Photo by philliefan99.The idea that the Nationals might be a cursed franchise is hardly a revolutionary thesis. After all, they were birthed from the embers of a somewhat cursed team, the Montreal Expos. (The long sequence of events that began with that team’s potentially epic 1994 season being cruelly wiped away by the players strike and ended with the franchise being owned by the league and drawing crowds in the low four-digits just had to be guided by the hand of something more devious than man.) You could make the argument that there’s a young pitching curse right now at the Park, considering that 2010 is the second straight season when the team’s most promising young pitcher is set for a long-term stay on the shelf with arm surgery.
Well, all you Nationals fans should feel free to blame John Wilkes Booth, apparently. In an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, David O’Leary and Mark Greenbaum — D.C. residents — suggest that the location of Nationals Park has stirred up “the curse of Abraham Lincoln’s Assassins.” Behold:
While the Nationals’ woes can be traced to a legacy of administrative incompetence and player failures, the team’s location at the Washington Navy Yard should also be considered as a source of their ineptitude. Nationals Park sits directly on an infamous stretch of the Anacostia River where authorities conducted the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth on the ironclad U.S.S. Montauk anchored at the Navy Yard. Next door at Fort McNair, Booth’s co-conspirators were held and tried at the country’s first federal penitentiary, and four of them were hanged there in July 1865. Booth himself was buried there until his remains were later moved.
Nestled beside where Lincoln’s killers were executed, the placement of the stadium may have unwittingly exposed the Nationals to the conspirators’ vengeful ghosts. That the apparitions of Booth and his gang would aim their ghoulish enmity on modern baseball may seem strange, but it makes sense given President Lincoln’s affinity for what became our national pastime.
Ah-ha! So the real reason that Stephen Strasburg’s elbow turned to jelly isn’t just bad luck, it’s angry Confederate ghosts taking their long-awaited revenge against the authorities by punishing a bunch of baseball-loving, Union-supporting baseball players. Fair enough. The theory does lose some steam when the paper suggests that the ghosts also affected the Nationals’ predecessors, the Senators, who were similarly a bastion of futility. I mean, how were Booth’s conspirators supposed to get all the way up to Griffith Stadium, Baltimore Sun? It’s not like the Green Line existed back then or anything. Haunting the new stadium is much more convenient for Booth and company.
Though, we’re curious: is there any chance that we could pin the responsibility for the economic slowdown that’s forced the stall of the redevelopment near the stadium on Lincoln’s assassins, too? That might be handy.
