It is now the second week of June. This is typically the time when baseball’s elite start to distance themselves, and those nice little guys who flirted with .500 and had a division lead when they were 0-0 are starting to settle where they normally end up, and yes, welcome to baseball in D.C..
Baseball in the summertime in D.C. is a lot like football in Oakland, basketball for Clippers’ fans or Tiger Woods’ marriage: dead. If anyone can remember, the Nationals were last relevant in the summer of 2005. It was their first year in Washington, they had Alfonso Soriano and were a division leader going into the All-Star Game. To put this in perspective as to how long ago this was: Fall Out Boy was a “new” artist that year, Wedding Crashers was not in the $7.50 bin at Wal-Mart, SeriouslyGuys wasn’t even a thought, Chris, McBournie and myself were just out of college and batches of Jack Daniel’s that were being released had started aging in 1998.
What is the point of all this? Stephen Strasburg.
It’s a Tuesday in June, tonight’s blockbuster is the age-old rivalry between the Washington Nationals and Pittsburgh Pirates. If you had told me that the hottest ticket this season would be a Nationals/Pirates game, I would have told you to politely put down the crack pipe.
Strasburg is the most highly touted prospect in recent memory. The only person I remember hearing more about was when J.D. Drew was hailed as the next Babe Ruth … um, how’d that end up J.D.? He won’t live up to it. With today’s media coverage he would literally have to through 20 perfect games a year in order to reach the level we as a collective media have placed him at. But what Strasburg’s presence, in D.C. at least reaches a far broader scope than achieving baseball Jesus status. His presence coupled with the arrival of Bryce Harper is changing the culture of losing in the Nationals clubhouse.
The team is now geared to win in the future, and even if Strasburg is a bust (I say his arms gasses out and he goes Kerry Wood-style by 2016) his arrival is the beginning of something bigger in Washington. And it starts on a Tuesday in June against the Pirates.