The picture above is of me, my parents, and my brother on September 5th, 2005. I’m the kid on the right in the red Curly W cap. The photo’s not the highest resolution, but the eagle-eyed among you might be able to look at it and tell that the Nationals third baseman standing over my dad’s shoulder on the left, playing in for the bunt, is *not* Ryan Zimmerman. In fact, it’s Vinny Castilla. Ryan Zimmerman didn’t start this game. He subbed in for Castilla, coming in in the seventh inning for defense. His leadoff single in the bottom of the eighth started a four run rally in which he was driven in by, of all people, Livan Hernandez. The game was his third of 1799 career; the hit was his second of 1846; the run scored was his first of 963. This was the first time I got to see Ryan Zimmerman play baseball; I was 11 years old.
Baseball is unique among American sports in how obsessed it is with its own history. You don’t necessarily have to engage with the history to enjoy the sport, but there’s definitely a greater expectation that you do in order to be considered a true fan than with, say, football. When I was eight years old and just getting into baseball, my parents bought me a book called Yankees Century by Glenn Stout. Published in 2002, the book covers 98 season of Yankees baseball, from 1903 to 2000. It’s 480 pages long. I haven’t read the book in almost 20 years, but I recall it being as comprehensive as a book can be while covering 98 seasons of baseball in 480 pages.
The Nationals don’t have the long and illustrious history of the New York Yankees. The Yankees play in the largest city in the country and have been a fixture of the sport of baseball and the fabric of popular culture for almost as long as either of those things have existed. The Nats are a transplant team, taken from a city who (despite recent revisionist history) didn’t seem to care much for them and moved to a city who’d already lost two teams and endured long stretches of bad baseball followed by 34 years without it. They’ve played 17 seasons in DC; the Yankees have played 27 seasons that have ended in a title.
But for someone like me, that lack of a lengthy history is kind of a blessing. The Nats are the only team for whom a person my age could reasonably say they’ve witnessed the team’s whole history first-hand. I didn’t have to read about the Nats’ first game in some 480-page tome; I got to watch it on TV. I witnessed, either on TV or in person, their first playoff appearance, their no-hitters, their historic individual seasons and performances, and their World Series victory. The benefit of having a brand new team move to town when you’re just coming of baseball age is getting to experience their entire lore being written.
And lore isn’t written just in those big moments; it’s also in the little ones, the moments that become shibboleths between longtime fans, the ones that get omitted from books like Yankees Century. The random players who shuffle in and out of town, the exciting games that fade from memory in lost seasons, the endless squabbles and meaningless debates that break out between fans during 162 game seasons.
Ryan Zimmerman has played 16 seasons as a Washington National, spanning his entire career. As a player, Zimmerman had an impressive career destined in a pure numerical sense for the Hall of Very Good. His career batting slash is .277/.341/.475, with his 284 career home runs tying him for 175th all time with Will Clark and Eric Karros. At the beginning of his career, Zimmerman was a terrific defender at third base, a true dual threat superstar who didn’t get national attention only because the team he played on was terrible. Injuries robbed him of his ability to throw the ball across the diamond, leading to two years of praying and hoping on every ground ball to third, followed by a move to first base. Except for an insanely hot three month stretch in the first half of 2017, Zimmerman’s time as a real star in the league was over by age 25, and his time as a reliable everyday player was sapped by constant injuries by age 28. Despite this, he hung around for nine more years, shifting positions and then finally accepting a new role as a bench player, staying reasonably productive when healthy (his OPS+ from 2014-2021 was 106). He’s a two time all star, two time silver slugger, and one time gold glover. His career Baseball Reference WAR is 40.1, tied for 531st all time with a pair of Daves, Parker and Concepcion.
A player playing his whole career for one team is a rarity nowadays, but it isn’t necessarily unique. In fact, Zimmerman isn’t the longest-tenured single franchise player still active in baseball; both Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright of the Cardinals have him beat by a year. I remember being in middle school and going out to the softball field behind my middle school with my brother and trying to master Zimmerman’s then-trademark barehand pickup to sidearm throw. Both my brother and I are in our mid-20s now. But while those memories are special to me and the thousands of DC-area kids my age who probably have memories just like mine, I’m sure St. Louisans my age have similar stories about trying to emulate Molina, like Minneapolitans with Joe Mauer or slightly older Denverites with Todd Helton.
What makes Zimmerman unique is that he came to a team just as that team came into existence, and by virtue of circumstance, longevity, and a willingness to stick around, came to define Nationals baseball in its entirety. He was the team’s first draft pick. He made his debut in their inaugural year. He was the first real star, hit the team’s first walkoff home run, its first playoff home run, and eventually, its first World Series home run. He leads the Nationals in essentially every major category, from the positive (hits, home runs, RBIs, runs), to the negatives (strikeouts, errors), to the ones you accrue simply by showing up (games played). Except for the fake pandemic season, Zimmerman’s played in every season in Nats history. He’s been teammates with 99% of the players who’ve ever donned the uniform.
Quick digression: a couple of years ago I started compiling a spreadsheet of every RBI in Zimmerman’s career, sorted by the player he drove in. I did it to commemorate his approaching 1,000 career RBIs, and it functions as both a source of fun trivia — he’s driven in Juan Soto the same number of times as he drove in Ronnie Belliard — and a time capsule to remember basically every player who’s ever come through DC. The list of players Zimmerman drove in exactly once features guys like George Lombard, Kevin Mench, and Jhonatan Solano, as well as two future big league managers in Aaron Boone and Alex Cora.
Zimmerman’s donned every uniform the Nats have ever worn, including being one of only two players to wear the infamous Natinals jersey. He’s been present in some form for nearly every moment, the great successes (he’s the only player who’s played in every Nats playoff series), the tragedies (the ends of most of those postseason series), and all the little ones that stick the memories of somebody, somewhere.
Zimmerman, who by all accounts is as introspective as baseball players get, seems to understand how unique the role he gets to play is, and he’s embraced it. In his postgame interview yesterday, he said of Nats fans: “We’ve lost lots of games together, we’ve won lots of games together, we were a brand new team and I was a 20-year old kid, so we’ve kind of grown up together. I have a unique relationship with these fans that not many people have with their fanbases, so I think that’s why it’s so special, for me and for them.” He allowed the fans to have their moment to salute him yesterday, and it served as a nice, if imperfect goodbye (I was hoping they’d let him take his position at third base before taking him out, and obviously it would have been better to see him go out on a win for a winning team). He says he hasn’t decided whether or not to come back next year; he can still play and Mike Rizzo has announced that he’ll be welcome back as long as he wants to keep playing. The end has to come for Zimmerman eventually, but it’s nice to see him go out on his own terms (if he in fact is going out) and, for once, after a season where he was on the active roster for all 162 games. But the idea of Nationals baseball in a post-Ryan Zimmerman era is hard to swallow. There wasn’t really Nationals baseball before Zimmerman. We don’t have a Yankee Century, but we might have something better in Zimmerman: a player linked to everything in a history we all got to see with our own eyes. Other players have been said to have defined their franchises, but for no player has that ever been more true than Mr. National.
Serious Jammage 
Vinny Castilla was an absolute beat in the mid 90’s!
Great write up man.