Giving Thanks for Baseball This Holiday Season

It’s hard to find ‘Peace on Earth,” but if you look in the right place this holiday season, you will find baseball in about as cheerful and bountiful a spot as it has been in many years.  That aura of bonhomie is worth celebrating.  It has many origins, but certainly begins with the new found prosperity within the sport that says, “there is plenty to go around.” It is rare to hear grousing about the contracts that players get anymore, equally difficult to find players who do not value the game that has made them wealthy. Denis Rodman was a basketball player, and that is a good thing.

Then there is the competitive balance that has been bought at little cost via the same mechanisms that are making labor peace a reality.  The Pittsburgh Pirates are back.  That great historical franchises made the playoffs and has reasons for holiday cheer looking forward.  The Kansas City Royals, the Tampa Bay Rays, and other teams from the scrap heap have found new life and have sanguine prospects for the future.

Of course, the Washington Post made the most substantial pronouncement for my money this morning when they said that “the Washington Nationals have grown from a wayward franchise into a respected National League force.”  The lowest of the low, the poorly Expos have led a resurgence in the Nation’s Capital as the team has sunk roots alongside the Anacostia River, where Mayor Marion Berry was once busted for crack cocaine and nothing seemed destined to grow.  Yet it seems as if the rebirth of Washington, DC began in 2005. Argue if you will about the cause, but there has been a renaissance in this city that has reached to the Shaw Neighborhood where from the ashes of the ’68 riots is springing a return to the days when Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes once strolled U street.  Now young families are walking their strollers along North Capital Street where gang violence was commonplace a decade ago.  Did the Nationals get that ball rolling?  Put a double shot in that eggnog and think about it.

Santa was sweet to the Nationals when he wrapped Doug Fister with a bow and made him the fourth starter–though that is certainly worth arguing.  Some would put him second in just about any rotation. What was once the cheapest baseball town in the country, where Clark Griffith and Bob Short never found anything but coal in their stockings, the Lerner family has deep enough pockets to contemplate extending both Ian Desmond and Jordan Zimmermann and moving the team into the upper quartile of baseball salaries.

No, the Washington Nationals are not bolting the “ghetto” like some teams. Baseball is helping Washington to build from the center outward, using the old horsehide to make this an All-American city where everyone is welcome to play. The Nationals have built a state-of-the-art “baseball academy” on the other side of the tracks to encourage the growth of the sport among any demographic that might believe the game belongs to someone else.  It may have been whispered back in 1971 that Washington, DC was too black for baseball, but the Nationals have taken that old lump of coal and made it into a diamond.  Chuck Hinton, the first real African-American star to play for the Senators would be proud of his adopted hometown and what it is doing.

Hopefully MLB, Inc will build on the solid foundation the game finds itself upon now.  Building from the center outward is what the sport needs to do, to reach out as the Nationals are doing and continue to make the game one that everyone watches and everyone plays. Baseball is doing as much as any other sport to address the issues of chemical enhancements for professional athletes. Almost everything is moving in the right direction and those that seem to have lost their way need look no farther than Washington to see how it is done.

So season’s greetings has a double meaning for those of us hunkered down, waiting fort the spring thaw. But Happy New Year is a sentiment that spreads beyond the upcoming year and embraces many new years to come where baseball is headed back to becoming the king of sports again. Happy holidays baseball fans.