We have no reason not to be having fun. We don’t want to lose; but the thing about baseball is that you can’t think about what happened yesterday, or a week ago. If you do, it affects how you play the next game.

But let’s not talk more about on-field stuff. Let’s talk about leaders and jokesters.

Our team is unique because we don’t have that many older guys, the veterans who are the strong leaders. Robert Fick is a prankster, but a lot of the stuff that he does or says is because he’s teaching. For instance, when you’re a younger player, if you need something done in the training room, you don’t show up at 3:30 for a 7 p.m. game. You come in around 1 p.m. when the older guys aren’t there. He’ll go in there if a younger guy is in there at 3:30 and say something smart about how he hasn’t seen young people on the massage table this late. It’s funny, but at the same time he’s teaching us what we’re supposed to do and not do instead of just coming in and yelling.

And Dmitri Young helps because he was on the Tigers team in 2002 that lost a whole lot of games. So he’s been through what the expectations are of us and he dealt with the media in this way before and told us what to expect. It’s nice to have someone like that.

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As far as joking, me and Nick Johnson and Brian Schneider and Austin Kearns do a lot to each other. Last year we did a lot of things with baby powder; you’d go away and come back and have it all over everything. In spring training, Nick put some baby powder in Schneider’s back pocket of his jeans with his wallet in there. Schneids and I went to Wal-Mart after that and he pulled his wallet out to pay for something and the baby powder went everywhere; there was a big cloud of baby powder.

That might not be funny to some people, but when you’re with the same people for 200 days, anything we do is pretty funny.

One time last year, our third base coach, Tony Beasley, was all excited about his new car. During batting practice someone, I forgot who did it but I think it was Schneider, took his keys and moved his car to the back parking lot where we park when we go on the road. They put the keys back in Beasley’s jeans so he walked out after the game and we had the security guys say, ‘Wait a minute, didn’t you just leave?’ He got all freaked out and we had the security guys get in the golf cart to see if he could “catch” him. It was funny, but he was freaking out.

Every team does stuff like that. You get pretty close to people so doing those things makes you a little looser and builds relationships.

As told to The Examiner’s John Keim.

Nats third baseman Ryan Zimmerman is one of baseball’s rising stars and, at 22, the face of the franchise. Now he’ll share his thoughts with The Examiner’s readers each week throughout the baseball season.