Natitude & Baseball's Finest Choke Artists

Jack Merlino

Play it.

  The Nats should've just forfeited the rest of their games after this, because there has never been a more fitting conclusion to a season than this fight. In fact, now that I've had time to really think about this and come up with even more jokes, Papelbon choking Harper was the perfect metaphor for this season. If someone were to ask you to summarize how the Nationals' 2015 campaign went, you should just forward them the link to that fight. Now, here's the fun part: donning our surgical gloves, plunging into this carcass of an organization, and picking apart every little thing that went wrong for Washington.


First, let's knock out the legitimate Nationals fans' (both of them) rallying cry: "WE WOULD BE IN THE PLAYOFFS IF IT WEREN'T FOR INJURIES!" This argument loses all validity the second any other playoff team loses an important player to injury (spoiler, that's happened, so this argument is on par with the anti-vaccination movement in terms of validity). Boo freaking hoo.

If you're so set on injuries being the key reason why Washington's players will be doing the same thing as the rest of us (that is, eating potato chips while watching the professionals on TV), there are apparently two things that separate the Nationals from the Mets, Dodgers, Cardinals, Cubs, Pirates, Yankees, Blue Jays, and Royals: the existence of playoff series wins, and the ability to absorb a bad injury.

The first thing that is so dislikable about the team is their attitude from 2012 to today. As many of you will recall, the prior the 2012 season, the Nationals announced their 'Take Back the Park' campaign, which restricted the sales of single-game tickets to people with credit cards that were tied to addresses in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington D.C..  That same year marked the debut of one of the most heinous team slogans ever created: 'Ignite your Natitude'. Between that and the racist nature of Washington's football team's name, this city should just have all of its teams deported to far-away places.

'Natitude' has become both the rallying cry for the thousands of Nationals fans that totally existed the whole time but just didn't come to the ballpark until 2012, and the innumerable amount of people who love trolling this God-forsaken team on Twitter whenever the team has one of its many faux pas (a group that includes this writer)

Filled with Natitude, the team lucked into back-to-back generational talents at #1 overall in Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon falling to them at #6 overall (it should be noted that they passed up on Sonny Gray, Jose Fernandez, and others to take Rendon). So they finally have their new, young core. They have Ryan Zimmerman, who is both terrible-but-not-really and a stud-but-not-really. They have Jayson Werth, who after leaving Philadelphia took half a winter to endear himself to the fans of his former team. They have two additional pitchers who would be aces on a lot of staffs in Jordan Zimmerman and Gio Gonzalez. And then they made the dumbest decision in the history of their franchise (which, despite how it's only a little over a decade old, is quite a statement).

They decided not to use staff ace Stephen Strasburg in the playoffs under the guise of him "hitting his innings limit" during the September stretch run. Strasburg, who in 2010 had undergone Tommy John Surgery to remedy his injury, watched from the bench, as his teammates took the St. Louis Cardinals to five games in the NLDS, only to lose it after closer Drew Storen surrendered FOUR runs in Game 5 as part of a 9-7 loss. It's entirely possible and hilarious that the Nationals had cursed themselves by not using Strasburg.

Then came 2013. Bryce Harper would come back with a season under his belt and tear up the league, and the Nats would roar into the playoffs! LOL JK. Harper only played in 118 games that year and the Nats finished 10 games behind Atlanta in the division.

Then came 2014. Washington made it to the playoffs after being the only NL East team to finish with a winning record. They matched up with the future World Series-winning Giants, and if that doesn't tell you who won the series, you should take a college course in Logic. This time, it only took four games for Washington to disappoint their fans.

So here we are. The Nats surprised quite a few people last winter by throwing a monstrous contract at pitching stud Max Scherzer, and immediately became the favorite to win the NL pennant. Eight months later, the Nationals are mathematically eliminated from any sort of playoff appearance.

Now we can get to why the Nats are so easily-hateable: they did the talking before they did the walking. Take back the park? Natitude? This is a franchise that was the runaway favorite in the NL East for the past four seasons and has nothing but a pair of early playoff exits to show for it. That stupid thing they did after every win for what seemed like whatever? I just wanna sit them all down in a room and be like "Not that I care, but what are you doing?" At least the Royals, who made themselves just as easy to despise, took a couple seasons and put up the facade of being a lovable underdog before revealing themselves to be antagonistic asses.

And then you get back to the fight that happened on Sunday. This is the most dysfunction I've seen on a baseball team in a long time. Harper is a young guy who needs to have his ass kicked once in a while, be it verbally or physically. That's something that all young guys have in common. Pap is simply an idiot. Even if other players are anonymously agreeing with what you did, you don't attempt you crush the larynx of your teammate, especially one who's bringing your garbage franchise the smallest of consolations with his inevitable MVP award.



One last joke: Papsmear definitely didn't come to Washington for this

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