Nationals 5-5, 1/16 of our way to Mighty Decent

(early development of gyroball)

I do not really remember baseball exists too well most of the time. I used to care, and was a Giants fan, but then the strike season and Barry Bonds kinda just crushed the care out of me. Baseball seems very American - not old school immigrant came to America to become millionaire America historical story, but today entitled as fuck to everything ever America, thus not really deserving of anything, and will probably suffer an agonizingly slow death. That's baseball, and that's America.
But I really want to try, ever since the Nats came to D.C. They haven't given me much outside of Future Promise up to this point, and even that has been clouded in mismanagement up until the last couple years. Anyways, we are already 1/16 of the way through their 2011 campaign, which I am deeming The Road to Five Hundred, meaning we will finally finish without flirting (or achieving) triple digit losses. (I do this in /16s fractions because I am mechanically inclined, and twist ratchets and sockets all day long, helping to rebuild America, futilely, one actual thing at a time. I use strange fractions because fuck metrics.)
Last Friday I had remembered, "Oh yeah... baseball. I should figure out how to listen to the games online because listening to baseball is a true pleasure, and nothing is more great than to zone out to a baseball game on the radio, letting it absorb into your mind through the soothing linguistical inflections of the play-by-play dudes." Where will these men come from in our internetted future, I wonder? But then my wife was out of town so I had all three kids, and thus forgot to listen to radio baseball. Oddly enough, I watched the original Karate Kid with my 12-year-old daughter that night, for a nice and pure father/daughter time together, and there was a drunk man on the beach wearing a Washington Nationals hat, who was belligerent until Miyagi karate chopped the top off of four beer bottles ALL AT ONCE! This was a moment of psychic clarity the universe was throwing at me. I must listen to baseball games on the radio.
I did read about the game and it was the home opener for the Mets, who lost, with our Zimmermann pitcher with the extra "n" at the end of his name successfully pitching a solid amount of pitches, nearing triple digit pitch count, for the first time since Tommy John surgery last year. This of course speaks to the Nats psyche not in terms of the actual Jordan Zimmermann who did this deed, but the Future Promise of our young Stevie Strasburg, who was to be the Ordained Nolan Ryan of His Generation, but was sidetracked by fucking himself up right out the gates, which means we think he will instead be the Ordained Greg Maddux of His Generation.
Of course I did not actually start listening to radio baseball, because psychic clarity is all too often out-buzzed by the next 37 sources of mindless entertainment shooting at me from seventeen different devices. But today at work, I was like, "You know what? I am an American bureaucrat, and I've worked hard for about four of the hours of bothered to be at work these first two days of the week. I'm gonna look up the baseballs inside the interwebs."
The most startling thing for me to come upon was the Nats starting line-up for this game last night against the dreaded Philadelphia Phillies, in D.C., which has been home-away-home for Philly, and was probably why the Nats signed Jayson Werth, so that the fans had somebody they could cheer for during every game. Batting clean-up and playing 1B was Matt Stairs. The Matt Stairs. Mr. Softball. Also of note was Livan Hernandez pitching a solid game again and continuing to be the most amazing freak in a lovable way left. He has become a Pedro Martinez-lite version for the 2011 baseball fan. And also Jerry Hairston was starting at 3B, who made me think of those terrible White Sox uniforms of like 1983 or so, and that just made me think of Greg Luzinski, and then I wondered what Greg Luzinski was doing nowadays. I figured probably bowling and living somewhere in the midwest where the white people actually still know what brand of white people from Europe they are, and middle-aged dudes with vibrant facial hairs will get into very serious pseudo-arguments about what is a better type of sausage or deli meat or something artisanly handcrafted from carcass in the old world traditions. For some reason this made me think about bowling, probably because those types of dudes always bowl, and really without them and their kind, duckpin bowling would probably be dead to the world by now.
But the Nats won, beating the dread Phillies, which put us at 5-5. Livan got his first win of the year, and Shaggy Werth knocked his second homer of the year against his old homies to seal a lead that he spark plugged in motion with a lead-off double in the 4th that ended in 3 runs and an INSURMOUNTABLE LEAD with that wacky and wily Cuban maestro on the mound. 5-5. That's all I ask, at least for now, until it comes time for that Future Promise to start paying some goddamned dividends.