#Cubs vs #Nats: Will the “Curse of Teddy” Stop the #Nats Again

Cubs fans have been so focused on their own curses, all of which ended last November 2 at 11:47 pm central time, that they may not have realized other teams have curses, too.  Even teams as young as the Washington Nationals, who have only been around since 2005 (or 1969, depending on your point of view).

As Milwaukee has the sausage race, since 2006, the Nationals have had the Presidents race, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt (and starting in 2013 William Howard Taft).  During the first seven years of the Presidents race, Teddy Roosevelt never won.  It was the Nats thing; Teddy loses.  But then, with the Nationals having clinched their first postseason berth in 2012, some so-called Nationals fans started a campaign to “let Teddy win.”

Obviously, this was a dumb idea.  Our daughter, who was working in DC at the time and, as a Cubs fan, knows about baseball, told her friends that the Nationals would be making a mistake if they let Teddy win.  But apparently not being real baseball fans, they didn’t understand.  Mike Tidwell, a writer for The Washington Post, did:

“At the time [i.e., September of 2012], my teenage son Sasha and I laughed at this foolhardiness, secure in the knowledge that the Nationals front office would never let that happen.  As every serious baseball person knows, when things are going well, you don’t change anything.  When the hits are falling and wins piling up, fans and players alike must take the exact same route to the ballpark every day and order the same brand of peanuts in the stands and sunflower seeds in the dugout.  It’s not a superstition; what a frivolous concept, superstition, implying unfounded belief in extra-normal powers.  This is a time-tested truth.  Is believing in gravity a superstition?  No.  In baseball, you never make changes when things are going well.  Period.”

Well, the Nationals “let Teddy win.”  How did it go?  As Casey Stengel supposedly said, “You could look it up.”

Since the day Teddy won, the Nationals have been to the playoffs three times, 2012, 2014, and 2016, and they have lost in the first round every time.  (Some of the losses have been pretty excruciating.)  This year, the Nationals decided to try to “reverse the curse,” as they say, by not letting Teddy win.  There were, however, amazingly, even this year, some fans who wanted to let Teddy win once the Nats clinched.  But this time, the Nats were smarter than their fans.

The question is: Is one year enough or will “the curse of Teddy” keep the Nats out of the NLCS yet again?  Who will prevail, “the curse of Teddy” or Strasburg, Scherzer, and Harper?¹  We will know in a week.
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¹ Strasburg, Scherzer & Harper sounds like a Washington law firm,  But these guys are even more expensive, which given the rates Washington lawyers charge, isn’t easy to do.