Steven Birnbaum has been on a bit of a roller coaster in recent years. In 2017 he went from a winter USMNT call-up and being handed more responsibility — both in terms of being a leader and with more demands being placed on him has a passer — to being yet another question mark for D.C. United. Fans had every right to wonder whether it was an anomaly, or whether an increasingly more demanding league had surpassed him, or if it was something else.
Things got trickier for Birnbaum before the season began. While Birnbaum was the day-to-day captain for the first 4.