On Monday night at Nationals Park, it was possible to have an entire section to yourself, which was how I wound up sitting with a man named Aman Kedir. Sometime in the middle innings, wondering who exactly was taking in a late-August game between the Nationals and Rockies, I spotted Kedir, all alone in Section 226, from the press box. On my way to him, the upper-deck concourse was so quiet I could hear the pitcher grunting on the mound. With no lines for beer, it took a drunk dude about 15 seconds to go from cursing about a lost bet to buying a cold Bud Light. Two 20-somethings leaned on a railing that overlooked the Potomac River, their tall boys sweating onto the concrete floor. The moon cast a rippling spotlight on the water.
They didn’t care who was winning. They might have been falling in love.
It was the kind of dissonance that’s become a constant in D.C., a perfect night for a baseball game that could do nothing to affect the playoff race. Kedir, it turned out, didn’t care who was winning, either. He did, however, care a lot about being there at all, seeing that he had now been to every Major League Baseball stadium. Nationals Park was his last to cross off.
From Row 1, Seat 13 in 226, he told me about knocking out his last four this month, when he realized he had airline miles to burn. His rooting interests? Nice weather, good food, maybe a steal for Nationals outfielder Jacob Young, who is on Kedir’s fantasy team. Then as we chatted, Young came to the plate, which made me say: “Hey! Here he is! Aman, let’s get a steal for you.”
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There are, of course, strict rules against cheering of any sort in the press box. But I was in Section 226, which was empty aside from Kedir until it was empty aside from Kedir and me. Young singled and we high-fived. Under my breath, while Kedir kept recapping his ballpark tour, I whispered: “Steal, steal, steal.” The universe, though, didn’t hear me. Jorbit Vivas singled behind Young, moving him to second base. Then the next batter, Nasim Nuñez, dropped down a bunt, which led to Young scoring on a Rockies error.
“OK, OK! There it is!” Kedir, who lives in Minneapolis, said while Young crossed the plate. “I’ll take a run!”
Why he was there was no longer a mystery to me. As for everyone else, I didn’t get to poll the entire stadium, though it would have made for an interesting exit survey. That game, an eventual 13-3 win for the Nats, was between two losing teams near the end of another lost season in D.C. Before the trade deadline, at which the Nationals traded three of their best players, they were 55-58, hanging off the edge of the wild-card race (though hanging nonetheless). But in the three weeks since, they are 8-15, including a 1-8 record on their most recent road trip.
They would also lose to the Rockies (52-82), 13-1, on Wednesday night, which ended with first-year Manager Blake Butera slamming his team’s effort. Even after a 7-1 win Thursday, the Nationals could very well finish last in the National League East, should they slip behind the Mets in the final five weeks of the season. Hope can flip to nihilism in a hurry. Just ask the biggest Nats fan in your life.
And yet, having spent the last few days at the park, I couldn’t shake the idea that baseball with no stakes is an overplayed myth this time of year. Yes, it’s been too long since the Lerner family ran the Nationals with a competitive payroll, which is the only change that could really shift the vibes around here, no matter how savvy the new front office and coaching staff might be. For the necessary amount of cynicism given the recent results, read that sentence again. But beyond the obvious reasons for the players to keep showing up, baseball is still entertainment, community, a way to have a conversation with a stranger that winds from favorite ballparks to minimalist art. And beyond hanging with Kedir, there were other reasons this week to believe in the dull practice of playing out the string, standings and scoreboard be damned.
There was pitcher Matt Waldron, who made his Nationals debut Wednesday after two teams released him in the last month. He is, at 29, looking for a baseball home, pitching for the chance to keep pitching in D.C. or elsewhere. He started Wednesday, allowing two hits and no runs in two innings. Waldron also throws a knuckleball in an era in which the fun-house pitch is almost extinct.
And then there was Luis Perales, a rookie pitcher who made his major league debut in the fifth Wednesday. That was going well until the seventh, when he gave up a two-out grand slam. But when he FaceTimed his mother Tuesday, her tears had nothing to do with whether his first appearance would be perfect. She cried because he’d made it. It was a moment they’ll never forget.
When, on Monday, the press box announced a paid attendance of 12,105, a fan in the 300 level screamed: “Liars!” He got some laughs. But even on slow nights, a stadium is like an airport or a shopping mall, a whole city unto itself. I saw grade-school siblings sharing a lemonade, the brother’s arm around his sister’s shoulders. I watched two stadium employees high-five in an empty team store, laughing their heads off. I briefly adopted a fantasy squad.
For at least a little while, I stopped wondering why anyone cared.
Before the series began, Butera fielded a handful of questions about how to keep his players and staff motivated. This is new territory for Butera in two ways: He has never managed into a quiet September of a major-league season. And, until a few weeks ago, he had never managed a team that wasn’t pushing for a long-shot playoff spot.
The answers, though, didn’t require experience in the chair. This is the big leagues. The process is important, as are the results for a group of young, unproven players trying to earn future opportunities. For him, for the next month and change, what matters is that the Nationals play hard, even if they sometimes play at a much lower level than their contending opponents.
He was certainly not satisfied Wednesday. Then Thursday was much better, another data point for a team that’s figuring out what it has moving forward — and on the flip side, what it needs.
There is, then, a big difference between baseball with no playoff implications and baseball that means nothing at all. The former happened at Nationals Park this week. I’m fairly certain the latter does not exist. In the seventh inning Monday, I was typing up some notes, head buried in my laptop, when Jay Z’s “Young Forever” blared over the speakers. That could only mean Jacob Young was up again, so I lowered my screen to lock in. He laced a double to left-center, missing a homer by a few feet. Excited, I whipped my head to 226, hoping to catch Kedir’s reaction.
But what I found this time was a completely empty section. My new friend had exercised one of the golden freedoms of a game with few fans. He had moved for another view.
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