Washington Nationals: They won’t stop the dance; Nor should they
By Jeff Kallman
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?