The “W” Nationals

5 July 2005, 1622 EDT

Many Democratic fans of the Washington Nationals are buying baseball capswith an alternate “DC” logo instead of the more common cursive “W” because it reminds them of the current occupant of the White House, according to the Washington Post.

“During the design process, a baseball spokeswoman said, nobody made the connection to a certain political figure, for whom the same 23rd letter of the alphabet is a down-home nickname.”

I own a red “W” Nationals cap; I find this whole thing pretty silly. Nevertheless, the spokewsoman’s comments confirm my basic sense of MLB’s decision-making process: these people are idiots.

But we already knew that, because they named the franchise the “Nationals” in the first place. Of all the great possibilities for a team based in Washington, DC, we get a meaningless name that invokes, at best, one’s citizenship status or, at worst, the city’s former airport. At least there are, to my knowledge, no plans to follow through with that last association and change the team’s name to the “Washington Reagans.”

My choice was the “Washington Partisans.” I would also have been impressed if they’d name the team the “Grays.” Even the “Washington Lobbyists,” however, would have been better than the “Nationals.”

Filed as: Washington Nationals and baseball

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.