Rachel Levitin: Passion alive for baseball in D.C.

It's been an eventful end to the season for the Nationals, to say the least. It's definitely not the conclusion predicted early on in the year. Spoiler alert: The Nats aren't going to the playoffs.
The explosion at Nats Park over the weekend sparked a barrage of national media attention. This is may end up being an unpopular opinion, but getting to this end point is something that's been in the making for a decade.

When I moved to D.C. in August 2015, all I wanted - more than anything - was for D.C. to become a baseball town. I waited eagerly and watched the Nats grow into something out of nothing. It's been an interesting journey, especially with all the players who've floated in and out of town since it all began.

What happened over the weekend between reliever Jonathan Papelbon and outfielder Bryce Harper has been discussed so much by so many people since it happened that I won't continue forward with a conversation on that topic alone. What I do want to mention is that, while it isn't a baseball town per se, this town sure does feel pretty passionately about what went down between a couple of ballplayers over at the Navy Yard.

So maybe D.C. isn't New York or Boston or Chicago or San Francisco (the list of die-hard baseball towns can go on, of course, and there are many more) but the passionate display made by fans in the past few days says a lot about how the Nats have embedded themselves into the mainstream culture of D.C. living.

People care about this team. They care about the team so much that some folks have pledged to donate thousands of dollars to charity if the team releases a certain individual.

This is what I've been waiting for since moving to D.C. from the north side of Chicago - not the midgame fight between teammates, but the passion displayed by the team's fan base in the wake of it all. It's cool to see D.C. get this riled up about a baseball team.

The fire's been lit and the only way the Nats can cool the proverbial flames is by going back out there in 2016 and doing all they can to scrape their way back to the top of the National League East.

Rachel Levitin blogs about the Nationals for District Sports Page. Follow her on Twitter: @RHLevitin. She will be sharing her observations about baseball in the nation's capital as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our little corner of cyberspace. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.