Baseball - Our National Past-its-time

I used to be a baseball fan. I cried my eyes out as an 8-year-old kid when the Senators played what would be the last game in DC for 33 years. After they left town, I became a loyal Orioles fan and made the trek up to Baltimore several times a season for about 20 years.

My interest in baseball slowly dissolved as the Orioles turned from a perennial contender to a perennial also-ran and as I started a family. I also came to find that the world (at least MY world) had become way too "short attention span" for the game. I no longer enjoyed the pace of baseball, and it became excruciating to sit through inning after inning of little action. I blame this, in part, on the 1996 departure of Jon Miller as the voice of the Orioles. Miller used to keep the game entertaining no matter what was happening on the field, but once he left, so did much of my interest in baseball.

Flash forward to last night - the All-Star game. I have always enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of the midsummer classic, simply seeing all of the all-stars in every team's individual uniforms has always been fun. I skipped the one-hour pregame, and channel-surfed back to FOX at 8 pm, as the players were being introduced... After watching this for about 10 minutes, I surfed away again, and came back about half an hour later, at 8:40 or so, to see how the game was progressing. To my shock and amazement, the game had not yet started. They were still doing some "greatest all-stars of all-time" introductions, and had not even thrown out the ceremonial first pitch. FOX had been on the air for an hour and 45 minutes, and the game had not even started!

I turned off the TV, and spent the rest of the night helping Robin paint Spencer's room, completely forgetting about the game. When I was checking my email around midnight, I clicked on Yahoo to see who won, and discovered the game had not yet ended! It was 3-3 after 11 innings. I switched on the TV, and forced myself to watch the rest of the game, a thankless task that reminded me why I stopped watching baseball in the first place. Four innings and more than an hour later, Michael Young of the Texas Rangers knocked in the winning run with a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the 15th to give the American League a 4 - 3 win, bringing the longest game in all-star history to a merciful end.

I had to chuckle. Even though America had long since gone to bed, Fox still had one last commercial commitment to make. It had to run the "Chevy Post-game show", which included the presentation of a 2009 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, "America's MPG MVP", to the game's MVP, J.D.Drew. By this point, Yankee Stadium was a ghost town, and everyone on the TV screen, from Drew himself, to the chairman of Chevrolet to commissioner Bud Selig, seemed anxious to just get the hell out of there.

On a happier note, training camp starts on Sunday! Go Skins!

Not To Be A Pest, But the (G)nats Aint Drawing Flies!

I noticed this morning that Grandy and Andy have gotten around to discussing what I've been reporting for the past week (here and here)... that the Nationals are having real problems drawing fans. For the record, the team has played seven games now at its new 43,000 seat ballpark, including a weekend set against the Braves... On Friday night, a beautiful night for baseball, 28,051 tickets were sold... 32,532 on Saturday... and on Sunday, the teams drew 29,151. Seven games... one sellout.

Now, I'm sure there are still plenty of fans out there who will eventually make their way down there to catch a game, and that some folks may be waiting for the initial traffic problems to shake out before they venture forth. But here's the real truth, folks. 1/ There is not enough, and there will never BE enough affordable parking... and 2/ They've already expanded the Navy Yard Metro station to handle subway traffic, but even with the expansion, the station can only handle 15,000 people an hour. That means it could take 2 hours to get every fan on a train on a busy night.

Now let me ask you... If you had to wait 2 hours just to get ON a train after a game, how many games would YOU go to? I thought so. I'm telling you - We've got trouble my friends... right here in (Anacostia) River City...

How 'Bout Them Nats?

A quick update this morning to my Tuesday blog, in which I discussed the inevitability that the Nationals season attendance in their new stadium will be a disappointment. The park is tough to get to after the evening rush hour, and DC has fairweather fans. Last night, with the temperatures in the 60's under balmy skies, the announced crowd was 23,340 - that's tickets sold, not butts in seats. The stadium looked much emptier than than that when I flipped past the game on TV, but by then, of course, the Nats were trailing the Marlins, 10 - 2. I'm just sayin'.

Talk About Your Fair Weather Fans!

We spent more than 30 years without baseball in DC, and many people in our area found that to be an outrage. I was not one of them. Except for the Redskins, Washington has always been a lukewarm sports town - in part, because a lot of the people who came through our area are transients (actually, that's more myth than fact), and in part because DC has always been a roll-up-the-sidewalks-at-6 pm kind of town. The Senators left in 1971, but within a year or two, I became an Orioles fan and never looked back. Memorial Stadium was closer to my home in Montgomery County than RFK was anyway... Fast forward to 1992 - Orioles Park at Camden Yards opened to hugely successful reviews, and suddenly, the baseball world became enamored with the whole "Field Of Dreams" notion that "if you build it, they will come". New stadiums started popping up all over the place, and in most, but not ALL cities, they were also key to driving up attendance. So how about the new Nationals park? It opened to rave reviews, and a near-sellout (that's right - there were a few empty seats for the debut)... And for game two? Well, the announced paid attendance was 20,487 - less than half of the stadium's 43,000 seat capacity. Mind you, major league rules dictate that attendance be counted by number of tickets sold, NOT actual butts in seats... So it's VERY likely there were fewer than 20,000 people in the place last night. Now, I will grant you... It was a chilly night and the game was played against the NCAA basketball championship. But if the Nats, current owners of a five-game losing streak, are in the basement of the NL East by the all-star break, it's going to be a long, QUIET summer along the Anacostia... Hope DC got it's money's worth!