Move over, Curse O' Les Bullez. There's a new supernatural force at work, and it's causing the Washington Nationals to continually stink. Thanks to the devoted and exhaustive research by Mark Greenbaum and David O'Leary of the Baltimore Sun, we now know that the Nationals are losing because of the Curse of the Abraham Lincoln Assasins.
↵↵↵↵Nationals Park sits directly on an infamous stretch of the Anacostia River where authorities conducted the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth on the ironclad U.S.S. Montauk anchored at the Navy Yard. Next door at Fort McNair, Booth's co-conspirators were held and tried at the country's first federal penitentiary, and four of them were hanged there in July 1865. Booth himself was buried there until his remains were later moved.
↵
Nestled beside where Lincoln's killers were executed, the placement of the stadium may have unwittingly exposed the Nationals to the conspirators' vengeful ghosts.
Noting Lincoln's love of America's pastime, Greenbaum and O'Leary speculate that John Wilkes Booth and his group of assassins hated Lincoln so much that they've decided to curse Washington baseball forever. Greenbaum and O'Leary also note that the old Senators won only one World Series in 60 years, saying that "the spirits of vilified miscreants could have traveled uptown to preside over the Great Emancipator's game." That might be one of the all-time most hilarious lines in sports print journalism history.
↵If Greenbaum and O'Leary intended the piece to be satire, then bravo. If they didn't ... well, at least they got me to laugh out loud a few times this morning.