For Nats Fans, Dismal Season No Reason to Give Up on Fun

Fans at a Nats-Blue Jays game try for a foul ball in the sparsely populated left-field corner. For many Nats fans, the thinking is that last-place baseball is better than none at all. (By John McDonnell -- The Washington Post)
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No one looked happier than Joe Callahan, a real estate executive who owns four seats in the third row, each costing $307.50. He drank beers and focused anywhere but the field. "Look at those gals on top of the dugout," he said, grinning as he gazed at the Nationals' side of the diamond. "It's pure entertainment."

Before the game, down in their clubhouse, the Nats did their usual ballplayer things, dressing and watching TV and kibitzing. Willie Harris, a utility player, sang along with Michael Jackson and dismissed the notion that a losing season could dampen his mood: "I'm not going to lose sleep because I lost a ballgame. I lose sleep when my mother's sick."

He turned to Zimmerman and said, "Hey, Zim, do you get bummed out if we lose?"

Not after he leaves the ballpark, the third baseman replied.

Sitting at his locker, Joe Beimel, a relief pitcher, acknowledged that losing can make it tough to get excited about going to work. "I keep saying it can't get any worse, and then something happens," he said. Referring to the fans, Beimel said: "I've been kind of shocked no one gives you a hard time around here. Maybe they just don't care enough."

The annals of sport are rife with examples of disastrous seasons. The Cleveland Spiders won 20 games and lost 134 in 1899, their attendance so poor that opponents refused to play in their ballpark.

"Can't anybody here play this game?" Manager Casey Stengel asked as he watched his '62 Mets lose 120 games. Fans of the 1980 New Orleans Saints wore paper bags over their heads, "AINTS" scrawled across them to commemorate the team's 1-15 season.

Yet it would be hard to find anyone who knows more about losing than the founder of the Washington Generals, that congenitally hapless band of basketball players that has lost how many games to the Harlem Globetrotters?

"It's easier to tell you how many times they won," said Red Klotz, now 88 years old.

Twice.

And how many losses? "We're talking about thousands, 13,000 is a reasonable guess, give a thousand either way."

So how does one stomach all that failure?