The Gaping Maw of Hubris Incarnate

The baseball gods are, as we know, cruel. And petty. And though their brains are composed largely of syphilis clusters, they are not like to forget slights. Anything from banishing a goat from a stadium, to taking a simple bribe, to trading away the greatest player of his generation. It's always a seemingly simple affair, but one tug on that string can render future decades of toil futile. None of this is new information.

Why, then, did the hubristic souls who run the Washington Nationals' fourth inning Presidents Race decide, on the cusp of their first ever division title, to overturn years of carefully planned sideshows when everything had been going perfectly well? That's when the gods strike you down: when you think yourself as a shaper of the baseball narrative rather than a passive spectator. And then, with the evidence whipped out for all to see, dangling in their faces, they continued the farce for a further two years. And just recently, with a second division title under their belt, with Teddy having topped the leaderboard for the first time, they chose to have him win during the first game of the NLDS (Nats lost), and then not once but twice during the eighteen-inning marathon that was Game 2 (Nats lost... again). And something tells me if they hadn't been finished off in San Francisco, the organizers would have displayed a similarly suicidal lack of pattern recognition upon their return home.

The Nats let Teddy win again this game in the 2nd presidents race. They foolishly mock the #teddycurse
— Chris Moody (@moody) October 5, 2014

Maybe it's not entirely fair to blame the PT Barnums of the world for giving the mob what they want. It was the fans, after all, who fast lined up behind Teddy, the underdog with the infectious smile. It was a natural fit: a franchise trying to forge an identity in a new city, with a new(ish) name, struggling to win--just as they had been in Montreal. People like saying that they like underdogs and with the President's Race--in the form of Teddy--Nationals fans had one. A guy you never expected much of and who never won, even though he really wanted to. Maybe not the best representative of one of the wealthiest, most insulated metro regions in the country, but well-suited to the look that a fledgling team and fledgling-er fanbase likes to imagine itself wearing. "Let Teddy Win," they demanded. "Teddy 2012!," they cried. Indeed.

It is at this point that I pause and wonder again just why Teddy was the loser-president for all those years. Theodore Roosevelt is, with no real exception, our most magnificent president. Not best, per se, but certainly the one that the others would be most terrified of being compared to. He could take every other president in a fight... and I don't mean one at a time. You've probably heard the story about the time Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a would-be assassin on his way to deliver a speech--and then went to deliver that speech before bothering to seek medical attention. If Theodore Roosevelt were a Batman villain, he'd be Bane, whose physicality makes you forget his nimble brain--he's almost too perfect. And yet, there Teddy was, for years on end--the butt of the jokes of the other three presidents (now four, for some reason). It's almost as though no serious thought was put into this mascot race whatsoever.

No longer. Teddy has been unleashed upon the Nationals' fortunes, carving their playoff stints into Panama Canals on two separate occasions (trust-busting was the better analogy there, wasn't it? Oh well, next time). And if his double-header win in Game 2 is any indication, the operators of the Presidents Race have stubbornly refused to acknowledge the gods' painfully clear signals.

So. Has it been worth it, Washington? Have the victories of your hydrocephalic god-king been worth this turn in fortunes for an emergent franchise? Will you continue to sacrifice promising young talent on this grotesque altar that you've built? Or do you now comprehend the needless horror that you've inflicted upon yourselves? Let him win no more. Wipe the record books clean. Only then may the gods see fit to smile upon Navy Yard.

Or maybe the Nationals just clinched the division too soon and went up against a still-loose Giants squad. I don't know. But it's definitely one of those.

Goose Island Matilda

It's helpful to remember that beer experimentation (or beerimentation, as no one calls it) predates the craft movement. If not for some German monks tossing hops into their beer 1,100 years ago, beer might've continued to look very different from what we know today (yes, the majority of beer's existence has been hop-less). Likewise, Belgian brewers, deviating from proud tradition, began toying around with their own pale ale style around World War II--recent enough to be new, but still several decades ahead of craft brew's love affair with the style. Chicago's Goose Island, perhaps as a result of their relationship with their ownership, tends to keep their experiments down the middle: nothing too unexpected but usually pleasantly palatable (all due respect to their exceptional Bourbon County line, which predates the new ownership). And they take an unsurprisingly low risk-high reward tack with their Belgian Pale Ale, Matilda: a beer that should, ideally, be a happy union of wheat and hops.

Matilda pours pale orange, with a decent head for a Belgian.

She smells mostly of wine, perhaps a chardonnay (that's a kind of wine, right?), with a slight plummy aroma.

The plums return on the tongue, in concert with a wheaty, malty aftertaste. The tartness is accompanied by an unexpected fizziness--not quite hopiness (we're getting to that), but close enough that I mistook one for the other at first.

For all its flavor, Matilda retains a light body that's complimented by a medium-to-heavy hop profile that lends a bit of effervescence, ensuring some memorability, though at this point that's not totally necessary.

A happy, if not ecstatic, marriage of styles gives Matilda an even, balanced profile that's pleasant throughout, offering a welcome invitation to continue drinking, all the way through its 765 milliliters.

Grade: B+