Orioles: Not My Home Team
Tuesday night, I made my first try at attending a weeknight Baltimore Orioles home game as a Northern Virginia resident. According to O’s owner Peter Angelos, this has always been an easy, convenient and reasonable thing to do, and therefore it was completely unnecessary for Washington to have its own team.
So let’s look at the timeline for a 1905 (7:05 pm) start at Camden Yards.
| 1600 | Leave work in Alexandria. Any later than this, and it’d take me at least a half-hour to cross the Wilson Bridge alone. |
| 1635 | Hitting backups toward 95 north, I’m off the Beltway at the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and immediately spinning onto 193 to get some cash. This is a problem, though, as with traffic… |
| 1655 | …I’m sitting in College Park, waiting to get on the Inner Loop to reach Greenbelt Metro, as the MARC train I wanted departs that station. At least I’m not on 495 yet, so I can run over to IKEA to check for something and grab a soda. |
| 1735 | After 15 minutes in Sveden, I reach the station in plenty of time to catch the next MARC Camden Line train. |
| 1735-1835 | I enjoy a smooth $6.00 ride to Baltimore’s Camden Station, immediately behind the right-field warehouse. Highly recommended, but don’t forget to ask for a round-trip ticket when you board, lest you get hit for $10 for the one-way bus ride back. |
| 1900-2133 | Orioles 6, Twins 3 (Flickr set): O’s rookie Nick Markakis hits three solo home runs in three straight at-bats, and Brian Roberts and Cory Patterson add another solo shot each off Minnesota starter Silva. Markakis’s fellow rookie Adam Loewen allows a run in the second but then retires 21 straight batters in dominating fashion. LaTroy Hawkins tries to choke away his five-run lead in the ninth, but Chris Ray slams the door with one strikeout to earn an unexpected save. The park is beautiful, by the way — if only you didn’t have to line Angelos’s pockets to attend. |
| 2153 | I’m on an MTA special commuter bus, departing 20 minutes after the last out. The guy sitting in front of me mumbles all the way to Savage about the time the bus driver took the other fifteen passengers to Union Station first and only dropped him off on the return trip. It’s an easy ride, though, and I get a blog entry finished off and posted via MacBook plus Sprint phone. |
| 2245 | The bus reaches Greenbelt. |
| 2330 | With little traffic after the 95/495 split, I get home to Reston in 45 minutes. |
That’s 7.5 hours for the trip from work to game to home, even given an optimal game duration of 2.5 hours. Take that out, and take out the forty-five minutes that it usually takes me to get home. We’re left with 4.25 hours of game-only travel time, reducible only by perhaps thirty more minutes if I plan for the 1735 train, skip the ATM run, and take the risk on a jam over the Wilson Bridge that could make me miss that train, which is the last one that arrives before game time. “But you could drive,” I hear a few of you saying. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No. Even if I wanted to wrestle 95 North all the way up, driving 90 minutes home after work and a ballgame is a poor idea at best. I did that once for Canes@Caps while living in Richmond. It wasn’t good.
Now imagine I were a little older and had a child at home that I wanted to take to the game. How would that work? Badly.
Compare this to my Nats trips. They take two main forms:
- Wait around at work to leave directly via Metro at 1800, arrive Stadium-Armory 1845. Presume an identical 2130 game ending for comparison’s sake. I’m on a train by 2145, and even if I have to wait the maximum 20 minutes at L’Enfant for the Yellow Line, I’m at my car by 2255 and home by 2330 (given low late traffic). Total time: 5.5 hours; total game-only travel time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.
- Move my car to East Falls Church for instant Toll Road access postgame. Leave work at 1715, arrive EFC 1800 (given nasty I-66 eastbound jams), arrive Stadium-Armory 1845. Again given our 2130 game ending, I’m on a train by 2145, at EFC by 2230, and at home by 2300 even if I stop at 7-Eleven before hitting I-66. Total time: 5.75 hours; total game-only travel time: 2.5 hours.
Petey-boy’s a high-priced lawyer. I suspect he’d be less than amused if an associate at his firm forewent a billable hour-and-a-half regularly to attend baseball games. But that’s the kind of thing he expected several thousand DC and Northern Virginia residents to do eighty-one times a year just to keep his pockets stuffed in Baltimore.
Camden Yards is a great place to watch a game, and the transit routes to get there make half of the journey easy. But only half — the part that involves leaving our own metropolitan area. Baltimore’s just too far away by time and geography (not to mention culture where we Virginia natives are concerned) to make the O’s our home team.
Go Nats.
24 August 2006 / 0 Comments / Tags: baseball, travel, nova