Looks at Nationals Fans, Feeling Again

You know what’s worse than having your heart broken in late June, than watching your team give up three runs in the eighth, then eight (!) more in the ninth, which got those smug Philly fans chanting “Start the buses!” in your ballpark, just when you were starting to talk your talk to them? You know what’s worse than the bullpen blowing it again a night later?

Apathy.

Apathy is what’s worse.

It was 1:11 a.m. on Wednesday when Scott Ableman hit send in the comments section of a story on the Nationals’ crushing, 14-9 loss to the Phillies on Tuesday night. A few hours earlier, Ableman, a die-hard fan since the beginning, had watched a good time burn from Section 129 on the first base line. After the Nats had led 5-0, the bullpen blew a lead in the eighth, bringing groans of here we go again. But then, in an admirable effort to save the day, infielder Jorbit Vivas pushed them back ahead with a three-run bomb in the bottom half. There was life. There was a little thing called hope.

But then there was another full-on implosion, when Brad Lord, the team’s most reliable reliever, allowed six runs on five hits in the ninth, two of them back-snapping homers. Lord had been one strike from finishing a win, which would have made it two straight against a red-hot team in the same rung of the standings. It was, by the end, about 45 minutes of emotional warfare. Yet it also was … refreshing?

“I was there tonight and am still trying to process that one,” Ableman wrote. “I’ll say this: It’s a feeling not unlike that which I felt on 3 other occasions, after some indescribably insane Game 5 losses.”

He hit enter for a paragraph break. He typed an ellipsis.

“ … and I suppose that means it’s nice to be having meaningful games again at Nationals Park.”

As with most things, in sports or otherwise, Tuesday’s loss can be viewed through a few different lenses. The most rational is also the least fun, which is that it was just one of 162 — and just one of the 81 games the Nats have played, putting their record at 41-40 after Wednesday’s 5-4 loss. The guidance attached to that framing is to suck it up and move on. The takeaway is that, in the grand scheme, there’s actually little to see here.

But the other two lenses are increasingly relevant to the fate of this team and the experience of rooting for it. Through a baseball lens, the bullpen’s Tuesday meltdown was further proof that even marginal improvements to the pitching staff could lift a team that’s scored the most runs in the league (and therefore competed way more, and way faster, than anyone could have reasonably expected).

Then even more proof came Wednesday, when the bullpen was handed a one-run lead in the ninth, recorded two outs, then was beat when Orlando Ribalta walked Kyle Schwarber and Richard Lovelady allowed a two-run, game-winning homer to Derek Hill. This framing has everything to do with the trade deadline and Paul Toboni, the Nats’ first-year president of baseball operations. It’s not going away, either, unless the club fades quickly in the next few weeks — or until the deadline passes, which is when we’ll have an answer on how Toboni really feels about the team’s chances of pushing for a playoff spot.

And then there is the psychological lens, the one that deals with a fan base that, for years now, ever since the summer of 2021, has guarded against hoping to the point of feeling real pain. It’s a fool me once, fool me twice, fool me 74 times sort of deal, a common dance for sports fans, who often love something that will never love them back. But this week — and with these tight losses in particular — Nats fans seem to be peeking out of emotional hiding, smelling the fresh air a bit, even enjoying the jolt of a yes-no-yes-no-no-no-no-NO! experience. It’s maybe the surest sign yet that things are inching toward a better place.

“I was driving home last night so freaking pissed off,” Toboni said in a radio interview Wednesday morning on 106.7 The Fan. “It kind of hit me that it’s a good thing. We have higher expectations than people had coming into the year.”

Toboni, talking with “The Sports Junkies,” then walked straight at the most pressing question: Is he going to improve this pitching staff or what? He acknowledged that, yes, the team would have a “few more” wins if the relievers were throwing a “bit better.” He mentioned that the team could be active with waiver claims, which are typically fringe roster additions, to marginally improve the bullpen in the immediate future. Before Wednesday’s loss, the Nationals did exactly that, adding Justin Lawrence, a right-handed reliever from the Twins, off waivers.

Toboni also described this as a tricky point of the calendar, when most clubs are still sussing out how they’re going to act before the Aug. 3 trade deadline, using the next three, four or five weeks as a gauge. He also said that, even if it is an odd time to strike deals, “it doesn’t mean we’re not going to try.”

That’s a decent amount of honesty for a baseball exec, especially one who’s about to make some critical decisions in the weeks ahead, if only because of how they could build trust between the new front office and the fan base (or not). Take it from Ellen Clair Lamb, a longtime season-ticket holder who was at Tuesday’s game, allowing herself to hope from her center field seats.

“This cautious optimism raises the stakes for the trade deadline,” Lamb said in a text Wednesday. “If they *don’t* do something about the bullpen, they’re showing us that they don’t care and we shouldn’t either.”

Since 2018, I’ve been building a rolodex of Nats fans, a cross section of people I bother to take the city’s temperature on the team. On Wednesday morning, that meant sending a big round of texts, asking how they’re balancing any feelings of wanting improvements — of wishing there was even a bit more urgency to bring in better arms — with the novelty of caring about specific results again.

Almost everyone was more interested in discussing the latter, especially since, for them, this is a young, upstart team that is suddenly playing with house money. Group chats were busier Tuesday night than they had been in a good while, both during the game and after. One lifelong fan, texting with his mom about that harrowing loss, said he was “zen about it,” actually, because he’s just happy the team is “surprisingly fun.”

Low expectations, exciting baseball, can’t exactly lose at the moment — that’s how their collective thinking reads. Except, of course, when you lose by allowing eight runs in the ninth inning (then cough up another late lead the next night). But that roller coaster, the feeling of riding it again after years of indifference, is more the point than whether Mitchell Parker is soon replaced by another random reliever. After all, just about every season will end in some form of heartbreak. The opportunity to invest is really the whole thing.