Thousands of baseball fans sporting red caps and sweatshirts, emblazoned with the Washington Nationals’ curvy W, lined Constitution Avenue in Washington on Saturday to celebrate the team’s historic World Series victory.

On Wednesday, the Nationals defeated the Houston Astros in Game 7 of the series with a 6-2 comeback, clinching the city’s first baseball championship in 95 years.

Next on the team’s schedule — a visit with President Trump.

The Nationals are scheduled to meet Trump on Monday, continuing a time-honored tradition of championship teams traveling to the White House for a meeting with the president. But in a city where partisan politics has long been the dominant sport, Monday’s visit has itself taken a political turn.

On Friday, Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle publicly confirmed that he will skip the event. Doolittle has been vocal about his opposition to many of the administration’s policies.

“There’s a lot of things, policies that I disagree with, but at the end of the day, it has more to do with the divisive rhetoric and the enabling of conspiracy theories and widening the divide in this country,” Doolittle told The Washington Post. “At the end of the day, as much as I wanted to be there with my teammates and share that experience with my teammates, I can’t do it.”

Even before Doolittle’s decision, this year’s World Series had delved into politics. During Game 5 of the series, Nationals fans booed Trump during an appearance at the team’s Nationals Park and taunted him with cheers of “lock him up.” During Game 7 in Houston, more than 16,000 Nationals’ fans gathered for a free viewing party back in Washington and again broke into boos when a Trump campaign ad aired during a commercial break.

While the fan response captured headlines, it was hardly the first instance of baseball intersecting with Washington politics.

The first team visit to the White House was in 1865. That summer, Washington, D.C. held a three-team baseball tournament. The Athletic from Philadelphia beat the Washington Nationals to win the tournament, but both teams were invited to visit the White House to meet President Andrew Johnson. As the story goes, the players from both teams attended and then one by one, shook the president’s hand.

Even then, the meeting had a political motivation. According to The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum, this first meeting was arranged by the president of the National club, Arthur Pue Gorman, a white Southerner and Johnson supporter who in the aftermath of the Civil War wanted to maintain racial segregation. He saw baseball — which was then an all-white sport — and the meeting with Johnson as a way to do this.

It wasn’t until the presidency of Ronald Reagan more than a century later that invitations for championship teams from across the sports world became a regular occurrence. So too did the practice of players snubbing those invitations.

In 1991, for example, after the Chicago Bulls won their first NBA title, Michael Jordan decided to play golf rather than meet with President George H.W. Bush.

Golfer Tom Lehman declined a meeting with President Bill Clinton, referring to him as a “draft-dodging baby killer.”

Jake Arrieta of the Chicago Cubs skipped a visit to the Obama White House, as did Boston Bruins goalie Tea Party supporter Tim Thomas.

But under the Trump administration there has been an uptick in the number of players — and in some cases entire teams — rejecting invitations to visit the White House, citing everything from scheduling conflicts to outright objections to the president’s policies.

The uptick, in part, may be due to a shift in public attitudes. Athletes who were once expected to keep their opinions silent are now cheered by some fans for speaking up and othertimes jeered when they choose not to.

When teams have accepted invitations, the decision by some players not to attend has often overshadowed the actual visit. After their victory in last year’s World Series, the Boston Red Sox visited the White House, but when they did, almost every non-white player and coach on the team was noticeably absent.

In 2017, the White House rescinded an invitation altogether after members of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors said that they were considering skipping the event. Trump tweeted the decision, saying, “invitation is withdrawn!” It was considered the first time a president ever pulled back an invite due to a spat with players.

This past summer during the Women’s World Cup, members of the Women’s National Soccer team, including Megan Rapinoe — said that if they won the tournament, they would decline an invitation to the White House. Trump responded, saying Rapinoe “should never disrespect our Country.” The team ultimately won the World Cup, but did not receive an invitation to the White House.

Since Doolittle announced his decision, he told The Washington Post that he has received a flurry of social media messages from those who disagree with his decision, calling it disrespectful.

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Politics is often described as a rough and tumble business. But President Donald Trump is expected to witness an actual blood sport when he takes in a much-hyped mixed martial arts event on Saturday at Madison Square Garden in New York.

This will be Trump’s second sporting event in the span of a week. On Sunday, he attended Game 5 of the World Series at Nationals Park in Washington, where he was met with boos and chants of “lock him up.”

Trump’s visit to New York comes just two days after announcing he and his family are switching their permanent residency from New York to Florida, a move that was met with cheers from some of several prominent Democrats in the state. Explaining his decision on Twitter, Trump said he lamented being “treated very badly by the political leaders” in New York.

Trump who was born, raised, built his businesses and launched his political campaign in New York, says he “hated” to have to make the decision to leave, but that “few have been treated worse” by the city and state elected officials.

He’s switching his residence to Palm Beach, Fla., where he owns the Mar-a-Lago resort, a place he’s dubbed the “winter White House.” Trump has resisted calls to release his state or federal taxes, but by switching residences, he’d go from a city that taxes top earners a 3.876% tax rate, and a state with a top rate of about 9% to Florida, which has no state income tax.

Before that paperwork is finalized however, he’s expected to spend much of the weekend in the Big Apple, starting with attending the UFC 244 tournament, headlined by Nate Diaz and Jorge Masvidal. The main event is for a new belt and “title” of BMF, an acronym for “Baddest Motherf*****.”

According to TMZ Sports, the belt cost $50,000 to make and other notables expected to attend include wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Trump’s Connection to Mixed Martial Arts

While a MMA match may strike some as an unusual place for a commander-in-chief to spend a Saturday night, NPR’s Scott Simon pointed out on Saturday’s Weekend Edition that “the president is a fan and used to book MMA events at his casino in Atlantic City.”

Trump’s dealings with Ultimate Fighting Championship and its President Dana White, go back to 2001 when UFC 30: Battle on the Boardwalk was held at Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

Back then, it was a huge score for the UFC to land a venue like Trump’s. The sport had suffered for years, being banned in several states and disparaged as “human cockfighting” by the late Arizona Sen. John McCain.

In a 2018 interview with The Hill, White spoke about MMA’s “stigma” and that “venues didn’t even want us.”

“I will never say anything negative about Donald Trump,” White said at the time. “He was there when other people weren’t.”

White said he and Trump remain close, even though, for a time, Trump partnered with a rival mixed martial arts outfit called Affliction Entertainment in 2008. Affliction soon tapped out, but the UFC has scrapped its way to being a multi-billion-dollar industry, selling for just over $4 billion in 2016.

“Any good thing that happened to me in my career, Donald Trump was the first to pick up the phone and call and say ‘congratulations, I knew you guys were going to do this,'” White told The Hill.

A month prior to UFC’s sale, White spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, something he said he was “blown away and honored” to do.

“Donald championed the UFC before it was popular, before it grew into a successful business,” White said before a crowd gathered in Cleveland.

“I will always be grateful, so grateful to him for standing with us in those early days. So tonight, I stand with Donald Trump.”

Trump is expected to stay overnight at the Trump Tower in New York on Saturday. He is expected to depart on Sunday, and perhaps add to the traffic congestion that’s already anticipated for the New York City Marathon.

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Deadspin, the brash and rebellious sports website, has had its entire writing and editing personnel resign just days after new management issued a mandate to staff to “stick to sports.”

On Friday, the website’s most well-known writer, Dave McKenna was said to be stepping down, according to a post by former Deadspin Senior Editor Diana Moskovitz.

“This the final Deadspin transaction before relegation. As the last editor left with access to our work systems, I’m promoting Dave McKenna to editor-in-chief of Deadspin,” Moskovitz wrote in a post titled “Transactions, Nov. 1.”

The post continues, “McKenna has graciously agreed to accept his new position until the end of the day (this is his last day). Please note that Dave McKenna was the last [editor in chief] of Deadspin.”

Before the sarcasm-laden post, Moskovitz published a separate entry that was simply titled “Thank You” and notably filed under the tag “BYE.”

“I have gone over the contours of this blog in my mind so many times, and yet I still don’t know what to say,” Moskovitz said.

“So I’ll keep it simple. Thank you to our freelancers, who gave us amazing stories. Thank you to our fellow bloggers at the other sites, for being the best comrades in blog battle that we could ask for. Thank to our sources (you know who you are),” Moskovitz wrote.

She also gave a shout out to Deadspin readers who “made this place special.”

Writers and editors began to quit the site en mass on Wednesday and it continued through through Friday. The Washington Post reports “around 20 writers and editors” handed in their resignations this week.

The turmoil this week began Monday, when executives with G/O Media, the parent company of Deadspin and other websites including Gizmodo, The Onion and The Root, sent a directive to the staffers of the sports website to only write on sports and sports-adjacent topics.

That left many writers peeved, because Deadspin had made its mark with its irreverent, and a times piercing commentary on culture, politics and media alongside coverage of the world of athletics.

NPR’s Media Correspondent David Folkenflik broke down broke down the tumult at Deadspin this way on Thursday’s All Things Considered:

“So G/O Media is run by a guy named Jim Spanfeller. He worked at forbes.com and Playboy – promised advertisers, according to writers and the union there, more than they could deliver. He’s claimed that look; 24 out of the top 25 stories last month were purely about sports. A number of recent editors say, hey, that’s flatly untrue; you could get as many as 100,000 readers or more for stories having little to do with sport.

“Spanfeller and others forced out an editor a couple months ago at Deadspin who didn’t want to push a more strictly sports line on writers and, a few days ago, sent out a memo the morning after a post on Trump being booed at the World Series, saying let’s stick to sports. And then they fired their acting editor as well.”

That acting editor who was fired was Barry Petchesky.

In statement sent to the Daily Beast on Tuesday, G/O Media’s editorial director Paul Maidment said Deadspin writers should go for any story “as long as it has something to do with sports.

“However, Maidment added, alluding to the recent firing, ‘We are sorry that some on the Deadspin staff don’t agree with that editorial direction, and refuse to work within that incredibly broad mandate.’ “

By Wednesday, Deadspin staff resignations began. On that same day, GMG Union, which represents Deadspin writers tweeted a statement alleging the actions of Spanfeller were “morally reprehensible” and that he “worked to undermine a successful site.”

The union also claimed the mandate to cover only sports was “a thinly veiled euphemism for ‘don’t speak truth to power.’ ”

With the editorial staff no longer on the Deadspin team, the future of the popular sport and culture site is unknown. But, for many of its former staffers, like one-time editor in chief Megan Greenwell, Deadspin’s legacy is firmly intact.

“And with that, it’s over. Deadspin no longer employs a single writer or editor. I am gutted but so very proud of this group of people. Deadspin was a good website.”

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