Maybe we need a diversion from the unholy beat-down the Nats took in Boston this week. Maybe the pro-Yankee chants in RFK last week are still haunting our homer hearts. Maybe we’re looking forward to Frank Robinson's official return to Baltimore just up I-95. Or maybe it’s just Friday, and we want some kind of distraction to push the clock a little closer to martini time.

Whatever the reason, we thought we’d enlist the help of the DCist legions and get down to solving an issue that’s plagued the Nats for a little too long now: how best to cheer on Washington’s finest on the diamond. Sure, there’s some element of lameness involved in orchestrating cheering, but it’s time to arm ourselves with something to drown out the next drunken rendition of “Lets-Go-Phill-ies” from the 500 level.

We know the desire is out there. We could see it in the vitriol directed at a Washington Monthly article last week that called D.C. fans transient and tepid. We could hear it in the disarray of cheering and booing as Nat fans tried to respond to Yankee chants last weekend. Well, we too have longed to join in a rousing cheer for our Nats – but there’s just no cheer, chant, symbol, or song for fans to rally around. It’s not a lack of passion; it’s just a symptom of the team’s newness, with no established tradition as of yet. It gets a little tough to just keep yelling Go! and Yeah! all the time, right? And we’re pretty sure the Nat Pack is pretty worthless in this department, right?

What better time to present a new tradition than this weekend in Camden Yards? Tonight the Nats (and their fans) invade Baltimore and stake their claim for mid-Atlantic baseball supremacy and look to repeat last month's series win in RFK. Hey, the baseball’s pretty mediocre, but that doesn’t mean the cheering has to be.

So what should it be? A recognizable old standby, adapted for Washington use like every other team in the league does? Or something unique? What’s going to be Washington’s better answer to the Rally Monkey, the Tomahawk Chop, or the Homer Hanky? Why can’t we make a wonderful tradition out of a fat drunken radio man singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame hanging out of the press box?

As a prompt, we’ll look at a couple of cheers from around the sports world:

The National Anthem Variation:
This is pretty effectively deployed in Atlanta and Baltimore, who both have their team mascot names in the last verse of the anthem. It’s pretty unique and creative (though possibly a little crass), and has the benefit of being un-boo-able, for fear of appearing to jeer the St. Alban’s Boys Choir performing our nation's anthem. It’s probably a non-starter for us – it’s too bad the team’s not called the Banners or the Frees. Or maybe not.

The Standards:
“J! …E! …T! …S! …Jets! …Jets! …Jets!” or “Let’s Go Mets!”
Pretty unoriginal stuff, sure, most often heard from the vocal denizens of Long Island. What they lack in originality, they possess in simplicity and familiarity. They don’t need scoreboard or sound prompting – just a fan with enough gusto or Bud Light to get it going.

The Banana Boat calypso lyrics:
“DAY-O!”
There is only thing worse than using this ridiculous outburst as a cheer at a baseball game. And that is copying it from the Yankees, who’ve used it for years. Seriously, this has got to be one of the worst things to happen to baseball in the past decade, right?

The Deafening War Chant (or, The Annoying AND Demeaning):
OK, so it was neither original nor particularly PC for the Braves to pick up tomahawk chopping from other teams with Native American mascots. But it sure as hell has rallied the faithful during Atlanta’s string of division titles, and we’d like a piece of that action, for sure.

So it's possible that copying the efforts of other fans in the league is not the greatest of ideas. Can the commenters do better? Is there something we can all agree to rain down on Javy and Company during John Patterson's return tonight in Baltimore?

Of course, in the event that creativity and spirit fail us going into the weekend’s Beltway Battle, we can always fall back on an old faithful:

“Angelos SUCKS!”