Column-inches devoted to the Washington Nationals have spilled over into the Washington Post’s “Outlook” section in the Sunday paper, where senior editor Marc Fisher skewered the Nationals’ front office for letting Teddy win his first presidents race last week. “In doing so, the Nationals committed a colossal marketing blunder and demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between baseball and football—and a tragic misreading of what it means to be an American.”

Well, OK then.

But Fisher was not finished. “The presidents now become just one more collection of mascots racing around the warning track, no different from Pittsburgh’s pierogies, Milwaukee’s sausages, Miami’s sea creatures, or the hot dogs in Cleveland and Kansas City.”

I take issue with the characterization of the racing presidents as mascots. I was under the impression that the Nationals’ mascot was an oversized avian who answered to the name of Screech.

Having cheered on Teddy many times, undoubtedly part of the enjoyment derived from the double entendre of hectoring a posthumous president to “run”: in a presidential-election year the pleas took on a piquant potency. Nonetheless, another part of the fun was also the foreknowledge that Teddy was not going to finish first, because Teddy never finished first.  In that sense, I concede that something was lost when Teddy won.