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

The Washington Post and the AP report on this lovely Sunday evening (when the Oscars are on the TV upstairs) that Major League Baseball has signed the lease passed last month by the DC City Council.

There will be baseball in town for a long time!

Those of you in non-baseball countries might not get this, but baseball is the national pastime of the United States. It was created at about the time of the Civil War, in the 19th century, shortly after this little experiment in republican democracy nearly failed forever.

The capital of the United States had been without a team for 34 years before last summer. Then the Montreal Expos were moved from Montreal (where nobody went to their games) to Washington (where 2.7 million people went to their games).

Thanks to Maury Brown of Baseball Journals for keeping all us Ballpark Guys up-to-date on the status of this ordeal throughout the winter. Now I can buy a new Nationals cap that fits properly, without fear of its becoming obsolete in a year.

Categories: baseball, washington-dc

Well, the Washington Nationals are in spring training. I have bought a mini-plan of tickets, with wonderful seats right behind home plate, and I have even found another family with which to share the plan, so we’ll be going to 10 games this summer (which is about the right number for us to fit into our schedules).

I am ready for baseball.

And the Nationals are getting ready for baseball, too. There are daily reports from spring training: Alfonso Soriano, the star second baseman we acquired several weeks ago, might not agree to playing outfield. (He was acquired for his bat, after all.) We got a new pitcher, Pedro Astacio, who may or may not be ready to go when the season starts. My two favorite players, Brian Schneider and Chad Cordero, are playing in the World Baseball Classic.

Yet the status of our team remains somewhat in limbo, because Major League Baseball has not yet decided whether to accept the DC Council’s lease agreement. MLB has to know that this is the best they will get from this city council in this, the most attractive market that had no baseball team before 2005. Yet they drag their feet.

It drives me crazy. Well, at least I’ll see 10 games from section 417 this summer.

Categories: baseball, washington-dc

Well, yes, maybe it is too early to get excited about the new stadium. But maybe not.

In the Washington Post this morning, a report by David Nakamura and Thomas Heath says that Major League Baseball is “very concerned” about the lease deal. Skeptics and pessimists probably read that as a gloom-and-doom scenario. And a piece by Dave Sheinin points out that much of the Nationals operation remains on hold, basically, because the owners and administrators are all still the same lame duck caretakers who ran the team last year.

However, on the BallPark Guys discussion forum (the best forum I’ve found for talking about the Nationals), the general feeling is that MLB is really just making the DC Council sweat it out for a few days before they, the team owners of MLB, give the only reasonable answer they can to the new deal: yes, we’ll go ahead.

Fact is, MLB doesn’t have a better town than Washington for this team, and they probably won’t get a better deal than what the Council coughed up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

But I’m not yet breathing easy about the stadium and the team. Only when both sides have said yes, will I rejoice.

Categories: baseball, washington-dc

Is it a done deal? Am I jinxing the whole thing by even writing a blog entry on it?

The Associated Press reports that the DC City Council approved a revised lease deal for a new baseball stadium in Washington. We’re waiting to see what Major League Baseball has to say about the revisions. In the Washington Post, Thomas Boswell has weighed in with a column. The local report is by David Nakamura.

It looks like there might actually be a deal for a new stadium, and then soon that there might be a sale of the team from Major League Baseball to a real ownership group.

I am not a huge sports fan, but I’ve always been a baseball fan. When my children were small and we all lived in Nashville, one of our favorite summertime outings was to see the Nashville Sounds play at Greer Stadium.

Before my wife and I lived in Nashville, we were in New York City, and I got to sit in the cheap seats of Yankee Stadium watching the Yanks in the legendary late-1970s/early-1980s phase of the team. I’d take the subway from the west 70s in Manhattan up to the South Bronx and be in baseball heaven for a few hours.

The inaugural season of the Washington Nationals last summer was a lot of fun; and the month of June, when the Nats were in first place for several weeks, was baseball nirvana. They’ll not be as good this summer, probably, but I’ll still attend 10-12 games and love every minute of it.

Can it be that we really do get to keep this team permanently? Can we allow ourselves to truly cherish our very own Nats?

Categories: baseball, washington-dc