before they get better for the Washington Nationals. The farm system is improving, but isn’t ready to make a difference at the major league level. Two different managers have tried—and failed—to get the team to play up to their ability.

Tom Boswell, a long-time sports reporter for the Washington Post, reported that interim GM Mike Rizzo has said that he has to now undo what Jim Bowden had done over the past two-and-a-half years.

In other words, there's no clear path back to respectability.

But many teams have had problems similar to the Nationals. The Pirates in the early- to mid-1950’s were just as bad, and the St. Louis Browns during that same period were even worse.

The Pirates won the World Series in 1960, and the Baltimore Orioles (formerly the Browns) won it seven years later.

For the most part, those fans stuck with their team until the good times finally arrived.

But Washington D.C. isn't Pittsburgh, and it’s certainly not Baltimore. It's unique, different, and unusual. It’s the only city in the nation not contained with a state and not officially represented in congress.

And Washingtonians won’t accept losers.

Being a native son, I can testify to certain truths about our nation’s capital.

First, everyone is from somewhere else. Every couple of years, there is a new wave of professionals who follow the new congressmen and senators and presidents to Washington and settle in the area.

They bring their own loyalties to the District and they support the teams they left behind.

It would make no sense, then, for a native Philadelphian who grew up rooting for Mike Schmidt or Darren Daulton to suddenly switch allegiances and support the Nationals. So all of those fans from New York and Boston and Philly and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and St. Louis don’t give the Nationals a second thought during the baseball season.

Except when their team comes to Washington, that is.

Home games against many of those teams, the Mets and Phillies especially, have the sound and feel of a road game because of all of their fans who come to the park from Falls Church, Alexandria, and Bethesda, and create a second home for their team.

Second, there's a deep mistrust of major league baseball by native Washingtonians. Some are old enough to remember the original Senators, who were spirited away by Calvin Griffith to Minnesota in 1960 even as a brand new, state-of-the-art stadium was about to open.

Major League baseball, fearing congressional action on their anti-trust exemption, quickly replaced the now Minnesota Twins with an expansion Senators team. But politics won out, and FAA executive Elvin Quesada was awarded the franchise over many deep-pocketed applicants.

Quesada wasn’t rich to begin with, and was insolvent after just a couple of years, giving way to new owner James Johnston. Bob Short leveraged his assets to buy the team in 1968, and three years later was a broke as Quesada.

The Senators moved to Texas following the 1971 season.

Fans rightfully believe that a compilation of bad management and political favors lost one team and destroyed another. 34 years later, they were still unwilling to forgive.

And lastly, Washington pounces on losers, holding their heads underwater until they stop wiggling.

Being the most political city in the world, everyone has an opinion. In Washington, you’re either a Republican, a Democrat, or you’re dead. Republicans watched the beginnings of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 and giggled with glee as a town full of Democrats packed their bags and left for home, leaving behind their hopes and dreams.

And just last November, Democrats called the last living Republican inside the Beltway and asked him to turn out the lights before he left.

We revel in the pain of the opposition.

So here comes the Washington Nationals, and for the first three months of 2005, RFK rocked and the third base stands bounced as the team raced to a 50-31 record and had a solid hold on first place.

Since then, however, the team has won just 257 games, and the team has ensconced itself firmly in the crosshairs of the city’s beat-them-while-they’re-down attitude.

I am in no way suggesting that this "us versus them" attitude within Washington makes the people, or the city, bad. Passionate people who value their beliefs and their likes are a positive thing most of the time.

But in the case of the Nationals, it’s an unfortunate nuance to the city’s psyche. While Washington loves a winner, it also has no problem chasing a chagrined loser up and down the broad streets laid out by Pierre L’Enfant more than two centuries ago.

So the question the Nationals face today is this: Can the fans who still root for their own hometown team join the old-time Senators’ fans who can’t forgive D.C.’s baseball past and join with the remaining residents who seem to take great joy at the Nationals’ pain and suffering?

While it’s possible, I think there is a better chance that the Republicans and Democrats merge their parties in a wonderful cum-bay-yah moment.

In other words, don’t count on it.