The reason I’m a Washington Nationals fan is because UVA Baseball star Ryan Zimmerman was the team’s first draft pick, back in 2005, made it to the bigs in his draft year, and became the foundation piece for the franchise for the next two decades.
I started yelling “Go ‘Hoos!” during Zimm ABs back in the RFK Stadium days, through when Navy Yard was Nats Park, a car wash, a McDonald’s and parking lots, all the way to the World Series in 2019.
OK, so, my wife and I are in DC this weekend to take advantage of the amazing late-March weather to see the cherry blossoms in full bloom, and to get a couple of Nats games in before April 1, a rarity – the missus doesn’t do cold-weather anything.
Early in the game, I made it a point to hit the team store, decided to spring for one of the new City Connect jerseys, and end up going with the Zimmerman #11, even through Zimm retired in 2021 – my reasoning being, I’m a UVA guy, Zimm is the reason I’m a fan, the Nats can’t trade Zimm, and he can’t leave as a free agent.
The behind-the-scenes on that thinking: I got burned getting Juan Soto and Trea Turner jerseys a few years back, assuming that there was no way the Lerners wouldn’t lay down whatever was necessary to keep those guys in the District, after losing Bryce Harper.
Shows what I know about that kind of thing.
Anyway, so, Zimmerman #11 jersey, brand new.
I’ve gotten ahead of the story I’m really here to tell just a tiny bit.
Rewinding, the nice folks who were our seatmates in Section 101 for the day today had, ahead of me hitting the team store, started talking politics with us, because of course you have to do that in this day and age.
We find out in the bottom of the first that we’re all Democrats, and we learn from one of the seatmates that she’s a retired federal employee, and one of their family members, a few seats down, had just decided to take a buyout from his federal job, out of the thinking that, they’re offering buyouts now, next time, they’ll just fire everybody, and there won’t be any cushion, you’re just out of a job.
We relate that, we’re journalists, left-of-center in a MAGA part of Virginia, have militia-member neighbors who threatened me, another neighbor who wrote me an email a couple of weeks back to tell me that he thinks the threat is hilarious.
Basically, we all commiserated, over that, and the slow pace of the Nats’ rebuild.
I left the bleachers at the end of the second inning to go to the team store, came back, Crystal looks over the jersey, sees Zimmerman on the back, is excited.
“What about him being a Trumper, though?” one of the seatmates asks.
Gotta admit, I answered back, don’t have a good answer to that.
I gave Zimmerman public hell, not that he would have seen it, but I did, after the stunt following the magical 2019 World Series run, in which Zimm presented Trump with a Nats jersey with his name and the number 45, and publicly thanked the future felon “for keeping everyone here safe in our country and continuing to make America the greatest country to live in the world.”
ICYMI
- Stick to sports: Ryan Zimmerman, and MAGAs in the clubhouse
- Winners, losers from the Nationals White House visit
Yeah, that hurt.
I didn’t know until researching this story about the golf outing with Zimm and several Nats players and Trump in March 2020, and Zimm rubbing it in, acknowledging that there were people who didn’t like it, and that he didn’t care.
“They have their ability to think what they want about the president and us going to golf with him. I understand why people would be upset if they don’t agree with his politics or aren’t a fan of him. But any president that asks me to go to dinner or anything, I’m 100 percent going to,” Zimmerman said at the time.
I’m really struggling with this, because as best as I can tell, from Googling the crap out of Ryan Zimmerman and every keyword that I can think of that could help me get a better sense of the guy, I think he’s, at the worst, just blissfully unaware when it comes to political toxicity.
That, if it’s true, is less a defense than it is a reflection of his rich White male privilege, which you get afforded when you made $140 million playing baseball and live in an $11 million house in Northern Virginia.
When you’ve got generational wealth, a president trying to consolidate power as an autocrat by ignoring 236 years of historical political precedent asks you to “go to dinner or anything,” you can “100 percent” go, no repercussions.
Ryan Zimmerman has done a lot of good – raising more than $4 million for MS research through his ziMS Foundation, raising mid-six figures in 2020 through the Pros for Heroes COVID-19 Relief Fund, which provided healthcare professionals at Inova Fairfax Hospital with personal protective equipment and healthy meals from the SuperFd catering company.
He’s also given back to UVA Baseball, donating substantial sums whenever UVA Athletics puts out the call for additions to The Dish, which was not much more than a diamond and a set of old bleachers when he was a first-year in 2003.
I want to make clear, I’m not here to defend Zimm for the White House celebration and the golf outing, and the awkward defense of both that he served up.
I should say, I searched his name on the FEC and OpenSecrets databases, and didn’t see that he’s donated money to either political party, and for what it’s worth, in case you didn’t know, no, you’re not going to find any awful social media or interview snippets with him coming across like an Aaron Rodgers.
All of that said, I’d personally like to see Zimm cash in on his rich White guy privilege and maybe, I dunno, take a stand?
If MS research is personal to him, and we know it is – his interest in MS is due to his mother, Cheryl, being diagnosed with MS in 1995 – Zimm could use his next round of golf with the Trumper himself to give him 18 holes of advocacy for the importance of continuing to invest in medical research.
Yeah, I know, radical idea here.
It’s asking, really, nothing – he doesn’t have to risk offending his rich White guy baseball buddies who like Trump because of the tax breaks, which is probably the biggest deal here.
Not asking him to stand up for immigrants with clean records being snatched off the streets and sent to a prison in El Salvador, for students from foreign countries being abducted by federal agents because they sign their names to a letter protesting human-rights violations.
For trans kids who are being demonized for being who they are.
For our seatmates, and hundreds of thousands of other federal employees, who are being treated like enemies of the state for doing their jobs.
Just play a stupid round of golf with your buddy, and tell him about your mom.
I’m not holding my breath waiting for this to happen.
I wish they’d had a Sean Doolittle jersey on the rack. I’d have snatched that one up in a heartbeat, and had none of this soul-searching to look forward to.
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Chris Graham
