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.

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?

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.

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.

Many other bloggers and journalists have covered the game. I did not photograph any of the game because I wanted to see it and keep score. But I did photograph my first real experience being inside the stadium.

It was thrilling to walk around the ballpark whose construction I have followed since the spring of 2006. As we emerged from the Metro, Half Street greeted us as festively as a major construction site can do.

Right now Half Street is bounded on one side by a recently-vacated Metro bus garage on the right and a construction site for two high-rise buildings on the left. It’s rather ugly now, but in a couple of years it ought to look magnificent.

The tone of the opening-day festivities resembled in many ways the “Grand Re-Opening” of RFK Stadium two years ago, when the Lerner family took over the team and did some remodeling. There was a red carpet leading to the centerfield plaza, musicians played, the Racing Presidents greeted fans. But once we got inside the stadium, we knew we were in something special and new.

The field looks magnificent from the stairs up to the Red Loft Bar in center field. When we arrived, the Atlanta Braves were starting batting practice.

When we went into the Red Porch restaurant to explore, they were not yet open for business. They were, however, happy for us to come in and look. One of the most surprisingly emotional moments for us was seeing the ceiling of the Red Porch. It is decorated with pennants from the old Washington Senators teams–the teams that were taken away from Washington baseball fans twice. We are not even native Washingtonians, but seeing these pennants brought feelings of nostalgia we did not expect.

Our season seats are just below the pressbox in section 311. That is at the right of this picture. They’re in the fourth row from the bottom, four seats in from the right in this picture. I take a tiny bit of pleasure in the fact that we are closer to the field than the reporters and TV announcers.

Our view of the field is as good as we could have wanted for what our tickets cost. These seats are very similar to the great seats we had in RFK Stadium for two years.

We did not, of course, sit in our seats for two hours until the game started. Instead, we explored the park in the cold wind as we strolled around. Most people arrive at the stadium through the centerfield gates. By about 6:00 PM the crowds were starting to build on the centerfield plaza.

The stadium is a wonderful addition to a formerly run-down neighborhood in Southeast Washington. However, a lot of critics have expressed the misguided complaint that the monuments of the Nation’s Capital are not properly visible from the seats. I don’t get this. My own friends and family who come to DC tend to go to the National Mall to see the monuments. I will go to Nationals Park to see baseball. In any event, I’m here to report that our seats in section 311 do have a view of the Capitol dome–albeit somewhat obscured by a lighting tower.

At a few minutes before 8:00, our television color analyst, Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton, took the field dressed in his finest to lead the on-field opening ceremonies. (Because the game was carried on ESPN, Don was not working on the air on the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network that night.)

Reflecting the opening day of the Nats’ first season at RFK Stadium in 2005, the DC Air National Guard spread two large American flags on the outfield. The RFK opening featured one gigantic flag. I wondered about this until the Nationals’ starting lineup ran onto the field through the centerfield gate between the flags.

Despite published reports, the stadium was full. The announced paid attendance was 39,389–a couple thousand less than the stadium’s capacity of 41,888. However, as you can see from this photo taken at about 8:10 PM, the house was full. Approximately 2,500 tickets were given away to dignitaries, team guests, DC politicians, and so on.

President George W. Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch. He got on the field quickly, threw the ball (rather well, high and outside), and got off quickly to a chorus of boos. No, I did not boo. I think very little of Bush as a president, but the tradition of the presidential first pitch is one that needs to be established in Washington, DC. I found the booing of the president to be rude and out of place.

The game? Well, it could not have gone much better. The Nats got out to a 2-0 lead in the first inning. Atlanta’s Chipper Jones hit a solo homer in the fourth inning and there it sat for most of the game. It was a pitcher’s duel between the Nats’ Odalis Perez and the Braves’ Tim Hudson–meaning it was a short game. (Remember, it was cold!) In the top of the ninth the Braves tied it up at 2. Then in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and nobody on–and with two strikes–our star third baseman Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk-off solo homer into the Red Porch to win the game. It was as if the game were being played according to a movie script.

We went home happy. The team headed to Philadelphia for their second game on Monday. The Nats would get out to a good start by winning three in a row. Then they dropped the next four games. They’ll play their second game in Nationals Park against the Florida Marlins on Monday, April 7. They bring a 3-4 record into their first real homestand. We hope they have a home-field advantage in their fantastic new stadium.

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.

The Navy Yard Metro station is accessible (right now) only at one end, the entrance by New Jersey Avenue. Even here, the view is quite different from one year ago.

The first place I stopped was at the new Starbucks Coffee shop in the Department of Transportation building on 3rd Street. This was under construction last year, and has now been open about a year. It’s about three blocks from the stadium.

The site about which many people are concerned is the Metro entrance closest to the ballpark. This is in a new building under construction by Monument Realty on Half Street. The building (with its retail and restaurants) will not be open this year, but the Metro station should be open next week, in time for Opening Day. The Metro entrance is in the corner of the building, at the left of this picture.

It’s the signs at the stadium that make the prospect of attending games so real. We are being guided to the places we need to go, as you can see here, at the corner of N and South Capitol Streets, the corner of the west parking garage.

The Nats, of course, hope we will spend many of our dollars at the team store, which is in the opposite corner of the west garage.

Here’s where most of us will enter the stadium: the centerfield gate at the base of Half Street. This is a short walk from the Metro station in that building under construction.

The Red Porch restaurant on the centerfield plaza is a unique feature of our ballpark. There are seats available in the Red Porch and the Red Loft, but most folks will just order food in the restaurant itself–which is open to the ticket-holding public.

I’ve heard that the HD video scoreboard is huge. Our seats are in the upper deck, directly opposite the scoreboard. This is what it will look like from the centerfield seats of section 102.

The Grand Staircase at Potomac and 1st will probably be the least-used entrance to the ballpark–at least until water taxi docks are available on the riverfront. The people arriving by boat will walk up these stairs. Nevertheless, the Grand Staircase is a strong feature of the architecture.

The banners of the Grand Staircase depict Nationals players. I’m very impressed at the fact that our new centerfielder, Lastings Milledge, is already depicted in action in a Nats uniform. This means that the team’s photographers have been very busy in Viera, Florida at spring training; and that the team staged some photos down there in regular white uniforms (not the blue uniforms worn during spring training).

The walkway up to the home plate gate has a number of important dates of Washington baseball history embedded in it. 1859, the first year seen, is the year organized baseball was first played in DC. Plaques explaining the meaning of the dates are next to the sidewalk.

The press and the general public in the Washington area seem to be freaking out because there won’t be suburban-style parking right next to this urban ballpark. (Eyes rolling in bemusement.) Well, if you aren’t a bigwig who gets to park in the garages, or a season-ticket holder who has paid up to $35 per game for parking in the neighborhood, or a Metro rider, then you can ride your bike to the stadium and lock it to a bike rack. There are about 250 of these bike racks on all four sides of the stadium.

Yes, the stadium is still under construction. This sign for the left field gate was not yet installed when I strolled the stadium neighborhood. Since I would never again have an opportunity to touch it, I laid my hands on it just before taking this photo. It was installed the very next day, above the entrance.

There are now eight days until the opening of the stadium. The exhibition game against the Baltimore Orioles is one week from now. This afternoon, George Washington and St. Joseph’s Universities played each other on the field, with a couple thousand people looking on from the lower seating bowl. Baseball is about to return to its own home in DC, and I’ll be there on Sunday, March 30.

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.

The sports geniuses at ESPN.com had the Nats losing anywhere from 93 to 113 games. Sports Illustrated’s own geniuses predicted the Nationals would be dead last among all 30 major league baseball teams.

I am happy to report that all these “experts” were so wrong it’s laughable. The Nationals finished just better than four teams in the National League and four in the American League. The Nats were very important in the New York Mets’ collapse at the end of the season.

So, yeah, 73-89 is a mediocre record. But we gave at least a couple teams–Philadelphia and the Mets–a lot of heartburn in the month of September. And we made a bunch of sports pundits eat their predictions.

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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Because I would have to leave the tour early, I arrived early and prowled around on my own. Here is a new view of the stadium through what will be the main entrance for most people, over left field at Half and N Streets. Notice that the support steel is in place for the upper deck all the way around to third base. The pre-cast concrete is in place for the club level all the way around as well. Most exciting to me, the steel is in place for where I hope to sit: upper deck, first-base side, near home plate. This would be approximately between the two tall cranes in the right-center of the photo.

Although the neighborhood is being converted on a massive scale, it is worthwhile to remember that there are small business still trying to make a go of it. This store is on L Street near New Jersey Avenue, just next to the site of a high-rise construction site (Onyx on 1st).

At about 12:00 noon, the Ballpark Guys and our guide, JD, met at the Navy Yard Metro station at New Jersey and M.

Here is a view of the stadium through some trees at the Anacostia waterfront. This is looking up toward the stadium from the river at the point of the grand staircase. The place where we are standing will eventually be a pedestrian plaza and will be flanked by retail and residential development, as well as a park.

Here is a better look at the location of the grand stairway. You can see the gap between the first-base seats and the right-field seats. This gap is at the point of view of the nighttime rendering visible at the Nationals web site.

Speaking of neighborhood small businesses, this one is still intact. Unlike the New Good and Plenty Carryout, which is now a ruin, this one (whose name I don’t know) is, according to JD, still in operation. It probably serves the stadium construction workers during the week. It’s located on N Street near 1st, directly across from the stadium.

I am very grateful to JD for leading this tour. This will have been my fourth visit to the stadium site in all, and the second one in March. Even in two weeks, change and progress is visible.

Today the Nats released a wonderful animated video tour of the new baseball stadium. NBC4 has it posted on their website. (Sorry about the possible commercial right before it; they’re a commercial TV station, after all.)

Thanks to the generosity of the contractor who did some work on our house, I got to see the Nats play the Baltimore Orioles from the club level of Oriole Park at Camden Yards last June. The club level in this video (with the nice bar, opening out to the picnic-table seating) is very similar to the one in Baltimore. Nice!

I have to admit they got better pics than I did. But then, they were allowed to crawl all over the upper deck, while I had to peer in from outside.