These people want to believe tonight’s going to be different.
I watched Cubs-Nationals Game 5 in a D.C. bar and saw sports at its most casually upsetting
A night in a bar with a bunch of people who knew exactly what was coming but valiantly tried to change it.
Alex Kirshner
I’m at D.C. Reynolds, a Nationals bar a bit up the Green Line from Nationals Park. I have come here because a) I’m told it’s very Nationals-y and b) it has a buy-one, get-one happy hour that generously runs until 9 p.m. The place fills up nicely during the game. The people here are a mixture of D.C. transplants and locals who have taken to the Nationals since they arrived here in 2005. There are moments on this Thursday when their belief is warranted. Michael A. Taylor hits a three-run homer at 8:53 p.m. local time to put the local club up 4-1, and this sort of appears to be the night. The Nationals are going to make their first championship series ever. Maybe.
Ultimately, it will not be. Washington is going to lose this National League Division Series Game 5 by a score of 9-8. Bryce Harper will strike out against the Cubs’ Wade Davis, swinging through a 90-mile-per-hour cutter with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. It’s the sixth pitch of a well-contested but not at all memorable at-bat that turns out to seal the Nationals’ fate. They’ve made the NLDS four times in the last six years and lost all four, including three home Game 5s. It’s brutal.
This night looks promising for a little bit, and that makes the final result worse. The Cubs lead 1-0 after the top half of the first inning, but Washington hits back hard. Daniel Murphy ties the game with a solo homer in the bottom of the second inning, and three batters later, Taylor’s homer is the moment of the season.
“Michael. Ayeeeeeeee. Tayyyyyyyylor,” the people chant at this bar. They’re emulating the public address announcer and the fans at Nationals Park.
The inning from hell is the top of the fifth. The Nationals are winning at this point, 4-3, and the highest point of the whole night is when Max Scherzer takes the ball. Scherzer didn’t start this game, but he’s the home team’s best pitcher, and he’s got a lead. Look how easy this is going to be! Scherzer is going to go the rest of the way and the Nationals are not going to blow this lead, I think, is the thought here.
The first two batters make outs. The bar is calm.
The next seven batters do not make outs. The bar is increasingly panicked.
A two-run double by Addison Russell makes it 5-4, Chicago, and that’s the last time the Nationals will lead or be tied this season. But the worst moment, the one that prompts people to yell about curses and D.C. sports, is the play that makes it 6-4. Javier Baez basically gets a double on a strikeout, after a passed ball leads to Matt Wieters throwing the ball into right field. It’s Bad News Bears stuff, and a mostly polite bar crowd starts yelling “fuck” and “shit” and “oh my god” and all of the things sports fans yell when their team does something that’s incomprehensibly stupid.
Then there’s a back-to-back catcher interference and a hit-by-pitch to make it 7-4.
At this point, the bar’s silent. This doesn’t feel real, even for a D.C. team.
In the top of the sixth, Jayson Werth botches a fairly routine sliding catch in left, and Russell’s line drive makes it 8-4. Werth isn’t charged with an error, but this is his fault. Nobody is really angry, because these fans have already died tonight.
Things don’t get truly dark here until later, when the Nationals tease everyone.
The Nationals hang around, scoring two in the bottom of the sixth to make the score 8-6. Chicago gets another run in the top of the seventh on a fielder’s choice, and that’s a touch controversial because Jon Jay takes out Daniel Murphy with a slide that’s fringy, but that everyone here knows isn’t getting called illegal in an NLDS Game 5.
“I feel good. I’m invigorated,” one guy says when I ask.
Washington’s comeback is valiant. A run comes in on a Harper sacrifice fly in the seventh, and another on a Taylor single in the eight, so it’s 9-8. The Nationals’ best chance to tie the game turns out to be in the eighth, but backup catcher Jose Lobaton gets picked off at first base, after a review, to end the inning. This is especially lame because Lobaton’s got a runner ahead of him on second base.
“God damn, Lobaton, you fucking suck,” one guy sitting at the bar says. He’s a Navy reserve officer who arrived a few years ago from Washington state but has taken to this team. “If he’s on the team next year, I fucking swear,” he adds.
This man has been optimistic all night. He’s here with his wife, who’s from Milwaukee, and they’ve both picked up the Nationals since moving to D.C. She wears a Trea Turner jersey, and he’s in a Taylor jersey. There are Michael A. Taylor jerseys in the general public in this city, which is a cool and stunning thing.
“He hasn’t suffered enough to believe it’s not gonna happen,” she says, pointing at him as we sit at the bar before the top of the ninth inning. A seat to their right, there’s an older woman in a Harper shirt, a longer-tenured D.C. person, who says, “I have.” He’ll then chime in that he’s just “protecting himself emotionally.”
“I want them to win, but part of me is telling myself they’re not gonna win.”
A Nationals bar crowd is comprised of partly local diehards, partly of Yankees fans from New Jersey who moved here for work, and partly of transplants from elsewhere who have legitimately assumed the Nats as their new team.
The defining characteristic of the D.C. bar experience during this city’s latest absolute gut punch of a postseason loss? Everyone kind of knew it was gonna happen.
A Washington professional sports team hasn’t made a conference final since 1998, when the Capitals got to the the Stanley Cup Final and lost. The Nationals’ impending loss will run the streak to 69 combined seasons in a row by the Nationals, Capitals, Wizards, and local NFL team with a league semifinal berth, by the count of the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg.
That’s a genuinely unreal statistic, but it’s real in this room. Washington teams have lost these games for too long for anybody but the most ardent soul to think the result is going to be any different than it’ll turn out to be. Washington’s win expectancy after the Taylor three-run home run was 82 percent, but not in the mind of anyone here.
Despair set in during that trainwreck of the top of the fifth. It receded as the Nationals rallied, but it’s back by 12:39 a.m., when Werth hits a towering fly ball down the left field line and, obviously, just foul. Werth doesn’t have the distance for a game-tying home run even if the ball is a little straighter, but that’s not the point.
When Werth’s shot hooks foul, there is no anger. There is just laughter.
Werth strikes out swinging.
At 12:41 a.m. ET, like four-and-a-half hours after this mess started, Harper comes up with two outs in the ninth, down 9-8 with nobody on base. He can hit baseballs so far that this crowd gets a brief revival.
Harper strikes out at 12:45 a.m. ET, after a six-pitch at-bat that’s taken just under a minute per pitch, because D.C. teams don’t die swift, painless deaths.
“Every year,” someone says, and it’s not really an exaggeration.
Within 30 seconds of Harper’s game-ending K, bar tabs start to close with numbing efficiency. It is, after all, very late. Within about two minutes, the woman in the Harper shirt is the last Nationals fan in the building.
“You’re a D.C. sports fan,” she says, “you’re basically just a masochist.”
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