Baseball is killing my concentration
It’s a beautiful Friday afternoon. There’s another hour until my German I class begins. Because our school had a strange schedule today, due to an eighth-grade career-day event, there is a Latin I class in my normally empty classroom.
These kids are restless, excited, eager for the day to be over. They’re having trouble concentrating on their work, and they’re counting the minutes until the end of the day.
I have to admit, I feel the same way.
This evening I’ll be going to the first Washington Nationals baseball game in the city in 2006. The Battle of the Beltway will kick off with an exhibition game between the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles. I have a great seat behind home plate for this game; and two days ago I received my season tickets,a 20-game mini-plan, which are also great seats behind home.
This particular game has really captured Washington’s imagination. For 34 years, the nearest baseball team was the Baltimore Orioles, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. Tom Boswell in today’s Washington Post argues that this rivalry is likely to be a friendly one, because both Orioles and Nats fans have a common enemy, the Orioles’ owner, Peter Angelos. Washington Nationals fans have a beef with Angelos because he kept baseball out of the city for so long; the Orioles’ fans have an axe to grind with him because he has mismanaged their team for so long.
Since my “plan partner” (the guy with whom I’m sharing the 20 games) only wanted two of our three seats, I will have a single seat for all 20 games of the plan. I’ll be watching a lot of baseball this summer.
It’s hard for me to explain my youthful giddiness about having season tickets to the Nats. I feel like a “real” baseball fan for the first time in the last 25 years. Last summer, the Nats were a novelty, and my family and I rediscovered the joys of baseball. This summer we have a lot of games entered on our calendars already. We’ve scheduled some aspects of our lives around baseball games.
My wife and I have two season tickets in Washington, DC: to the Nationals and to the Shakespeare Theatre. Shakespeare and baseball. Two pastimes whose appeal is subtle and rather esoteric.
There are now 100 minutes until the last bell of the day. See? I am literally counting the minutes until I can go to the ballpark.
Categories: baseball, washington-dc, midlife
March 31st, 2006 at 9:21 pm
Have a great time at the game.
April 1st, 2006 at 6:09 am
Ouch. I checked the score. No joy in Washington. Although looks like a pretty exciting game.
April 1st, 2006 at 8:14 am
Oh, it was sad. Soriano did nothing (except let a couple of balls go past him in left field). Ryan Zimmerman was singularly disappointing: two errors in one inning, plus some bobbles.
The good news was Brandon Watson, who hustled and hit and fielded well in center field.
This, of course, is not yet the season.
April 1st, 2006 at 8:45 am
Oh, and I do want to say that this was an utterly meaningless exhibition game, and was played, at least in part, so that the maximum number of players could get onto the field.
The small crowd that was there was very enthusiastic.
November 6th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
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