East Coast Baseball Fever – Conclusion

The first part of this story is found here.

Next it was on to our nation’s capital, and the newest addition to the Major League Baseball landscape, the Washington Expos/Nationals, who are inexplicably in first place in a division that also includes the annual NL East champs (Atlanta), the Boston Red Sox old-timers team (Mets), the 2003 World Series champs (Florida), and the perennial underachieving Phillies.  Somehow, Curley and I landed a penthouse hotel room at the Alexandria Hilton with a panoramic view of D.C. that reminded me of the view from the Jedi Council room on Coruscant.  Or if that image doesn’t work for you, think of Ferris Bueller leaning on the window on the top floor of the Sears Tower, only not quite as high.  Either way, we had a fantastic view. Over the winter I was skeptical when I heard about baseball returning to D.C.  Although I figured playing home games at Rogers Park in Brighton would be an upgrade over Le Stade Olympique, I was convinced that there had to be a reason why two previous attempts to have the Senators by the shores of the Potomac resulted in one mass exodus to Minnesota and another to Texas.  I thought the population of DC is too transient and distracted by other things; too many government types who aren’t from the Beltway area and who probably have allegiances to other teams anyway.  All the Texans that W. imported to the District would probably just as soon play chess with Ted Kennedy than turn their backs on the Rangers or Astros.  Plus, the Orioles, with their still-gorgeous jewel of a ballpark 40 miles away, would pummel them in attendance.

I have to admit I was wrong about the Nationals, at least in the short term.  Although their ballpark is in the running for worst in MLB (Shea and Tropicana Field are battling for that nod as well), their fans were great, especially for a franchise in its inaugural season whose sense of history (besides the obligatory Andre Dawson, Terry Francona, and Randy Johnson in a late-80’s mullet memories) is serving as a farm club to the big market teams for the past fifteen years.  (Thanks for Pedro, by the way.)  RFK Stadium is a joke, so it’s good to hear the Nats have a new ballpark on the way for `08.  Sitting in the upper deck at RFK felt like being an ant perched on the inside of a giant jelly doughnut.  That’s the best way I can describe it; the place has an ugliness to it that is hard to put into words.  Still, the fans were tremendously supportive.  Four out of five fans had on some kind of Nats apparel, from the hats with the hideous swirling “W” to the red Jose Guillen jerseys.  (I myself couldn’t resist the urge and purchased a Nats t-shirt with “ARMAS 36” on the back.  Once again, thanks for Pedro.)

The biggest differences that RFK, Citizens Bank, and Shea have with Fenway is their enormous parking lots right next to the stadium.  Around Fenway, anyone who is brave enough to park their car might have to sit in some traffic after the game, but since people are generally going in so many different directions from the central location of the park, they are generally not bad tie-ups (especially if you know the back roads and cut-throughs).  But at some of the other parks, you could sit for 45 minutes to an hour and a half just waiting to inch your way onto some on-ramp to go back in the same direction as everyone else on an equally crowded expressway or parkway.  Apparently the Metro (my personal favorite part of D.C., especially the surreal station ceilings and the insanely steep escalators) has a stop at RFK, but apparently it too is completely overcrowded, with no alternate stations in walking distance.

After the weekend at two Nationals games (including the only day game of our trip, a Sunday afternoon squeaker in which the Nats somehow pulled another one-run win out of their ass), we headed up to Baltimore on Monday and checked into the Holiday Inn Inner Harbor.  This wasn’t the best hotel we stayed at on the trip, but it was definitely the most convenient — the place is two blocks from the ballpark and about a mile from 95.  It is located on a horizontal with the right field warehouse building at Camden Yards, and you can see it from Eutaw Street and the right field concourse.  It was a perfect location; we had just enough time to check in, take a nap, hit the gym to work off some of those hot dogs and beers, and then go right back out to the Inner Harbor sports bars to play some Golden Tee and wait for the game to start.

If you’ve never been to Camden Yards and you’re a baseball fan, I would highly recommend it for a road trip.  I went down there for a Sox-O’s series for the first time in 2001, a few days before Jimi Williams was fired as the Sox manager.  The night before, I had dinner with some friends at the ESPN Zone where we ran into Joe Kerrigan (soon to be named manager in a disastrous move by Dan Duquette) and Rod “Steve Nash plus 200 pounds” Beck.  Most of the time when there’s a Sox series, the Nation takes over the Inner Harbor by storm; it is definitely an experience that all Sox fans should have at some point.

My impression of Baltimore is that it is a dingy, grubby, rather boring town with a beautiful six or seven blocks of waterfront and a killer baseball stadium.  Hey, a lot of cities are worse.  (See: Houston, TX, Detroit, MI, and Jacksonwafflehouse, FL, coincidentally the current three consecutive Super Bowl sites.)  But Camden Yards is great.  The sightlines are incredible, the Eutaw Street area is one of the best urban spaces I’ve ever seen in America, and there is plenty of space to roam around and check out some of the plaques commemorating some of the longest home runs in Camden history (including one I saw by Troy O’Leary, and the famous one that Ken Griffey, Jr. hit off the warehouse in the 1993 Home Run Derby).  Ticket prices aren’t too bad either; we were lucky enough to be there on a promotion night where we got four tickets, four hats, and a program for $44.  That’s not even enough to get you one grandstand ticket on Yawkey Way.

I love Fenway, and I still think the Fenway Experience (minus the leg room difficulties) is the best in the game.  However, if you can’t get tickets or if you want to travel around a little bit, the baseball road trip is the way to go.  For any SC readers who are interested, we are making preliminary plans for a Midwest roadie next year.  I am thinking Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee.  (We’re always open for suggestions, though.)  Even if I might never be able to fulfill my high school dream of the Great Cross Country Ballpark Tour, the least I can do is honor its memory by tackling parts of it at a time.