The pitch is a fastball that explodes into the catcher’s glove with a leathery pop. The crowd of 24,000 at Nationals Park in Southwest Washington responds with a muted, mid-game roar. It’s outside for ball two, and Ryan Zimmerman relaxes. For the next 25 seconds, as the pitcher prepares to throw again, Zimmerman adjusts his fielder’s glove on his left hand and looks into it, making sure nothing has changed since the last pitch. Sometimes he busies himself by sweeping his cleated shoe in semicircles, raking the dust into arcs a few yards from third base.
The pitcher steps onto the rubber, and Zimmerman transforms, setting himself into a position every Little Leaguer knows as “baseball ready,” with knees slightly bent and ready to spring. As the pitcher goes into his windup, Zimmerman creeps in toward the batter ever so slightly, so as to be already moving if contact is made with the ball. The batter swings, and Zimmerman tightens and expands at the same time, ready to dive in any direction, to extend up or down for a line drive over his head or a hot grounder at his feet. The bat misses, the crowd responds, and Zimmerman relaxes. He looks into his glove, makes tracks in the dust, then prepares to spring again. He does it for every pitch his team makes in the game.
Given that Zimmerman will be manning third base for the Nationals for the vast majority of their 162 games (he played in all of them last year), and considering each game sees about 125 pitches by the Nats, it’s safe to estimate he’ll assume that same baseball-ready crouch 20,250 times a season.
From UVA to MLB
Many a 10-year-old Little Leaguer—and not a few of their dads—would say being a Major Leaguer makes you the luckiest guy in the world.
“I wouldn’t say in the world, but I think I’m pretty lucky,” Zimmerman said over a light lunch of soup and salad at Harry’s Taproom in Clarendon, walking distance from his year-round residence, a three-bedroom townhouse.
The baseball hat Zimmerman wears at work tends to round his features; without it, he’s more angular and less boyish. He’s a sleek 6-feet-3 and carries his 228 pounds without effort, and he walks into the restaurant with a smoothly rolling gait. Despite being the most recognizable National, he blends into the streetscape without distinction, which is fine by him. He seems to require an effort to overcome mild shyness.
Zimmerman, who will turn 24 in September, quickly became the “face of the franchise” for the Nats shortly after replacing 39-year-old Vinnie Castilla as the starting third baseman in the 2006 season. The team was new, Zimmerman was new, and the region’s love affair with the pretension-free Z-man blossomed by way of his runner-up honors as Rookie of the Year, 20 homeruns, a .287 batting average, reliable fielding, and thrilling walk-off hits, including a two-run, ninth-inning homer to beat the Yankees in front of a packed home stadium.
That particular decisive, defining moment is memorialized at the new Nationals Park in a billboard-sized blowup of the photograph that depicts a joyous Zimmerman leaping at home plate into a scrum of celebrating teammates. True to his nature, Zimmerman takes the billboard in stride.
The first time he saw it, he thought: “It’s big.”
Just … big?
“Really, I don’t get caught up in that stuff,” he said, restraining a blush. “I mean, it’s cool, but at the same time I don’t really think about it that way.”
“It” is a reference to his on-field successes, which continued into the 2008 season with an undeniably memorable walk-off homerun against the Atlanta Braves that christened the new stadium.
The Virginia Beach native’s rise to billboards was rapid: Drafted in June of 2005 during his senior year at the University of Virginia (he still has two semesters to go for a degree in sociology), he played four games in the Single-A South League, then 63 for the Nats’ Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, minor league team. “When they expanded the rosters in September (2005), I got called up, and the next year I started,” he shrugged.
His minor time in the minor leagues is not lost on his teammates. “The older guys kind of wear you out, just joking around about it, but some of those guys spent five, six, seven years in the minors. It was just all about being lucky,” Zimmerman said. “Lucky for me, I was drafted by the right team for the right spot at the right time.
“Once you get here, you never, ever, ever want to go back down there (to the minors). It makes you work even harder.”
It was also in 2006 that Zimmerman started ziMS Foundation, which raises research funds and public awareness about multiple sclerosis. When he was 13 years old, his mother, Cheryl, was diagnosed with the debilitating disease, which attacks the central nervous system, and for which there is no known cause or cure.
“She was a teacher, and for the first couple of years she kept teaching. It really wasn’t a factor, but it just got worse and worse, so we were kind of lucky that I guess we eased into it, you could say,” he said.
Cheryl’s been in a wheelchair “five or six years now,” he said, and true to Zimmerman’s form, he considers himself lucky to be in a position to help others. Each November, his foundation hosts a Virginia Beach golf tournament, the first of which brought in between $50,000 and $60,000, according to Zimmerman. This year, roughly twice amount that was collected. “It gets easier each year you do it.”
Making It Look Easy
The same cannot be said for his career. “That’s one thing that most people don’t realize, how much work goes into being an athlete,” Zimmerman said. “I’ll be leaving the house at 1:30, and (visiting) friends will say, ‘Where are you going?’ and I’m like, ‘Ahh, to the field.’ And they say, ‘Aw, the game’s at 7.’ People don’t realize there’s a lot of work to do. We’re (at the stadium) for 11 hours a day. I wouldn’t want to do anything else, but it’s hard work.”
Zimmerman is usually in bed “by 1 or 2 o’clock at night” following a home night game. “I don’t sleep in too much because you feel groggy and tired,” he said. “I don’t wake up early, but like 10, 10:30 after a night game. I don’t get home until midnight, pretty much. You can’t eat right after a game because you’re still wrapped up, so I wait a little while and go home and eat.”
Dinner might be carryout called in on the way home to a neighborhood tavern, but more likely it’s something reheated that was originally prepared by “a nutritionist kind of guy who comes over a couple of times a week. He’ll cook lunch or dinner for a couple days so all I have to do is heat it up when I get home. I cook a little bit, but it’s a lot healthier than me trying to cook at 12 o’clock at night when I get home.”
Zimmerman drives to Nationals Park in his Range Rover (purchased when he was drafted) or his Infinity (he has an endorsement deal with a dealership). The relative newcomer said he quickly adjusted to navigating Northern Virginia: “I’ve learned when to drive and when not to … You pretty much don’t get on the highways from 3 to 6 (in the evening); you learn, but I don’t think traffic’s that bad.”
In fact, one of the reasons he said he lives in Clarendon is because “it’s only two-and-a-half hours from my parents (in Virginia Beach).”
A longtime friend lives in his house during the season so Zimmerman doesn’t have to worry about the property when he’s on the road. And these days there’s a new roommate: A white bulldog. A white, purebred, girl bulldog.
“I wanted something lazy,” he said with a grin. “I grew up with a yellow lab, but there’s no chance I could have one now, especially living here. But my mom’s sister had a bulldog when we were growing up. I thought it was cool-looking.”
At press time, the dog remained unnamed, but Zimmerman said he was leaning toward “a pop culture girl name. Wouldn’t that be funny if you named all your pets after pop culture girls? Like Britney.”
How about Miley?
“Miley. It’s kind of got a ring to it.” There’s a pause as he considers. “Miley might be the winner. It’s pretty good.”
As for human female companionship, “I’m too selfish and busy for a girlfriend, I’ll be honest,” he said, adding, “It’s a fun town. It’s all right to be single around here. You have to watch yourself a little bit. I’m pretty guarded, I guess you could say.”
Lucky to Give Back
And focused elsewhere, it seems. Zimmerman’s personal attachment to his cause “made it kind of easy to make the decision (to found ziMS), but I didn’t do it just because of my mom,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to help other people out here that have to go through the same stuff that me and my brother (Shawn) had to go through. It’s nice to be able to do that.”
Setting up the foundation proved to be more difficult than anticipated, however. “So much stuff goes into it; the legal stuff is unbelievable, getting the tax stuff straight. My parents run most of it; now finally they have four or five people who help them out.
He also intends to “start doing some stuff up in this area, if not this year then next year,” including his dream event. In the spirit of athleticism, on the local roster is a foundation-organized bowling night.
To sketch a connection between his foundation involvement with his professional success isn’t much of a mental stretch: “It was hard at first, but you learn how to deal with it. It made you grow up and realize things can change pretty quick, so you value what you have.”
For more stories like this, subscribe to our Health newsletter.
