Northside flu

Windiess Bleacherus.

It'a a rare condition, I'll admit, usually only found in certain neighborhoods in the far northern reaches of Chicago on 50 to 60 days each spring and summer. Sadly, while I feel its characteristic symptoms today, I will somehow have to muddle through the day.

Damn it!

The Real "Crash" Davis

(and even though he went to Dook, I'm still posting his picture here)

The Nats are playing an extremely rare day home game today at 12:35 p.m. As much as I'd love to blow off work and head out to the ballpark, sadly, the work culture in this town is like an antibody to Northside, or Wrigley flu. Half of D.C. bills by the hour, and the other half are clients checking the billing records. This effectively negates the possibility of taking a little undertime, chucking the tie and lounging in the outfield for an afternoon.

Sad.

Playing hookie from work is so entrenched in the Chicago culture you almost feel a little silly not going to the game. My brother told me he and three guys in his IT department each used to sign out to a different location downtown - specifically Clark and Addison; Addison and Sheffield; Sheffield and Waveland; and Waveland and Clark - and take in a game.

D.C. is a night game town, and that sucks. But, and this is a big but, if they started playing day games, I bet people would loosen up and come.

"This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."
- Terence Mann, Field of Dreams

Justification for higher education

Back in March, as some of you may remember, I switched jobs moving from a big company (12k-plus employees) to a much smaller company (500 or so employees). This was forced upon me by the old company’s (let’s just say its acronym is a homonym for a type of tan-ish fabric) inability to win the re-compete for the contract I was working on.

Lazy bastards.

In the past six months I’ve come to really like my new company. It’s consistently rated as one of the best places to work in D.C. and I can see why. One of the best reasons I’ve found so far is the company’s season tickets at Nationals Park work their way through the rotation a whole lot quicker.

On Wednesday, my boss called to see if I wanted to go to the game that night and, having nothing else to do that evening except contemplate my navel, I said “Sure, no problem.” He told me the tickets were in the top drawer of his desk and just asked that I not scalp them. Not that I’d do that of course but, after opening the envelope I found in his desk, I understood the warning. Here’s why:

It’s not often you get offered four, fifth-row, behind home plate tickets. Except for some of the tickets I got for Heels’ games in the Dean Dome (front row, behind the goal, SCORE!) these were probably the best tickets I’ve ever had in my life. And best of all, they were free (just like the food that was served to us in our 22-inch-wide padded seats).

Seriously. I’ve never actually had to go down before to get to my seats at a baseball park. The climb to my seats, usually halfway to the stratosphere, was an integral part of the game for me. To get to our seats we had to ride the elevator down and then go through this door:

which was guarded by not one, but two very large men.

I’m not kidding with the title of this post, seats like these are seriously a justification for higher education, cause trust me baby, these seats ain’t cheap. As a comparison, I just bought four pairs of tickets to Caps games this winter all of them cost me only marginally more than just one of the tickets I used on Wednesday.

These seats confirmed something I already knew: Nationals Park is one of the nicest places around to watch baseball. It's just a pretty, well thought out stadium. This is a good thing because the team sucks so bad the Nats are almost painful to watch and the folks running the stadium do their best to make watching a bad team even harder.

Anyway, here’s a couple more shots from Section E, Row E, Seat 3:

Shortly after this picture was taken, Abe cut blocked Tom and both of them ended up on their asses. Tom still won the race.

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Technically, this one wasn't taken from our seats, but it's pretty close

A view into the secret world of the goings on in the Nats' dugout

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Adam Dunn watching Cristian Guzman watch one go by

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And while I won’t say leaving the park that night was difficult cause, c’mon, the Nats lost again, I do look forward to the next time the boss calls.

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Just Play Ball fer Chrissakes!!

Skip: You guys. You lollygag the ball around the infield. You lollygag your way down to first. You lollygag in and out of the dugout. You know what that makes you? Larry!
Larry: Lollygaggers!
Skip: Lollygaggers.
– Bull Durham

I went to a Nationals’ game a couple of weeks ago with my cousins (one who lives here and the other who was in town on business) and my cousin’s wife. And even though they’re both (the cousins) Mets fans (the Nats’ opponent for the evening), it was a pleasure to see them and spend time catching up.

You know what wasn’t a pleasure? Nationals’ Park. Not the park itself, the park is a great place to go and watch baseball: great sightlines, not a bad view and, hell, it’s a baseball game. Who doesn’t like going out to the ballpark and watching a game? Commies, that’s who. OK, maybe not commies, but you get my point.

My question is this: Why do the people who own the Nats and the people who run Nats’ Park hate baseball so much? What has it ever done to them except make them a bunch of money with an inferior product?

Maybe I’m just old school, but a baseball game is supposed to be relaxing. The game is already entertaining; it doesn’t need anything else. It’s the friggin’ American pastime. You know: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.” (OK, maybe that was an ad from the 80s, but the point still stands.) You don’t need to blast (mostly bad) music through the PA system for each batter. And you especially don’t need to blast three bars of the same music between each and every fucking pitch.

Baseball, even when played badly, which is something the Nats have perfected over the past few years, can still be beautiful to watch. Somewhere in amongst all the pitches and balls and strikes, there’s a Crack! of a bat, the cheers of the crowd, a diving catch up the middle by the shortstop, and turning two with a 6-4-3 double play. Or, if you’re lucky, the CRACK! of a bat and a moonshot of a home run.

Then the idiots in the PA booth at Nats’ Park (and most other parks around the country for that matter) go and ruin a good thing with some stupid music.

As much as I like the movie, I blame “Major League” for this situation. Blasting “Wild Thing” as Charlie Sheen walks from the bullpen to the mound was cute. But, unfortunately, it has inspired legions of wannabes.

I’m thinking the constant blasting of music and the many, many other annoyances that now call Nats’ park and other professional stadiums home are like the headsets smart people are forced to wear in "Harrison Bergeron." For those who haven’t read their Vonnegut, in the story everyone is equal under the law and made equal by the government. This is done either by the addition of weights to lessen physical advantages like strength, or headphones blasting noise to break their concentration so the intelligent can’t hold a thought for any length of time, or some combination of methods.

The blasting music and other annoyances, I believe, are there to distract us from the crappy product the Nats put on the field day after day after day after day. If you can’t pay attention to the game, you don’t notice how much they stink up the joint.

Baseball didn’t need anything more than an occasional “Da, da, dant! Da, da, dant!” from an organ for a century and it doesn’t need it now. Turn off the music and let fans learn to enjoy the rhythm of the game again.

Oh, and play more day games. D.C. needs to loosen up and learn to play hooky like the North Side of Chicago. Nothing quite like a “long lunch” on a Thursday.

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Photo credit: My friend MB, who lives in Dallas, sent me the second picture above from the first baseline of Saturday's Boston Red Sox at Texas Ranger game. The Rangers won 7-2.

Batter Up!

Well, beat the drum and hold the phone - the sun came out today!
We’re born again, there’s new grass on the field.
A-roundin’ third, and headed for home, it’s a brown-eyed handsome man;
Anyone can understand the way I feel.

- Centerfield by John Fogerty

The world famous Durham Bull. When he gets hit,

his eyes flare and his nose snorts streams of smoke.

Now I’m not that big of a baseball fan. But, every since my first game at Chicago’s old Comiskey Park, there’s just something about the start of the new baseball season that screams “SPRING” in my ear. [Note: Even though my first game was a White Sox game, my sister quickly rectified any potential fandom for the Southsiders by taking me to the North Side cathedral bounded by Clark and Addison streets and Sheffield and Waveland avenues. And while my first love is and always will be for my dreadful hometown Pirates, the Cubbies are a very close 1A.]

And while you won’t catch me watching more than five or 10 minutes of a game on TV for the next six months, I can think of few things finer than a summer evening at the ballpark. The laughter of friends (including those who couldn’t give a damn about the game) surrounds you as you gaze down toward a field of grass so green it almost hurts your eyes. The pitcher’s wind-up and delivery. The crack of the bat hitting a 94-mph fastball. A player hustling around first, stretching a single into a double and a play at second base.

I’m not a passionate baseball fan, but I am a fan of the time I spend at the ballpark each year with my friends.

And now, two of my favorite baseball movie quotes.

“Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”
- Crash Davis in Bull Durham

And, despite all the times baseball players and owners have disappointed us, I think these words pretty much say what we all feel about baseball:

“Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”
- Terence Mann in Field of Dreams

Play ball!