The Nats And Their Home Run Celebrations Are Making Baseball Fun Again On A National Level
WaPo - In Game 2 of the World Series, the rest of the country learned what fans who have followed this wild and crazy team all season already knew: The 2019 Nationals are a lot of fun, and when they hit home runs, they dance.
“There was a lot of dancing in the dugout,” Fox analyst John Smoltz said after the Nationals took a two-games-to-none lead with a 12-3 win.
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There was a lot of hugging, too. Well, one especially long hug, anyway, with Aníbal Sánchez and Gerardo Parra, who sported the lucky sunglasses they picked up at a promotional table outside Comerica Park in June, sandwiching Nationals starter Stephen Strasburg in a tender embrace. The normally reserved Strasburg, who let loose in the clubhouse after Washington clinched a spot in the World Series, looked as if he enjoyed it, at least as much as he enjoys anything.
This right here, this is what baseball is all about. It’s not the unwritten rules, it’s not the old curmudgeon sports writers trying to tell you what is or isn’t acceptable, it’s not any of that. Baseball at it’s purest form is the fans eating a bunch of hot dogs, peanuts, and drinking beers, and players having fun. And the Nats fans, and the Nats, are doing both in spades.
The crowd:
The team:
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They’ve been dancing in the dugout after dingers pretty much all season, but now the national audience is getting to see it and I think a lot of people, and apparently pundits too, are like “damn, maybe you can be really good at baseball but also realize you’re just playing baseball and it doesn’t have to be *that* serious”. Sure, Brian McCann is definitely currently writing a letter to MLB front office demanding the Nats be removed from the World Series, but you can’t please everyone. In fact, I haven’t really seen that much, if any, blow back from the Nats celebrations. I’m sure there are people on Twitter who are angrily tweeting to their 14 followers, but that’s probably it.
So much makes this Nats team special, and the dugout celebrations, the sunglasses, the Baby Shark, the Soto Stare, Max’s eyes, Fernando Rodney…being on it, and Ryan Zimmerman coming up huge are just a few of them. Baseball is fun again, thanks to the Nats.
And just remember, the Nats bandwagon is very open. There’s a few people (mostly with machine guns as their avatar on Twitter) who are wondering how myself, and many others, became Nats fans when the team wasn’t there when I was born. I explain it in this blog. I’m so glad the Nats made me care about baseball again, because this is a ton of fun now. A tonnnn of fun.
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