If you were a Canadian who followed baseball in the 1980s, you were a Montreal Expos fan.
Living in Montreal had very little to do with it. Rooting for the Toronto Blue Jays was a minor impediment. The Expos were the sort of team that defied geography and the logic of loyalties.
The roster was often patched together from weirdos, castoffs and kids, Dirty-Dozen-style. The results could be patchy, but they were always dynamite to watch.
Those Expos teams gave two impressions – that if they could just keep it together for a while, they could be great; and that they were never going to keep it together for a while. They were too wild to care about winning.
So, in that sense, the Washington Nationals have very little in common with the team they once were. Because the team that just won the World Series is nothing but the will to win.
The Nationals should not have made it this far. Not in the modern game. They have three wonderful starting pitchers, but no bullpen to speak of.
They started out the year with a 19-31 record, the sort of number that means it is time to begin ringing the death knell. Having scrabbled their way in the postseason, they needed a final at-bat outburst to win the wild-card game.
They were written off against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the divisional series, got blanked in the first game, were underwritten off, and then won it in five. They took care of the St. Louis Cardinals so quickly that people had no time to adjust. Baseball was all, “I’m sorry, who made the World Series again? I don’t think we heard you right.”
The Nationals’ problem was not that they are not a good team. They just didn’t look like the team people expected to win.
A great postseason team in the modern era is built from the bullpen out. The thinking goes that you send out your starter, he survives for three or four innings, your offence demoralizes the opponent with a bombing campaign, then the bullpen comes out with the incendiaries to finish them off. This was the Yankees strategy this year. It didn’t go well.
People were willing to concede that what Washington had done might work in the National League, but the World Series was a different matter. In it, the Nationals faced the most complete team in baseball. Three starting pitchers even better than the Nationals top of the order rotation. A lineup with no holes. Very close to the best bullpen in baseball (Washington’s had been dead-last during the regular season).
On paper, it was over before it started. Which is why you shouldn’t trust what you read.
There were several irregularities in this World Series, the most memorable of which will be the fact that the road team won every game. That was a first in North American sport, and will probably never happen again.
As such, this was the worst World Series in history for people lucky enough to get tickets. All of them paid a ridiculous amount for the privilege, some more ridiculous than others. No home fan left the stadium happy.
In fact, it was a terrible World Series in terms of live viewing. The home team was often blown out, the games lasted forever, sitting around confused as umpires went to the video replay for 20 minutes nightly and still got it wrong.
The concentrated viewing of a seven-game series often leaves you with a few strong impressions that no amount of regular-season grazing can equal. My own from this year – A) television is a far superior way to watch baseball; B) the human experiment was a wonderful idea, but it has run its course. Bring on the Robot Umpires.
But all of these are complaints. That’s not what you’ll remember about the 2019 World Series. What you’ll recall is Washington’s rear-bumper job. They showed the value of hanging on.
They were most effective at that in Wednesday’s Game 7.
At the outset, you were getting a bad feeling. Mostly because no one likes the Astros anymore and they had that look. Everything was going right for them. The Nationals could barely manage a hit.
After six innings, it was still only 2-0 Houston, but had someone offered you outrageous odds that the Nationals were coming back, you’d have laughed at them. It felt like one-way traffic.
Then someone made a mistake. That is what makes baseball so compelling. You can watch as one little miscalculation spins out excruciatingly over 10 or 15 minutes.
It was Houston manager A.J. Hinch’s gaffe. He could have (in retrospect, should have) pulled starter Zack Greinke after six and subbed in strikeout machine Gerrit Cole for his first major-league relief appearance.
Instead, he sent Greinke back out to face the Nationals lineup for a third time. Then the wheels exploded off the bus.
Anthony Rendon homered. Juan Soto walked. Owing to the hoary belief that no starter is capable of pitching in an inning that is already under way, reliever Will Harris came in instead of Cole. He gave up a two-run homer to Howie Kendrick and that was that.
They play baseball for seven months, pretty much every day. Thousands of games in total. And in the end, it comes down to a single iffy decision taken by one person about whether or not to pull the starter.
Washington won the game 6-2 and took the series. The Nationals played in five elimination games this postseason and won them all. They won three winner-take-all games in comebacks staged in the seventh inning or later.
If this wasn’t the most unlikely World Series victory ever, it’s up there. This was the team the Expos never managed to be – not always fun to watch, but one that finds a way.
But like the Expos, the Nationals were impossible not to fall in love with. For all those who did so, that new love paid off like a slot machine on Wednesday night.
Afterward, U.S. President Donald Trump – who’d been booed while attending a game – tweeted, “Game 7 was amazing!”
They ought to put it in the Smithsonian. It’s the only indisputably true thing he’s said while in office.