

Jayson Werth douses Nationals Manager Matt Williams with champagne after Washington clinches the NL East on Tuesday. (Dave Tulis / Associated Press)

Before the Nationals‘ division title celebration began in earnest on Tuesday night, the team huddled in a circle around the tubs of champagne and beer. Manager Matt Williams stood next to General Manager Mike Rizzo near the center. Players were armed with ski goggles and alcohol but someone whistled to get everyone’s attention.

All eyes turned to Williams. He held up a bottle of Coors Lite and offered a toast. “Lift your glass, fellas,” Williams said in video captured by MASN cameras. “Congratulations. We have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep. Enjoy.”

While players began spraying the beer and champagne and celebrating, few may have noticed that Williams quoted a line from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” poem. Asked about the reference on Wednesday, Williams offered a touching explanation. When he was heading off to college to play baseball at UNLV in 1984, Williams’s mother wrote an open letter that ran in the local newspaper thanking everyone for their support of her son, from coaches to groundskeepers. In that letter, Williams’s mother quoted that Frost poem and he always wanted to commemorate his mother’s letter in someway.

In that heat of the excitement of Tuesday night, Williams leaned on those words in his brief remarks to the team. “I wanted to do that to honor my mother,” he said. “It meant a lot to me.”