Nats Park thoughts
I made it up to Nationals Park for the first time a couple weeks ago, after seeing close to 50 games total at RFK over the past three seasons. (Needless to say, the yearly average is going down given my new home — both its location and the associated mortgage. But such is life.)
RFK got a bum rap in some respects; purely as a baseball venue, it wasn’t bad, with good sight lines and reasonable prices. The problems were with the atrocious concessions, uncomfortable (and in some cases, permanently broken) seats, and the total lack of extracurricular entertainment that might not make much difference to the dedicated fan, but will draw the casual visitor and bring in extra cash.
Nats Park fixes those problems in spades. Concessions still have some work to do in terms of speed, but selection is much improved in both upper deck and lower bowl. The seats are your typical modern stadium plastic; not exactly roomy, but nor are they ergonomically-hostile like some of the upper reaches of RFK. And extracurriculars… well, everything from the Build-A-Bear shop offering custom-dressed versions of Nats mascot Screech to the PlayStation Zone to two full-service team stores and much-improved kiosks.
Whether it’s a baseball improvement is an open question. Comparable seats are predictably more expensive; my old $18 seats in section 508 at RFK seemed about even with $26 seats in new section 318. Of course, people below me in the 400s at RFK have no equivalent option; their airspace is now occupied by club suites. There are two almost completely-empty sections, one the $170+ set behind home plate and the other the $33 right-field wraparound past the foul pole, evenly priced with adjacent seats along the foul line and much closer to the infield.
But I’ve seen worse; in Philly, you might as well be watching from a helicopter in the upper deck. Nats Park and Citizens Bank Park there are very comparable venues, but Nats Park gets a marginal edge on upper-deck feel and presence within a city, i.e. not being marooned in a sea of parking. I’d call it a worthy competitor to Camden Yards just up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway; in my history of stadium attendance, those two would only sit behind Petco Park in San Diego and Fenway in Boston. All in all, a worthy effort by the Nats, and one I hope I’ll get to visit again soon.
27 April 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: baseball