“When I talk to my family and friends or whoever about it — people that aren’t from here — it’s like sometimes the voting part doesn’t fully hit, right?” Doolittle said. “Because in their heads, people are like, ‘Okay, what are the consequences of that?’”
This is not manufactured emotion. They’re living it. Doolittle is forever a member of the 2019 World Series champion Washington Nationals. But the baseball life is nomadic, and he doesn’t know where he’ll pitch next season after he recovers from the elbow surgery that shut down his 2022.
But this is now about their home city — and a charity event to help support its people, which we’ll get to. Doolittle said all this Friday, sitting on the couch adjacent to Dolan, who folded her feet under herself in a chair in the living room of the Capitol Hill rowhouse they had moved into only earlier that week. Their rescue dogs Fiadh — an Irish word that means wild deer — and Rooney scuttled about, making themselves available for scratches. For most of the Nationals, some of September will be spent packing rented apartments and houses to move back to wherever they call home. Doolittle and Dolan are home, because whatever happens with Sean’s baseball career, they’re homeowners who will spend their offseasons in Washington, DC, for the foreseeable future.
“We just fell in love with the city,” Doolittle said.
That affection grew before the midseason 2017 trade that made him a National. It evolved during offseason vacation visits here, back when Doolittle was an Oakland Athletic, before he had any idea he would become an all-star for Washington, before he could envision posting a 1.74 ERA over nine appearances in the 2019 postseason, including the four outs that closed out Game 1 of the World Series and the two outs that buttoned up Game 6.
“Any time we did venture outside of the National Mall and the Smithsonian, we were like, ‘This is amazing,'” Dolan said. “It’s one of those things where people visit on their eighth-grade trip or whatever, and they see what we saw, which is the National Mall and the monuments and the Smithsonian museums. But there’s so much more to the city.”
Thus, their decision to sell their place outside Chicago and buy in the District, where they eloped on the Mall on the day after the 2017 season. Because they are civic minded, Dolan and Doolittle have adopted not only the city, but the city’s issues. Statehood — or at least voting representation in Congress — is among the most important. Their interest is not performative. It’s passionate.
“It’s a human rights issue,” Dolan said. “It’s about environmental justice. It’s about racial justice.”
An hour-long conversation covered the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, which placed DC under the control of Congress. It covered Washington’s uniqueness among other capitals of democratic countries; the citizens of London, Paris and Brussels all have voting rights, because of course they do. It covered the difficulty of getting people from other states to first understand, and then to care, that nearly 700,000 of their fellow citizens don’t have the same governmental representation as the rest of the country. It covered the idea that it was easier to suppress a city that was, until a decade ago, majority Black.
“For a long time, at least in the past 50, 60 years probably, the demographics of the city were a reason that they were — not thinly veiled — saying, ‘That’s why they’re not getting statehood,’” Doolittle said. “Whether they thought that the Black population and the residents here couldn’t handle running the District, or that they were like, ‘That’s automatically going to be two electoral votes to the Democrats.’
“Whichever way that they wanted to go, the demographics of the city were absolutely a reason — and it’s racism — why they didn’t want to entertain statehood.”
They speak the language. They live the language. And so when DC Vote, an organization that promotes voting representation and statehood for the District, reached out to the Nationals to get in touch with Doolittle, he and Dolan were thrilled. Monday night, they will host an event called “Art Drives Statehood” at the Atlas Theater on H Street NE, supporting both DC Vote and a studio called Art Enables, which provides opportunities for artists with disabilities to make, market and sell their own work . (Tickets are $51. Get it?)
The event is a perfect fit for Doolittle and Dolan not only because it supports statehood, but because Dolan’s older brother is autistic. Drawing — elaborate, intricately detailed portraits of everything from Buddha to a baseball stadium — is therapeutic for him.
“This is such a good connection for us,” Dolan said.
Anyone from the District, Maryland or Virginia is familiar with DC’s license plates, which now are adorned with the slogan “End Taxation without Representation,” an update from the older “Taxation without Representation.” At Monday’s event, artists with disabilities will unveil their interpretations for a new “Statehood” license plate.
“Art is storytelling,” Dolan said. “It’s telling a personal story, a personal history and experience. I think that’s why it’s a very cool opportunity to share the story for the disabled artists of DC to tell their story. I think the license plate art will reflect their experience of living here.”
Sean Doolittle’s left arm is still in a brace, and his contributions to the Nationals for the rest of the season will be limited to going in for rehab when the team is home, perhaps sharing some wisdom gained from 11 big league seasons and 463 big league appearances. He turns 36 next month, and whatever the baseball future holds, he certainly has more games behind him than ahead.
But even if his contributions to the Nationals are over, it feels like his contributions to Washington are just beginning.
“We’re trying to humanize it to connect with people so it can be somewhat relatable,” Doolittle said. “You’re not going to sell people by talking about lobbyists. I think the thing that we connected with the city so much is people have so much pride — civic pride — about living in DC”
Welcome home, Eireann and Sean. Let’s go get the vote.