Washington
The 19-year-old who has been performing it since she was a precocious fourth-grader shoots for under 90. The violinist scrapes it out in exactly a minute and a half.
And the maitre d’ famous for bursting into song in downtown power restaurants is a reliable 68-second guy when it comes to singing the national anthem before Washington Nationals games a few times a year.
“The timing is everything,” Paul Reosti said last Sunday as he tugged his bow tie into shape and ran through arpeggios in the ladies’ locker room where anthem singers prepare. “It’s a very precise operation.”
Baseball may be a game without a clock, but when it comes to the pregame ritual of local singers performing The Star Spangled Banner, speed is of the essence. Being able to deliver the bombs bursting and banners waving at a briskly dignified clip is one of the main criteria for making it into the team’s roster of amateur anthemists. That, a big voice and the ability to ignore some truly wicked reverb are in play 81 times a season as homegrown singers get a minute-and-a-half of home-field airtime.
“We look for people we know can do a good job in some challenging circumstances,” said Thomas Davis, the Nats’ director of entertainment, who recruits the singers and directs the mini-pageant of color guards and first pitchers that must satisfy broadcast schedules, watch-tapping umpires and the occasional fighter jet flyover. “We take it very seriously. It’s the national anthem in the nation’s capital.”
He depends on local military bands — beloved for their up-tempo consistency — for 10 or so games a year. Hopefuls can send an audition track to anthem@nationals.com. And each spring, Davis and his staff select several more during an open cattle-call audition for anyone who wants to try their voice on the stadium speakers. After 13 seasons, Davis usually knows by the second stanza who has big-league stuff.
“I’ve listened to a lot of national anthems,” said Davis.
For many, the tryout is over when they are gobsmacked by the disorienting experience of having your voice emerge in the arena well after it leaves your throat, a function of stadium sound engineering.
Some singers wear earplugs, including Adalia Jimenez, 19. The popular anthem regular at Nats Park has appeared several times a year since elementary school, as braces came and went and her voice matured. “Basically, I went through puberty at Nationals Park,” said Jimenez, a sophomore at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va.
The epic echoes were on display last week when Reosti, 57, began his day with a mic check three hours before game time. In white shorts and a Ryan Zimmerman T-shirt, Reosti stepped behind home plate, cleared his throat and began O-say-can-you-seeing into the upright microphone.
At first, he sang into a dead mic, but at “dawn’s early” a switch was flipped and an infinitely huger version of his baritone enveloped the empty stadium and came rolling back at him, always a full beat behind. But Reosti didn’t falter, and finished to a smattering of applause from the concourse where workers were filling the beer coolers and Cracker Jack bins.
“I have to focus on something,” Reosti said, walking back up the tunnel where we could relax out of the blazing sun until it was time to change into his tux. For the warm-up, he fixed on the red curly-W microphone cover. During the performance at 1:21 p.m., he would stare at the second-base bag. Since this was Sunday, the day when the Nats add God Bless America to the seventh-inning stretch, he would sing a third time, for once facing the infield crowd. “That feels like an audience,” he said.
Reosti’s day job, or rather night job, is as maitre d’ of Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, the upscale seafood place two blocks from the White House. Before that, he had a long career as a waiter at the Prime Rib, where the college voice major and aspiring opera singer grew famous for his Italian version of Happy Birthday and the occasional spontaneous dining room aria.
It was probably inevitable that Reosti would break into stadium singing, given that the masters of the D.C. sports universe eat where he works. A few years ago, Reosti was called over to sing Happy Birthday to Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis and ended up singing the anthem on Verizon Center ice.
In 2010, Mark Lerner, scion of the Nats-owning Lerner family, came for dinner and told Reosti he had caught one of his anthems at a Caps game. The baseball-loving waiter said he’d been having trouble getting through to the Nationals to offer his voice. Lerner handed him his card and said, “This should be easier.”
“I’ve been doing it ever since,” Reosti said.
Reosti now does at least two games a year, including the coveted two-song Sunday slots. He’s a fixture on the list of regulars that Davis compiles based on reliability, fan feedback and comments from the discerning audience of players and coaches standing along the base paths for 162 performances a year.
“Oh, we rate them,” said Nats bench coach Chris Speier just before Reosti took the field last Sunday. “Like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s good.’ Or ‘Hmm, no.’ ”
The players, like the timekeepers, seem to prefer the brisker versions for reasons of style and efficiency. “It’s one of the hardest things to sing,” said relief pitcher Blake Treinen. “So just sing it. Don’t draw it out. Don’t make it longer than it has to be. Sing it.”
A few minutes before game time, Reosti finished dressing. He would change back into street clothes after the anthem and join his sister, brother and several friends up in Section 221 to watch the middle innings. So he just pulled the black dress stockings over his white athletic socks, popped in the black onyx studs and sang “at the twilight’s last gleaming” into the mirror.
“Paul! Pauli!” the calls came as soon he emerged from the tunnel. His customers were peppered through the crowd of 35,387. Five of his waiter buddies, who had let their connected regulars know they wanted to see Paul sing, greeted him from a row of killer seats behind home plate. For a lifelong singer who didn’t have the high notes to go pro, this was a sweet moment of audience love.
His fellow performers agree. Glenn Donnellan, who plays the anthem several times a year on an electric fiddle he made from a Louisville Slugger bat, compares the joy of stepping onto that warning track to his regular gig as a violinist for the National Symphony Orchestra: “I’ve been to Carnegie Hall and the great halls of Europe, and this is the same feeling.”
D.C. (Dwight Clyde) Washington, a retired Army officer and fan-favorite anthem singer for the Redskins and D.C. United as well as the Nats, loves standing up before the players. He used to see opera great Robert Merrill hold Yankee Stadium spellbound with his anthem and tries to rock the park with his own.
“It’s just fun to be in front of the crowd and the players,” he said. “(Former Nats shortstop) Ian Desmond would always catch my eye and give me thumbs up.”
As the honor guard stepped crisply into place, Reosti played a surreptitious note from a tuner app on his phone and sang in a quiet voice: “O, O, O, O say can you see.” Davis, stage managing, nodded and he, Reosti and a cameraman stepped out toward the batter’s box and the waiting microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Reosti,” boomed the voice of the park. And on a summer Sunday, the maitre d’ stepped up to the plate.