#WFIB
The cathartic joy of watching the Nationals lose
Since we have already used this space to establish one of the ways in which Cardinals fandom can help make you a better person, let’s consider another: To be the target of so much half-assed vitriol—to see whip-smart writers lapse into trollish tendentiousness, to have to indulge every shitty joke or be marked as a scold, to watch every little thing get sucked into the jet engines of contempt—is to understand the deep, essential silliness of the tribalistic grudges we sports fans come to hold.
It’s an edifying, if not always entirely comfortable, experience, watching the rest of baseball try and mostly fail to come up with reasons to loathe the Cardinals that don’t have the ring of petty jealousy. And when we switch gears into other sports and seasons, maybe we come to see our own reflexive antipathies towards the Patriots or the Heat or the Red Wings in a different light. Maybe it dawns on us that rooting against Duke basketball is never going to be the proxy war on Polo-clad frat-star privilege we badly want it to be, or that the Dallas Cowboys are not truly an effective stand-in for corporatized American excess, or that no Notre Dame loss will ever be one-sided enough to exorcise our Catholic guilt.
And just maybe that way lies a new, liberating clarity, a framework for cheering for our favorite teams that elevates play and competition and strategy and athleticism while minimizing moralism and narrative and shoehorned value judgments and soft-lit OTL portraiture. And if Cardinals fans really are going to be baseball’s best—and why shouldn’t we aspire to be?—maybe our goal should be to rise above the fray and embrace this new perspective, to leave aggrievedness and resentment and projection to other, lesser fanbases, to be the sober adults in a room full of hooligans.
And I really believe all that, which is why I needed to get it out of the way before stating with absolute, unflinching certainty that the worst fans in baseball root for the Washington Nationals.
Note that what I did not just say is that Washington Nationals fans are the worst in baseball. There are certainly those who would argue just that, but various attempts to quantify this sort of thing put them somewhere between the near-bottom and the middle of the pack, and surely we must allow for the fact that the franchise is still less than a decade old. Yes, there’s been a pronounced bandwagon effect as the team has emerged as a contender in the last few years, and “Natitude” remains an unforgivably lame watchword, but ultimately there’s little reason to believe that the Nationals’ fanbase is on balance any less passionate, loyal, and respectful than any other.
But neither are we obligated to ignore the fact that an outsize and highly visible segment of that fanbase is just the fucking worst.
The relationship between Nats fans and the Worst Fans in Baseball™ is the direct analogue to that between Washington, D.C., a uniquely charming North-meets-South mini-metropolis where I lived for three years and very much liked, and Washington, D.C., the diseased rat’s nest of black-hearted hypocrites and dead-eyed bootlicking morons presently doing their level best to plunge this country into a hole it can never climb out of.
These are the chattering classes, the Politico set, the “Gang of 500,” the talking heads and demagogues and plutocrats and influence peddlers and hacks and hangers-on. So instantly ingrained were these daywalking vampires into the fabric of Nationals fandom that when the Abramoff scandal hit just before the franchise’s second season in Washington, team executives publicly feared the “chilling effect” increased scrutiny of the lobbying industry would have on ticket sales.
They needn’t have worried; first RFK Stadium and now Nationals Park have endured as hives of horse-trading and institutionalized corruption, but that’s only part of it. On an everyday level, Nats fandom is just a suitably flavorless, low-stakes way for D.C.’s legions of malfunctioning replicants to display something that vaguely resembles human emotion—for lobotomized cable-news chuckleheads and bubble-dwelling Beltway buffoons to interrupt their regularly-scheduled pabulum and puffery with thoughts like these:
Unsurprisingly, the Worst Fans in Baseball bring to their fandom the very worst habits they’ve formed in their professional lives. That so many of them so readily deserted their hometown teams and embraced the Nationals in the first place is a telling reflection of D.C.’s creedless insularity, of a notionally representative, public-serving government that in practice is a toxic enclave of self-interest and muddled allegiances.
And while most cities make at least a token attempt to avoid the appearance of bandwagoning, the #WFIB are utterly shameless about it, just as they’re pathologically incapable of viewing politics and governance through any other lens than a cynical, reductive, who’s-up-who’s-down style of horse-race analysis. Occasionally, one D.C. shitheel or another will try to turn that lens on the game of baseball itself; the results are surely some of the worst pieces of writing in the English canon.
It should go without saying, but probably doesn’t, that there are plenty of smart, decent people who make a living in political Washington. But they’re cogs in a hopelessly entrenched power structure that is as destructive and deserving of our contempt as any other on earth. Every part of the system is getting worse; the influence of political money is becoming more corrosive, political coverage is getting dumber, and politicians themselves are growing more intransigent. And though the public retains the power of the ballot box, that crudest of democracy’s levers, we’re essentially powerless to combat the broader subversion of the political process wrought by the Beltway’s power-hungry agitators and their enablers in the press.
We can, however, root for their baseball team to lose. Hard. We can hope that the Nats literally never win another game, that after a few surreal 0-162 seasons the franchise simply folds out of shame and that the very words “Washington Nationals” become a permanent global synonym for abject and total failure.
Barring that, we should savor every Nationals loss we can, particularly those that come at the Cardinals’ hands, and fondly recall Game 5 of the 2012 NLDS, a game that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “compared…to a death in the family”:
“It affected me for days. It had a huge impact,” he said. While fellow Republican Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential election was worse, McConnell added with a laugh, the Nats’ defeat “was a close second.”
That the St. Louis Cardinals were responsible for ruining multiple days of Mitch McConnell’s life makes me happier than I can possibly put into words. If the best opportunity to seek redress for our grievances, to inflict some small emotional damage on those responsible for the real and lasting damage currently being done to the public good, is going to come on a baseball diamond, so be it. As reigning NL champs, the Cards are in a better position to mete out such justice than most, whether in a series like this weekend’s or—we can only hope—in another showdown in October. And at the very least, whenever we’re next asked to argue over whether or not Cardinals fans are the best in baseball, we can be absolutely sure that they’re not the worst.
