So the Strasburg era has begun. Just one day shy of a year after he was drafted, Stephen Strasburg took the mound for the Nationals last night against the Pirates.
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. Continue reading ‘Strasburg’s debut: Now that was something!’
The Philly-Phan disaster of the Nationals’ Opening Day still has Nats fans boiling, but there’s baseball tonight. The Nats have a second chance, this time against a pitcher who struggled at the end of last season, Cole Hamels.
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?
Adam Kilgore prints his entire email exchange with Kasten in the Nationals Journal.
A lot of people remain quite upset about what happened at Nats opening day. With a stadium oversold with groups of the other team’s fans–who happen to be legendary as some of the worst fans in sports–what could have been a beautiful opening day became a miserable experience for many.
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.) Continue reading ‘Opening-Day storm rages’
The Nationals’ Opening Day loss was miserable, of course: 11-1. But worse was the “fan experience.” The team oversold blocks of OD tickets to busloads of Phillies fans–legendary as the rudest, most boorish fans in North American sport–who overtook Nationals Park and actually booed during the introduction of the home team.
The icing on the cake came in about the 7th or 8th inning, when the Nationals PA man made what I believe was the only such announcement of the day, telling all participants in something called “philliestailgate.com” to meet their bus at such-and-such a corner after the game. A second later that announcement was posted on the high-def video scoreboard.
So not only did the Phillies fans fill the seats with their blocks of tickets, they literally had the management of the stadium on their side. Meanwhile we very few Nats fans were left to defend ourselves against the drunken Phillies boors at every corner.
It was bad enough to have a team so awful that it allowed the opponents to score double-digit runs for the second home opener in a row. Our own team ownership rubbed our faces in it by making Nats Park into a kind of Citizens Bank Park south.
Tom Boswell lets the team have it in today’s Washington Post with both barrels today for all these ignominies.
Oh, and Barack Obama (for whose presidential campaign I actually knocked on doors in November 2008) had the incredibly poor manners to don a White Sox hat on the pitcher’s mound of Nats Park, while clad in a Nats jacket for the first pitch. I guess he doesn’t understand that he’s not the President of the White Sox.
As one commenter put it on Nats Insider, I had trouble sleeping last night after this debacle. Really.
Yep, I’m a Washington Nationals fan, as you can tell from a lot of my past posts. As you also can tell by the date of the most recent post before this one, I almost lost interest in this blog.
But having endured yet another ignominious Nats opening day (Phillies win, 11-1; John Lannan ousted after 3.2 innings; stadium filled with drunken, boorish, antisocial Phillies fans; Nats management kowtows to said Phillies fans by helpfully telling them where to catch the bus after the game), I decided today that Dave’s Midlife Blog will probably morph, more or less, into a Washington Nationals fan blog.
I’m not an insider or “blog-journalist” or anything close to that. I’m a very interested fan who knows a little about baseball, but not overwhelmingly much. I find myself tweeting about baseball and the Nats about as much as anything else.
So okay. I’ll be yet another Nats fan-blogger now. Maybe if I have a slightly narrower focus, I might actually post something to this site from time to time.
A week ago, March 30, it was cold and cloudy in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, Barbara and I dressed warmly and went down to Nationals Park for the official opening game of the Nationals’ 2008 season. Although it was around 49 degrees all day long, we got to the park at 3:30 for an 8:15 game, because the President of the United States would be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch. Security lines would be forbidding, we were told, so it was a smart idea to get there early.
Continue reading ‘Nationals Opening Day’
After our arrival home from Florida on Wednesday night, Thursday was a free day for me. I decided I’d go downtown into DC and take a look at Nationals Park.
Looking back at the archives of this blog, I am astounded to note that it has been a whole year since I was last down at the ballpark site with my camera. I have been following the progress of construction on the construction cam (to which I won’t link, since it might not be online for very much longer), but I haven’t seen it in person since March 17, 2007.
I expected it to be different–and it was. Where there were once deep pits in some blocks of the neighborhood, there are now high-rise buildings emerging.
Continue reading ‘Back Home–the New Ballpark’
Well, I’ve not been here. I notice that the last post I wrote was right after the Blacksburg shooting. Since then, my daughter has matriculated at Virginia Tech, my house has undergone a major renovation, and I saw a lot of baseball games.
Nothing much that many people will be interested in, I guess–but plenty has gone on. Baseball has consumed a lot of my attention this summer. The Washington Nationals had a much, MUCH better season than anybody predicted, finishing with a record of 73-89. That doesn’t sound so good, unless you consider that the major sports press predicted before the season that the Nationals would be “historically bad.” For example, Gary Graves in USA Today compared the Nats with the 1962 Mets. Continue reading ‘Hey, where ya been??’
Two weeks ago, I walked around the neighborhood of the new Nationals Park with Bob Wright of the Baseball History Podcast. I posted a few pictures back then that I took without knowing much about what I was seeing.
Today Jacqueline Dupree, the pre-eminent documenter of the development of Near Southeast DC, led a walking tour of the stadium neighborhood for anybody who showed up.
Although it was very windy and temperatures were in the 30s, the front of 20 M Street SW, a building owned by Lerner Enterprises, showed a temperature of 58 degrees.
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Continue reading ‘Nationals Stadium Tour #2′
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