Tag Archives: World Series

A World Series title comes home to Washington

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World Series celebrations were things for other cities.

That’s what I knew for a fact during the long twilight years when the city I chose didn’t have a baseball team. The next 14 years–first salted with 100-loss futility, then scarred with first-round postseason exits–didn’t shake my fear that I’d live my entire life while watching other places’ players jump on each other on an infield in October.

But that just happened. For my city. In my lifetime.

The Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros 6-2 in a game 7 that wasn’t supposed to happen after… the team started the season with a 19-31 record… our bullpen was revealed to be built partially out of balsa wood… we had to claw our way into the postseason via a come-from-behind wild-card win against the Brewers… we needed five games to beat Los Angeles in the division series and crush our own postseason curse… we swept St. Louis and jumped to a two-game lead over Houston that we then refunded to find ourselves down 3-2, needing to win two games on the road.

(By then, it looked like the primary accomplishment of our ill-spent World Series homestand would be providing an appropriate and deserved greeting to President Trump. Readers: It’s your right to boo a politician making a public appearance at a baseball game–and if that politician otherwise hides from all unfriendly audiences, booing might be your obligation as a citizen.)

We grabbed game 6 from the Astros, but game 7 saw us staring down eight outs from a second-place finish that I would have accepted. Can’t lie: I thought we were smoked then.

Wrong. We did it. We flipped the script. The Nats are world champions. They can replace the blank white flag that’s flown over the Nationals Park scoreboard since the venue’s 2008 opening with a pennant bearing four digits: 2019.

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Weekly output: robot arms, strange tech at CEATEC

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I have to remind myself that I’m not imagining things through a haze of jet lag: The Washington Nationals really did win the National League Championship Series with a 4-0 sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals (revenge for 2012!), and a D.C. baseball team will play in the World Series for the first time since 1933. Eighty-six years!

I watched game four of the NLCS from 6,700-plus miles away on my laptop–first in my hotel room, then the CEATEC press room. I can only imagine what the other journalists there thought of my demeanor, which went from “staring a hole into my laptop’s screen” as the Cards loaded the bases in the top of the 8th to absolute elation as the last pitch of the game landed in Victor Robles’s glove and the Nats rushed onto the field to celebrate.

Now we just need to win four more games. Go Nats!

10/19/2019: Here’s what it feels like to sprout an extra pair of robot arms, Fast Company

I knew that one of the keynotes on CEATEC’s opening day would spotlight ANA’s ventures into telepresence avatars. I didn’t expect one of these experiments to take the form of a set of remote-controlled arms that a person could wear while another operated those appendages–or that I’d get a chance to strap on that Fusion rig myself. This was a fun piece to write.

10/20/2019: Too-smart toilets and work-tracking shirts: Could this tech in Tokyo come to the U.S.?, USA Today

What CEATEC lacked in shipping or soon-to-ship products, it made up in a sort of science-fair weirdness. I tried to capture that in this show recap/photo gallery I filed Thursday night in Tokyo. The piece could have been considerably longer… but I get paid a fixed rate per USAT column, so writing long only drives down my per-word rate.

 

Ranking my Nats postseason nightmares

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It happened again. Of course it did.

The Nationals’ 9-8 loss to the Cubs in Thursday’s National League Division Series game 5 stands apart from the team’s other postseason exits for how utterly snakebit the Nats looked.

Barry Svrluga’s breakdown of the defeat only begins to capture what a shitshow this game was. The nightmare fifth inning alone–in which previously lights-out Max Scherzer got lit up for three hits, had a third strike turn into a run-scoring error when Matt Wieters dropped the ball and then airmailed it past Ryan Zimmerman (except play should have stopped after Javier Baez’s bat grazed his mask), saw the bases load on a catcher’s interference call, and walked in a run by hitting Jon Jay with a pitch–will haunt me for years.

But the upshot is the same as in 2012, 2014 and 2016: We lost a winnable division series in avoidable ways, leaving me with a strip of NLCS tickets to set on fire in the driveway before I wait to see which other city’s team gets to mob the infield after winning the World Series.

In the meantime, as an inveterate list-maker I feel compelled to rank the relative misery of our final home games in each postseason, all of which I’ve had the dubious privilege of witnessing in person.

4) 2014 NLDS game 2. Eighteen innings. Eighteen freezing innings. And all after we got within one out of a victory before robo-manager Matt Williams took out Jordan Zimmermann for Drew Storen because that’s what the book says to do. Giants 2, Nats 1, but we did still have three more chances to win–only one of which we took, leading to our fastest NLDS exit.

3) 2016 NLDS game 5. A great start by Scherzer turned to ashes in a horrible and prolonged (one hour and 5 minutes!) seventh inning that saw five relief pitchers give up four hits before Chris Heisey’s two-run shot in the bottom of the frame concluded our scoring in the series. Dodgers 4, Nats 3.

2) 2017 NLDS game 5. Seriously, this was grotesque. I’ve now attended maybe 250 Nationals games, and this one subjected me to onfield calamities I never thought I’d see even in the woeful seasons in which we lost over 100 times.

1) 2012 NLDS game 5. The worst. Witnessing a 6-0 lead collapse, inning by inning, into a 9-7 loss to the Cardinals ranks as my most painful sports memory ever.

And so the D.C. postseason curse grinds on. I would like to think that it will end in my lifetime, preferably before inflicting too much trauma on our daughter. But that’s also what I said to myself in 2012. And 2014. And 2016.