This will be short. I just wanted to say how much I love Sean Doolittle, who retired on Friday after 11 years in the majors, six of them with the Washington Nationals. As he wrote in his farewell message, he was retiring “with gratitude and a full heart.”

Many Nats fans have the exact same feelings.

No Nationals player between the amazing 2012-2019 run of success for the club was more a Washington-type person than Sean Doolittle. Not Bryce Harper who couldn’t wait to get out of town for the bigger money in Philly. Not Tony “Two-Bags” Rendon who really didn’t feel at home here even though he was indispensable during the 2019 championship run but then decided to accept a big offer from the Angels, the team where dreams go to die. Not even those players who really didn’t want to be traded and loved it here, the Max Scherzers, Trea Turners, and — the deepest cut of all, Juan Soto. Not even Ryan “Employee 11” Zimmerman who always felt more like a Northern Virginia-type to me than a District guy.

Doolittle and his wife Eireann Dolan, who is beloved by Washingtonians in her own right, made this city their “forever home.” As Chelsea Janes wrote in a beautiful piece for the Washington Post, Doolittle “felt like someone (Nationals fans) knew, the guy down the street who worked for the environmental nonprofit and sat in independent bookstores wearing Birkenstocks in his free time.”

For Doolittle, his appreciation for the opportunity to be a major league pitcher is real. He thanked the A’s, the team that originally drafted him. He thanked the Cincinnati Reds and Seattle Mariners for hosting him for a “gap year” in 2021, before he could return to the Nats. He thanked the union, which provided the working conditions and labor contracts where he could work through his numerous injuries and still be able to close out the wild and wacky Game 6 of the 2019 World Series, and which expanded to include minor leaguers under their bargaining umbrella. He said that 2019 was the highlight of his career, just as the year was the highlight of a lifetime of watching baseball for so many of us in Washington.

As Joe Posnanski posted today, Doolittle’s wife Eireann “wrote the most beautiful of summations of Sean’s wonderful and unlikely career.”

“Watching Sean’s career for the past decade,” she wrote, “has always felt a bit like seeing a Subaru Forester in the Daytona 500. Part of you is like, ‘Who the hell let that thing in there?’ And the other part kind of just wants to see how far it can go. Turns out farther than you’d think.”

Doolittle and Dolan used his platform to speak out for marginalized communities including LGBTQ citizens, and to promote causes such as literacy. He had an “ability to earn respect as the nerdiest guy in almost every classically macho clubhouse he entered,” Janes wrote. And Washington just loves nerds, especially those who are thoughtful, grateful, and somehow still relatable. It doesn’t hurt to be able to throw high heat past hitters.

So, I guess this was a little longer than I expected. But that’s okay. Sean Doolittle deserves it.

I can’t wait to see what he and Eireann do next in DC.

More to come . . .

DJB

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Image of Sean Doolittle set to host a Storytime event in 2022 at Central Library in Arlington (via Arlington Public Library)