You all may know this, but in 2019 the Washington Nationals won the World Series. We Washingtonians thought that this team, filled with exciting players, would be a contending team for the foreseeable future. But this was not to be. The next year, the Nationals ended the season eight games under .500. In 2021, they were 32 games below .500. In 2022, the team was 52 games below .500. In 2023, 20 games below .500. And in 2024, 20 games below .500. As of today, 91 games into a 162 game season, the Nationals are 17 games below .500.

For most of this period, the team has been “rebuilding” with continual promises that, in effect, “next year we will be a contender”. In each of these years, as the trading deadline (late July) approached, the Nationals would trade away some (most) of their better players to obtain younger players, not yet ready for prime time, but with great promise for the future. Most of those trades have not really panned out.

This year, once again, began with hopes of contention. And three weeks ago, when the Nationals were only two or three games under .500, it even seemed possible. But then, the Nationals fell once again, losing 12 (or was it 13 or 14?) games in a row, falling into last place, just as the last place Miami Marlins went on an almost comparable winning streak and passed them right by.

Three days ago, the owners of the Nationals, the Lerner family, who have come under much criticism for holding down necessary spending, fired both the General Manager, Mike Rizzo, who had been with the team for close to 20 years, and Davey Martinez, the team’s manager, who had been in that position since 2018. Last night, the team played its first game under new temporary leadership – its bench coach, Miguel Cairo is managing the team, and Rizzo’s deputy, Mike DeBartolo is the acting general manager.

Both of these might have been the right move, but to fire them both at the same time mid-season without permanent replacements ready to be named does raise some questions for me. I remember that day in 1983, when my office moved the same weekend that we moved into our current house, and how disorienting that was, driving from one strange place to the other after my first day in my new office. And it must be especially disorienting for a team with so many young players. (When I say young players, if you look at the 25 members of the Nationals today, only 5 are over the age of 30; looking at the New York Yankees, for example, they have 11 of the 15 over the age of 30)

The Nationals are the youngest or second youngest team of the 30 Major League teams, and now they have lost the leadership that they have been used to, and have not yet seen new leadership come into view. Their future is very uncertain. And a trade deadline (for some, their first) is coming up in about three weeks.

So, I am not very optimistic about the rest of this year (even though, obviously, you never know) but, because of the overall quality of the team’s young players, I am confident of the future if good leadership is chosen and if the team loosens its financial limits a bit. And I hope that the Nationals do not once again trade away their better players this year.

I do want to say one more, but very different, thing about baseball today. I want to recognize the death of Bill Hunter at age 97. You probably don’t recognize his name, but Bill Hunter was the final shortstop for the St. Louis Browns, and (not surprisingly) the first shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles, after the Browns moved to Baltimore in 1953. But more than that, Bill Hunter was the last living individual who played for the Browns. Just like there are no living veterans of the Civil War, there are no living veterans of the St. Louis Browns, the team that I followed most closely growing up in St. Louis (even though most everyone else there followed the Cardinals).

Another thing about Hunter, something that I did not know. He was born (in 1928) in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. This would make him, by my careful mental gymnastics, appropriately Punxsutawney Bill. This would not make him, in any way, a relative of that other famous Punxsutawney native, Punxsutawney Phil.

Meanwhile, in other news, the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was burned to the ground over the weekend, a likely victim of arson.  Built as a home in the 1890s, it became a hotel in 1935 and was the first stop for Edie and me on our Haitien honeymoon almost 50 years ago. We liked everything about it, except for the music from the nightclub that kept us awake much too late at night.