“Just when I thought I was out,” a hammy Al Pacino bellows midway through The Godfather, Part III, “they pull me back in!” So too has it been for me with regard to America’s Pastime, baseball. My love for the sport growing up in Washington, D.C., from the Eighties through to the Oughts was something even Peter Angelos — the Castro-curious and currently senile owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who long blocked the District from getting its own baseball franchise back — couldn’t beat out of me. The hapless early years of the Nationals (or the “Natinals,” as we old-school fans say) as a quasi-expansion team couldn’t beat it out of me. And when the Nationals won a wildly improbable World Series in 2019, it was the most triumphant sports moment of my life, even if I celebrated it from afar in a city I had moved to long ago. It felt like vindication, it made the entire clown-car ride the Nationals (and I) took to get to that point not only feel justified, but required, as part of the great story every sports fan sentimentally tells themselves about how their team’s Big Win folds into the bildungsroman of their own obviously unrelated life.
And then Covid-19 happened. The 2020 “season” was barely a real season at all. The game, once it fully returned, had slowed to a snail’s pace. The commissioner pushed through a series of increasingly salient rules changes — first by universalizing the designated hitter, then by adding all manner of ridiculous post-Covid innovations such as the automatic runner in extra innings — that altered the contours of the game I had grown to love. The Nationals themselves had imploded as a franchise almost immediately after winning it all, which certainly didn’t help matters. I felt like, maybe, after that final catharsis of 2019 . . . perhaps I had simply moved on in life from baseball?
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