The Congressional Baseball Game takes place every June, and legislators
prepare for it diligently. For weeks leading up to the game, they attend
regular early-morning practices before heading to their day jobs. The
game itself, Republicans against Democrats, is played at Nationals Park,
in Washington—a big-league stadium, four hundred and two feet out to
center—and the level of play is surprisingly good. Pitchers throw
curveballs. In recent years, the Democrats have dominated, thanks
largely to Congressman Cedric Richmond, of New Orleans, who once played
for Morehouse College and still throws a fastball more than eighty miles
per hour.

Richmond’s dominance has been so pronounced that, in 2014, some
Republicans tried to oust their longtime manager, Congressman Joe
Barton, of Texas, whom they criticized for giving playing time to any
lawmaker who had shown up to practice. A compromise was reached, and
Barton ceded some coaching duties to Congressman Roger Williams, a
fellow-Texan. On Wednesday morning, after a sixty-six-year-old man
opened fire on the Republican team as it was practicing on a field in
Alexandria, Virginia, some of the early reports indicated that Williams
had been among the people who’d been shot. That turned out not to be
true: Williams had been hurt diving for cover in a dugout. But
Congressman Steve Scalise, the Republican Majority Whip, had been
standing near second base when the gunman attacked, and he was shot in
the hip, and then, as Congressman Mo Brooks, of Alabama, later
told CNN, he “crawled into the outfield, leaving a trail of blood.”

Things could have been even worse. There were about two dozen Republican
congressmen at the field. Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, jumped a fence
and hid behind a tree. Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, ducked into the
third-base dugout. The shooter, who has been identified as James T.
Hodgkinson, of Belleville, Illinois, fired what witnesses said sounded
like fifty or sixty rounds; on a cell-phone video published by the New
York Post, the loud pops of the rifle—even, unhurried—can be heard.
Because Scalise was on the team, Capitol Police officers were at the
practice (as a member of House leadership, Scalise gets round-the-clock
protection), and those officers shot back at Hodgkinson, disabling him;
he died soon afterward. “Everybody probably would have died except for
the fact that the Capitol Hill police were there,” Paul told MSNBC.

Our politics have long been suffering from an essential tribal sickness,
and it is not limited to any one tribe. Hodgkinson had volunteered as a
canvasser on the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign, in Iowa. “Trump
has destroyed democracy,” a post on Hodgkinson’s Facebook page read. He
had called and e-mailed his Republican representative fourteen times to
express “anger” at the drift of U.S. politics. Then, six weeks ago, he
arrived in Alexandria, showed up regularly for basketball games at the
local Y.M.C.A., and eventually tried to assassinate a large group of
Republican congressmen.

It is in a very small way significant that those congressmen had been
assembled Wednesday morning for baseball practice. The Congressional
Baseball Game is one of the few occasions where federal lawmakers of
both parties appear together in public, informally. The pleasure of the
game is the glimpse it offers of politicians as individuals instead of
avatars of ideologies. In 2010, Anthony Weiner, in center field, made a
beautiful catch with his back to home plate, and then, looking a little
impressed with himself, “pointed his index finger like a gun,” the Wall
Street Journal recounted,
“and blew the proverbial smoke off the tip.” That same year, Linda
Sanchez, who has been one the few women to play in the game in recent
years, rapped out a line-drive single. To see politicians in physical
motion, playing baseball, is to see them more fully and more
individually.

After Wednesday’s shooting, the official statements were muted and
elegant. “We do well, in times like these, to remember that everyone who
serves in our nation’s Capitol is here because, above all, they love our
country,” President Trump said. At the Capitol, according to the Independent Journal Review reporter Haley Byrd, some members of
Congress were “going off the record during press scrums so they can cry
before continuing to answer” questions. A photo circulated of the
Democratic baseball team members, gathered on their own practice field
just after hearing news of the shooting, praying together for the
Republicans. Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, mentioned that photo when he
spoke on the House floor a few hours after the attack. “We are one
family,” he said.

That both is and isn’t true. The Congressional Baseball Game will be
played on Thursday, as scheduled, but there are new uncertainties. On
Wednesday, when Flake was in the third-base dugout, taking shelter from
the gunfire, someone with a pistol crouched near him, firing. “Are you
friendly?” Flake shouted. “Are you friendly?” It turned out that he was
a Capitol police officer; he was friendly. But, in the moment, it was
impossible to know.