These are the Washington Nationals, and outside of the Clark Griffith years, maybe 1915 - 1953, the butt of that old vaudeville joke. Lost games, lost two teams. Got a team that spiraled down to depths not matched except for one or two of the Chuck Dressen disasters and the first few expansion seasons. Mike Backsik and Matt Chico in starting rotation. Elijah Dukes. Insanity (aka Nyjer Morgan). A team that could not compete in AAA.
Sixty hopeless season, including 30 years of no baseball. In the late '90s, I was walking across a parking lot at HQ in Rockville with a couple of younger programmers, and they had never heard of the Nationals/ Senators / Nats.
Every Nats win is a punch in the gut to Bowie Kuhn and The Lords Of Baseball who chose to expand to chump towns like Tampa and Miami and Denver, to AAA towns, while spitting on RFK, the Nation's Capital, and that profitable NFL team.
Every Nats win is a win that "the experts" said would never be...not this year, probably not next year...maybe in 2014...
Natitude? It's Buddy Myer to a Yankees infielder: "The next time Ben Chapman slides into second, I'm going to step on his face". That's "Natitude". Accept it.
Who knows if this team will will everything. Baseball is weird. Doesn't matter. This team fights.