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The Nats’ air horn is 2020’s Baby Shark, but the celebration may need some fine tuning

Don’t you think of children, Asdrúbal Cabrera, especially the little ones who learn to play the trumpet?

“I don’t teach a band, but I know instruments,” said Cathy, a Nats fan who teaches at a private school in Northern Virginia and preferred not to give her last name to keep her anonymity on Twitter. “I quickly realized they weren’t playing their hands like a trumpet.”

Like most National fans, Cathy, who goes on Twitter under the name @NatsMusicTeachr and certainly isn’t losing sleep over this more mundane issue, first noticed the new celebration during the team’s two games against the Orioles on last month. Some wondered if the musicians were pretending to play a tape recorder, or perhaps a magic flute.

“I noticed the guys doing that and I thought, ‘Are they trying to play an instrument?'” Cathy said in a phone interview this week. “It sounded like something musical.”

Victor Robles cleared up any confusion when he sat down for his post-match press conference after the second game of the regular season wearing a red shirt with a gold trumpet image on the front.

“It’s our new little sign that we use as a team,” Robles said through the instrument’s team interpreter who pretended to play towards the bench after a double inning, which he proved again for reporters. “Last year we had Baby Shark hand gestures with Gerardo Parra, and this year it was Emilio Bonifácio who created that sign, just to make it fun and get some energy.”

Bonifácio brought a trumpet to the baseball field for the series finale the next day and was photographed blowing inside while sitting on the extra bench.

“He’s obviously a good trumpeter,” national team manager Dave Martinez said before the match. “… They made these shirts. We have these trumpet shirts for everyone. It keeps everything fun. ”

As Federal Baseball noted, Bonifácio debuted the trumpet celebration with his Dominican Winter League team, Tigres del Licey, last year. Bonifácio wielded a real trumpet in the clubhouse when the team danced at the Dominican artist El Alfa’s “Mueve La Cadera” after the victories. (The song’s trumpet opening blared into the Nationals Park sound system as Josh Harrison approached the cymbal in the second inning before doing a solo home run on Tuesday.)

Apparently, Bonifácio’s teammates could have given a lesson while he was here, as no national team player has blown the whirlwind with adequate form.

“If it makes them happy, it’s great, but it’s so much fun,” said Cathy. “They keep calling it the trumpet and they also had a trumpet there and they don’t play it like a trumpet.”

If not a trumpet, what aerial instrument could the Nationals play?

“It’s a clarinet or a recorder,” said Cathy. “The recorder was my first thought when they did it, but they both work. “

“The flute is held on the side, so it’s not a flute,” he said. “You could say the saxophone, but usually the sax is moved to the side. Unless they do it from the side, I would definitely say the clarinet or the recorder. Trumpet, if you only use one hand and don’t use your little finger or thumb, that’s what a trumpet is. ”

Presumably, Cathy expressed some doubts even before Bonifácio was DFA that the Nationals would be blowing the whirlwind all season, but acknowledged that it seemed to catch on.

“It’s funny the things that remain,” said Cathy, who has shared a midseason ticket plan with her sister in recent years, of the Nationals Trumpet. “Who would have thought we’d be Baby Sharking all last year?”

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