WASHINGTON — The tarp on the mound read “2019 World Champions.” There was no arguing with the facts: The Washington Nationals did indeed win the 2019 World Series, and flags (or tarps) do fly (or sit) forever, as they say. Yet it was hard to imagine how all of that could have felt any less relevant to the team that would soon take the field.
This was the first “normal” Opening Day for the Nationals since they won the World Series. In 2020, there were no crowds due to the pandemic, and in 2021, the first home series was lost to an outbreak with the stadium capped at partial capacity when the season finally began. That means this is the closest the Nationals have been able to get to something like a celebratory springtime return to the field. Yet Thursday seemed quite distant from any such concept. For it was also the first Opening Day under what is definitively, undeniably a new era in D.C.: Welcome to a full season in a rebuild.
It is not that these Nationals look particularly different in April than they did when fans last saw them in September. Rather, they look almost just as they did after last year’s mid-season sell-off, when they scuffled through the first few months of play and proceeded to dismantle much of what was left from their championship team. Which makes this year the first one in some time that has been forced to begin without even an illusion of hope in Washington: If the last-place finishes of the last two seasons felt like unfortunate spots the team just stumbled into, this one feels like a foregone conclusion, a target it will be driving straight toward.
