Nationals Park was packed (although I was just a tad disappointed that the announced crowd was 40,315 in a stadium whose capacity is 41,888). Unlike recent opening days, this time it was packed with Nationals fans. That was different.

The weather was perfect. It was 75 degrees at game time, with just a light breeze from left field to right. Our seats were perfect. This just happened to be the first of a handful of games we earlier bought in the Stars & Stripes Club level, section 217, looking right down third base.

And the game? My. Oh. My. A few days ago, I had joked that the kid would probably go seven scoreless innings and then the bullpen would give up the game. Then I would sardonically snarl, “Welcome to Nats Town,” as I’ve done so many times when a game collapsed in the late innings.

That’s not what happened. Instead, Strasburg mowed through the Pittsburgh batting order with dispatch. Everyone now knows that he struck out 14 batters–each and every member of the Pirates’ starting lineup–thus setting a new Nationals record for strikeouts in a game. In his very first major-league game. How unbelievable is that? As Mark Zuckerman wrote, it was a historically overwhelming display, possibly the greatest pitching debut in the history of the game.

And in this game he gave up a two-run homer to Delwyn Young in the fourth inning. That’s good, because it showed Strasburg, and all of us fans, that he is mortal. In the bad-Nats scenario, that would have been it; the one-run lead Ryan Zimmerman’s first-inning solo shot had given him would have been squandered. But instead, the Nats’ bats woke up. The slumping Adam Dunn parked a two-run homer in the right field mezzanine (the second deck of seats) to give the kid the lead back. And Strasburg would fan eight of the next ten batters he would face to end a truly overwhelming pitching performance.

And our recently disappointing bullpen, guided by Pudge Rodriguez (fresh off the DL), slammed the door to ensure the kid his win. Good job, Tyler Clippard and Matt Capps. In the spirit of the evening, Clippard struck out two batters and Capps one.

Yes, we saved our ticket stubs. Yes, I did a neat job of keeping score, so I can prove I was there one day. Just like with the 1969 Woodstock festival, millions of people will claim to have been present, but only 40,315 will be telling the truth.

(Of course, anti-Nats could point out that they are trailing that division, but that’s just because Washington comes after Florida in alphabetical order.)

The NL East is arguably the strongest division on baseball, with all teams at .500 or better and the last-place teams in very easy reach of the lead with just a simple combination of someone heating up and someone else cooling off.

So life is good in Nats Town–even without Pudge Rodriguez, Scott Olsen, and not even having seen Chien-Ming Wang yet. (What’s up with him anyway?)

And Strasmas is just a week away. Strasburg debuts on June 8, and as it happens, I have tickets for that day. Just by accident, not by plan.

Their 2005 April record was 13-11. At that time they were in third place in the division, two games behind Florida and a game behind Atlanta. As of April 30, 2010, they are in second place, one game behind the Mets and a half game ahead of the Phillies.

We in Washington don’t know exactly how to behave when we have a winning team. It’ll be interesting. I know I have steeled myself for the inevitable collapse during every game. Five years of egregious losing will do that to you. It seems proper for the Nats bullpen to break down and give up a multiple-run lead. (Brian Bruney seems to have tried to keep the Nats tradition alive last Monday in Chicago.)

Can it continue? Well, Strasburg and Storen are not even on the Nats pitching staff yet, and Adam Dunn’s bat has not yet awoken from its winter slumber. If the team can hold on until the first of June, the last four months of the season could be very nice indeed in Natstown.

For the first time since 2005 I have a reason to pay attention to the standings. A real reason. My team is actually performing decently in comparison to other teams. The Mets have stayed in last place in the NL East for about a week and a half, and the Nats are a full game ahead of them with the Dodgers coming to DC. And I’m also enjoying the thrill of the Nats’ being only 1 game back in the NL wildcard, tied with Colorado.

So I now look to see what the other teams are doing. I’m sorry to see the Astros break their four-game winning streak and lose to the Marlins 5-1, since this means that the Fish maintain a tie with Philadelphia for first place in the NL East.

The Nats play the Dodgers for a three-game series starting tonight, and I have hopes that Luis Atilano, who takes Jason Marquis’s place in the rotation after a miserable start to the season by Marquis, the 15-million-dollar man, will succeed in his major league debut.

But I’m also concerned about the Mets-Braves series. The Nats need for the Braves to succeed to keep the Mets in the basement; but Braves success will also strengthen their hold on 2nd place in the division. The Nats can’t gain on the Braves without the Mets gaining on the Nats.

So this is what it feels like to have a real team, eh?

[EDIT, 11:08 PM:] The Mets just took the game 2-1 in 20 innings. When they put Pelfrey in (a rotation guy on an off day, a real pitcher), he shut them down.

A few minutes ago, Ubaldo Jiminez just pitched the Rockies’ first no-hitter, beating the Braves 4-0.

The Pirates beat the Reds in the bottom of the 9th in Pittsburgh when, with the bases loaded, Lastings Milledge took a walk to push in the tying run; then Garrett Jones hit a walk-off single. The Reds’ closer Francisco Cordero has to be the goat of Cincinnati right now.

And I like to think that our own Nationals started the wild and crazy festivities on this baseball Saturday when Livan Hernandez pitched a complete-game shutout while his teammates put runs on the board to beat the Brewers 8-0. For a very few minutes, the Nats were tied for second-place in the NL East (with Florida and Atlanta, after the Braves lost to the Rockies but before the Marlins finished off the Phillies). Florida’s victory over Philadelphia, however, put the Marlins at 7-5, while the Nats and the Braves are sitting at 6-5, tied for third in the division.

Did you follow all that?

It feels absolutely brilliant to be a fan of a team that is right in the thick of things–albeit after two weeks of baseball. I even made it onto the scoreboard at Nationals Park today, when I urged everybody to get on their feet with two outs in the 9th and Livo on the verge of his first shutout since 2004. What a wonderful game this is!

This year the granite is festooned with the words NATIONALS PARK (all caps, all plain block letters). My initial reaction was that it looked clunky and stupid. But then I saw the logo behind the batter at the new Target Field on opening day of the Twins’ new ballpark. And I began to understand.

I would not be surprised if a naming-rights deal were struck with a sponsor this year. The letters behind the batter this year might be there to get us used to seeing a name there. Not that the Lerner family need any more revenue streams from the place or anything, but we’ve been hearing about the possibility of corporate naming rights for Nationals Park ever since it was built, and we’re now in year #3 of the ballpark.

This is, of course, pure speculation on my part; and I’m nobody, a mere fan who reads the news every day. Are the clunky letters on the granite wall merely a placeholder for Geico Park or something similar?

Livan Hernandez went seven full innings of shut-out baseball. He even got a base hit. A great outing by the big guy.

And the Nats are at .500 for the first time in two years and two days. About damn time.

Willie Harris will next be convincing all nuclear powers to give up their weapons, and he’s working on a cure for hay fever.

I’m not a stat-head or an expert on pitching. The following is offered simply as my own desperate musing as to whether or not my home team will ever be any good this season.

The putridness mostly resides in the pitching staff. Of the starters, only Craig Stammen has gone more than 4 innings (5.0 versus Philadelphia in the lone win). “Ace” John Lannan, who starts in New York today, was yanked after 3.2 innings on Opening Day. Jason Marquis managed to make it through 4.0 on Wednesday. Garrett Mock–the man occupying Scott Olsen’s spot in the rotation–went 3.1 against the Mets on Friday.

So the bullpen gets overworked. So we get to see the likes of Batista and Bergmann giving up six runs in two innings on Opening Day, or the same dynamic duo finishing the loss to the Mets with ERAs of 12.46 and 18.00, respectively.

Yuck!

Lannan is scheduled to start this afternoon against the Mets, and Livan Hernandez will be added to the roster to start on Sunday. When Livo comes back, somebody must be cut to make space on the 25-man roster. Who should it be? (No, “the entire bullpen” is not a helpful answer.)

Commenter JayB offers a reasonable scenario on Nats Insider:

“Mock will be sent down after the game today…..Buys them time and keeps all the bull pen arms around as this starting staff tries to get going. Livo looks damn good right now which is damn sad.

Bergmen [sic] will get send down when they need another starter.”

Sounds good to me. I can’t understand why Bergmann made it to DC after Spring Training, and Mock was stinky all spring. Scott Olsen just went 6.1 innings in Syracuse (albeit giving up 4 earned runs), so he might be better than Mock, who knows?

Sigh. It could be another long, long summer–at least until real pitchers like Strasburg and Storen come up to the big-league team.

The outrage and venting over this mess seems mostly to have taken place in two venues: Mark Zuckerman’s Nats Insider and the WaPo’s Nationals Journal–albeit much, much later on in the NJ. (And a shout-out to Dan Steinberg for picking up the ball and running with it in the first place on the Post’s D.C. Sports Bog.)

But above all, it was Mark who did the important initial investigation and who has allowed everybody on both sides to blow off all necessary steam about the Kasten sell-out of Nats Nation on Opening Day. In comparison, not a word seems to have appeared on the MASN Nationals site. No surprise there, considering the close relationship between Nats management and the TV network of which they’re partial owners.

Mark’s right: back to baseball. Mike Morse starts in right field tonight, in a second-game-of-the-season change of plans. No more Willie and Willy platoon out there?

One of the longest threads of comment-venting about this is on Mark Zuckerman’s Nats Insider. (Of course, Mark, who first dug into this, is an independent journalist and not a mainstream-media reporter.) There are 152 comments as I write this. Mark seems to have been the first to publish Stan Kasten’s rather clueless and cynical response to a query about selling seats to hordes of opponents on Opening Day:

“Both season tickets are sold, and groups are booked, all through the winter, for every game,” Nationals president Stan Kasten said via email this morning. “All of this is before any individual game tickets go on sale.”

The Washington Post got on the case about four hours later, when Dan Steinberg posted in the DC SportsBog Kasten’s response to him. (Note the craven and clueless tagline, implying that we fans are simpletons.)

“We sell season tickets and book groups all winter long. For every game of the season. All of this is before any individual tickets go on sale. Most of our groups are local. Some are from out of town. It’s really that simple.”

The story finally made the Post’s dead-tree edition (as well as its melange of various online versions), so I guess it’s a “real story” now.

Okay. Whatever. After a day of angst and agita, I’ve decided that it really comes down to the famous “product on the field.” Fact is, the Nats still aren’t very good. Fact is, they played the Phillies, arguably the best team in baseball, on Opening Day. Fact is, said Phillies started one of baseball’s most dominant pitchers against the Nats’ slightly improved lineup.

Tonight it’s the Nats’ Jason Marquis versus the Phils’ Cole Hamels. Maybe a more reasonable matchup. Is Marquis all he’s cracked up to be? Is Hamels still in his slump from last year?

Alas, I can’t watch the game either live or on TV because of a conflict. So tell me how bad it is later on, okay?