Washington Nationals: They won't stop the dance; Nor should they

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Deal with Astrogate as you must, but let’s not forget: the Dancing Baby SharkNats are defending World Series champs. They don’t want to forget, either.

My colleague (and editor) Manny Gomez tweets a splendid thought: “Alright, I’m done with the Astros scandal. Who’s [sic] with me?” I’m sure he won’t mind if I see and raise: “All right, I’m still ready to celebrate the Washington Nationals World Series triumph. Who’s with me?”

If you read Thomas Boswell in yesterday’s Washington Post, the Nats sure are. Give them an inch, and they’ll talk yours (and Boswell’s) ears right off your head about their favorite things from that unlikely romp to the Promised Land. Even if some of theirs might not be some of yours.

“A lot of guys in here are upset that we won the World Series,” said World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg, “and we are being overlooked because some guys cheated.” That state of upset lasts just long enough until you, like Boswell, start asking assorted Nats what their favorite October moments still are.

Washington Nationals: They won’t stop the dance; Nor should they

Calvin Coolidge was a month from winning the White House in his own right, and J. Edgar Hoover was named director of the FBI. Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York with composer George Gershwin himself at the piano, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade stepped off for the first time. A couple of hundred miles north, IBM was founded. Hitler got five years for the Beer Hall Putsch and Al Capone’s brother got his from Chicago police.

So 95 MLB seasons isn’t 108 the Chicago Cubs waited from 1908 through 2016? Nobody cared in October, and the Washington Nationals probably don’t care now. Nor should they.

Daniel Hudson still savors having to holler for a lane to throw a few more bullpen warmups when Juan Soto‘s two-run wild card game single turned into three runs on a hit, an error, and Soto out between the bases for the side.

“They were jumping up and down, screaming. I yelled, ‘Get out of the way!’,” he told Boswell. “Nobody could hear me. That whole game, I’ve never been in a ballpark with energy around me like that.”

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That was nothing compared to the high energy to come. And that was the top moment in retrospect for the guy who turned up the last man standing in Game Seven of the World Series, striking Michael Brantley out for game, set, and lease to the Promised Land. Just . . . wow.

“There are too many good things . . . especially because every single guy on the team had a really big moment somewhere along the way,” Boswell got from Max Scherzer, whose own favorite moments were the Nats’ three aces—himself, Strasburg, and Patrick Corbin—taking relief roles when needed; and, when manager Dave Martinez charged an umpire for an argument in Game Six.

Martinez himself isn’t going to forget that one. When he exploded over the umps calling runner interference on a play that saw Astros pitcher Brad Peacock throw errantly enough to pull first baseman Yuli Gurriel off the pad and into the path of Nats batter Trea Turner when a better throw would have left Gurriel unobstructed.

Two Nats coaches had to restrain Martinez, well aware that the skipper was only six weeks removed from a jolting heart procedure. Martinez only laughs and loves it now. As he told Boswell, “I threw Chip Hale away like a fly. My mother said, ‘You need to calm down.’ I said, “Do you realize what we’re playing for?’”

Washington Nationals: They won’t stop the dance; Nor should they

Our man Manny and Boswell’s men in Nat’s fatigues make a great point, though. It’s one thing to lament the doings and ramifications of Astrogate, and they’ll be with us for longer than either we, the Astros or baseball itself care to think. Especially if the Astros keep tripping over their own banana peels in its wake.

But it’s something else to forget who really started the Astros’ unmasking. Yes, Mike Fiers is the guy who blew the whistle on the entire Astro Intelligence Agency operation. But those were the Dancing Nats, the Baby Sharks, who put paid to the Astros with an unprecedented all-on-the-road World Series win that shattered the Astros’ vaunted home field advantage no matter what the Astros were or weren’t up to otherwise.

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Remember: Once upon a time, and more accurate as a punch line than an actual fact, the legend of Washington baseball went, “Washington—First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” ‘Twas the night before Halloween, and all through the Nats’ house, many creatures were stirring with the realization that now it was “Washington—First in war, first in peace, first in the National League, and first in Show.”

This was the Series: For the first five games, the Washington Nationals and the Astros raided each other’s houses leaving nothing behind, not even a stray old tarnished butter knife. So profound had been each other’s road sweeps entering Game Six that the wags wondered where the Nats would find their missing bats when the set moved back to Minute Maid Park.

The clubhouse? The weight room? Under the bench? Good questions. Better answers to come.

We’ll never really know if the Astros were up to no good last October. Astrogate’s heaviest weight is 2017 and parts of 2018 so far as we know for dead last certain. But it became a moot point when the Nats outscored the Astros in Minute Maid Park (30-11) while the Astros outscored the Nats (19-3) in Nationals Park.

The Astros ground their gears off to get that Series home-field advantage only to be left wishing they could be runaways for just one more game. They probably still wonder how on earth they couldn’t get more than two Game Seven runs off a Scherzer who was pitching from so far beyond fumes after his shoulder and neck barked him into a hail-Mary cortisone shot.

They had men in scoring position in four out of Scherzer’s five innings on the rockpile and cashed only one of them in. (The other Astro run: Gurriel’s leadoff blast into the Crawford Boxes to open the bottom of the second.) Max the Knife he wasn’t that night.

“After what he went through with his neck, you don’t know how that’s going to hold up with his violent delivery,” Nats reliever Sean Doolittle said after Game Seven. “You don’t know what his stamina is going to be like. But with Max, we’ve come to expect the unexpected. It was gutsy, man . . . He willed us to stay in the game and that was awesome. I know guys fed off it.”

They still do. Even if they have to resolve their third base anchorage now that Anthony Rendon has high tailed it as a free agent to southern California under a Los Angeles Angels’ halo. Even if they still have to shore up a bullpen that found its bearings in October but still has a patch or three needed pronto.

“We still have the same goal,” said Corbin, credited for the wins in both the pennant clincher and the Series clincher, and meaning getting back to the Promised Land this year. “But to see everyone coming into camp and remembering it — we’ll be talking about it all spring. And we should.”

Them and everyone else. Deal with Astrogate’s apparently continuing fallout as we must, and likewise whatever nuke commissioner Rob Manfred chooses to drop on the Boston Red Sox and their replay room reconnaissance ring. No way to avoid it.

But let’s not let those make us forget who has the lease on the Promised Land now. The guys who looked so beyond rigor mortis late last May we thought it was when not if the manager would be sent to the guillotine and the team overhauled as fully as a hobbyist restores an antique car. The guys who started taking things by single-game winning streaks and having a party-hearty blast doing it.

The guys who overthrew the Milwaukee Brewers in the wild card game, overthrew the Los Angeles Dodgers rather violently in the division series and swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win the pennant. The guys who told the Astros home was where the heartbreak was in the Series. The guys who sharked and danced their way to the Promised Land proving that yes, dammit, baseball was fun again.

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“So many emotions after so many heartbreaks in this clubhouse,” Scherzer told Boswell. “All you want to do is do it again.” That’s how much fun the Dancing Baby SharkNats had last year. Who really wants a party like that to stop?

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