I just got back from meeting my podcast buddy Bob Wright, producer of the Baseball History Podcast. He’s in DC for a conference, and we met (for the first time face-to-face) and went down to the new stadium neighborhood, where I took some pictures. Here’s “your game announcer Bob Wright” Read the rest of this entry »

Well, actually, my first baseball junk mail of the year is what arrived in my mailbox today. A sporting-goods chain sent me their baseball catalog. I guess because I bought a bunch of Nationals clothes and stuff there last summer, I’m probably qualified on their mailing list as, maybe, a youth baseball coach or something.

Or maybe it’s because as an aging boomer, I’m supposed to stay forever young. Who knows? I was a terrible baseball player as a kid, so I’d be no better as a 53-year-old guy.

Ryan Zimmerman has reached the stage of budding stardom where a recognizable picture of him is the background of the first inside page. No team logo on his cap, though. So he’s not a generic National, but rather Ryan of all baseball. (I think I can also recognize the Orioles’ Miguel Tejada behind some text, but Zim’s the one who is recognizable and looking right into the camera.)

An adult-sized Louisville Slugger bat sells for $90.00. Next time I see six or seven bats broken during a big-league game, I’ll bear that in mind.

Today, the first day I went back to the classroom after the great Washington Ice of 2007, I almost busted my butt taking out the garbage in the morning. A relatively warm rain had fallen through the night, landing on the solid ice in which our neighborhood is encrusted. It, of course, refroze instantly, causing a slick glaze onto which my shoes could not hold. Read the rest of this entry »

  

Nationals stadium: Half and N Streets
Originally uploaded by ShepDave.

The sign is from Monument Realty, the company developing the area closest to the new stadium. It’s going to turn a grungy neighborhood street into a snazzy retail-and-restaurant strip.

This Metro station is at Half and M Streets, SE, in Washington, DC.

As I write this, the station is actually closed for expansion, to accommodate the thousands of baseball fans who will come through it in 2008.

The stadium is one block ahead of you, at Half and N Streets.

Well, no, actually, today in the Virginia suburbs of DC it got up into the upper 70s. On our deck, when the sun hit the thermometer, it read 96 degrees at one moment.

But there’s no baseball in the newspapers. No baseball news on TV or the radio.

The St. Louis Cardinals’ great infielder Rogers Hornsby, “The Rajah,” summed up true baseball fans’ feelings when he said:

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

Yeah, that’s how I feel right now. Spring training starts in Florida in mid-February. Then the spring will eventually come, and baseball will be back!

During Christmas week I drove into Washington and took pictures of the construction site for the new baseball stadium:

My favorite part of this picture is the tiny bit of upper deck, on the left, where the cheap seats are being built. That’s my neighborhood, baby !

For the first time in my life, within the past week I attended two, count ‘em, two major-league baseball games. Because I was sitting both times in my season-ticket seats, I now truly feel like a baseball geek.

I must state, here at the very beginning of this post, the unpleasant fact that the Washington Nationals lost both games I saw. Against two of the palooka teams of the National League East–the Florida Marlins and the Pittsburgh Pirates–the Nats went down to defeat.

(Since then the Nats have beaten Pittsburgh once at home and Cincinnati once on the road.)

But there was good news, too–more important than wins and losses. After something like 17 months of procrastinating, Major League Baseball awarded the right to purchase the team to a group of investors led by Ted Lerner, a local developer with very deep pockets. The announcement was made late in the day on Wednesday. We halfway expected to see the Lerners at the ballpark on Wednesday, but they didn’t come until Thursday evening.

Then on Thursday morning, ground was broken for the new stadium. Many DC politicians, including race-baiters-come-lately Marion Barry and Vincent Orange, participated in this event. The Lerners were at the park on Thursday to watch the Nationals lose again.

Friday the Nats began a series against the Pittsburgh Pirates (even worse than the Florida Marlins) with a decisive win, 6-0. I had high hopes when I went to the stadium on Saturday to see game two against the Pirates. But no, after the batters got the score to 3-0 in favor of the Nationals after two innings, pitcher Ramon Ortiz gave up the entire lead before he was pulled from the game. Our guys ended up losing 5-4.

What does it mean that we will now have an owner? Most importantly, it will mean that our team is not owned by the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball. That is the status quo. The sale to the Lerner group will not be finally closed until mid-June. This means that for another whole month, the Nats are quite literally owned by the other team every time they play.

Most people I know are very excited about this new ownership group. The group centers on a business-oriented family that is very wealthy. They are a local family, which means there is no reason to worry that the team will leave DC any time in the foreseeable future. They are joined by Stan Kasten, who turned the Atlanta Braves into “America’s team” in the late 1980s-early 1990s.

In a way this feels like we have become subjects of a benevolent princely family of sport. But there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll be a happy subject.

RFK stadium, sec. 417, row 3, seat 4 (rail in foreground)
Originally uploaded by ShepDave.

This is a view of the Nats/Orioles game from my regular season seat. At this point in the game, the Orioles were being put out 1-2-3 in the top of the ninth inning. But the damage had been done. The O’s won, 9-6.

Categories: baseball, nationals, washington-dc, flickr

Musings and thoughts on the Battle of the Beltway game at RFK Stadium between the Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles:

• I had a great seat in section 422 for this game, but I made a point to look at the field from my season ticket seat in 417. We’ve got the third row. It will be great, but we may try to upgrade next year to move closer to home and (more importantly) up at least one or two rows, to take the rail out of the picture.
• The Nationals lost. At least one guy on the ballparkguys.com discussion board was very incensed about this. Most of the rest of us, though, just enjoyed being at the stadium. The Nationals are going to lose a lot this year–they have no owner yet, so they have no budget to acquire players, plus a lame-duck management staff. We’ll live.
• This was a two-game exhibition series. Friday night was in DC, Saturday late afternoon in Baltimore. It was a little disappointing to see only about 19,000 people in RFK for the Friday game–until we saw the attendance for Saturday’s game in Baltimore. It was 11,000 and something, and I’ve heard tell that many of those people were Nationals fans. Moreover, we in DC paid full price for tickets to this practice game, while the Orioles sold their tickets for $10. It’s clear to me who the real fans are.

Go Nationals! Opening day of the season is tomorrow (Monday), in New York against the NY Mets. Opening day at home is Tuesday, April 11. We have tickets for Wednesday the 12th, against the Mets. I can hardly wait!

Categories: baseball, nationals, washington-dc

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