TBOH Mailbag: In Which the Nationals Demand Your Respect

Hey man, just want to tell you that I really appreciate your blog.  I was deployed for last year’s playoffs….hell everything from July on I ended up missing…but this blog made it all OK….I survived somehow, thanks to TBOH.

Now, back stateside, I’m stationed in MD, near DC, and I have a problem….there is an epidemic spreading…it has been dubbed, “Nat’s Fever.” People are starting to actually ROOT for the Nats around here, and when I point out how much they suck, they tell me that “they’re young, they’ll beat the Phillies next year.”  Its becoming so bad, in downtown DC, you see drug dealers wearing Adam Dunn and Steven Strasburg jerseys….<insert arbitrary steroid joke here>.  WHAT CAN I DO?

Oh and keep up the good work….seriously being able to log onto a computer and seeing a blog post from you guys when I was deployed, it was the high point of every day, even when the Phils lost.

— Air Force Patrick

AFP,

I put in a quick call to the CDC to get the rundown on this “Nat’s Fever,” and by the horrified screams on the other end of the phone, I think it is only fair to assume that our nation’s capital has been lost, and we might as well elect a new president before the country descends into a Mad Max-style apocalypse, where mothers and babies are run over with motorcycles hourly.

I think its great that Nationals fans have accepted their team as a team.  I hope the Nats wrap themselves in the warm blanket of love being offered to them, because it certainly wasn’t there before, when they were the Expos.  In fact, nobody was there.  Who was showing up for Expos games by the end of their tenure?  Sex addicts rendezvousing through craigslist ads?  Lost dogs?  Children being punished?

However, I would instruct Nationals fans to just hang on a second there.  You can burrow inside that Strasburg jersey all you want, its not going to make that Tommy John surgery any less graphic.

I’ll let Dr. Clayton Lane and his pet cybernetic being explain it better.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

So that’s what the lord and savior of D.C. will be going through and then rehabilitating from for 12-18 months.  Does he scare me?  Of course he does.  But so do stray cats.  They get all worked up over shit like a bird carcass and then they arch their backs and hiss and its like WHOA DUDE I’m just trying to pass through this crack alley without getting rabies for once.

Now, there’s always Bryce Harper, the second helping of humble pie the Nationals hope to force us NL East-ers to choke on in the coming seasons.  He’s more of a computer; like a really fast, slick, trendy computer that does everything well, but every week it seems like he deletes a really important file, like your birth certificate or that picture of Christine right before she dumped you.

First of all, he looks like a dick with that shit on his face.  I mean, a child can apply that without turning it into a tribal ceremony.  You’re playing baseball, dude, not hunting humans in the Amazon.

But it is painfully clear that one can look like an idiot and still play a professional sport with legendary talent.

And yet, Harper still seems to go out of his way to incur the wrath or sadness of who will eventually be his hometown fans.  The Nationals need a hero; they need several, actually.  They’ve got Zimmerman, they’ve got Dunn, they’ll have Strasburg and Harper, eventually.  And sure, that’s talent.  But given Harper’s recent public announcement of his favorite teams–the Cowboys, Lakers, Yankees, Texas (for college cootball), and Duke (for college basketball)–is all the proof you need that until he grows up, sprouts a spine, and coughs up that cloud of toxic dickishness circumventing his brain, he’s going to be douching it up for awhile.

But hey, Giants fans still cheered for Barry Bonds for awhile.  So maybe the “hometown appeal” obscures whatever moronic tendencies a player may have.

To answer your question, I think, the Nationals will be a force to be reasoned with some day.  But not today.  And not tomorrow.  And not in 2011.  So as Phillies people, with our core group pushing the wrong side of 30, we should be focusing more than ever on the here and now, when we are apparently the most devastating juggernaut to ever strut the earth.

–TBOH

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[Image courtesy of ESPN]