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.)

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Scoreboard: Yankee Stadium

No, my blog isn’t limited strictly to customer service rants these days.

On Thursday, I made the run up to Yankee Stadium for the Yankees’ day game against the White Sox, making it my 11th major league stadium. I’m no Yankees fan, but the place is an integral part of baseball history, and it’ll be gone at the end of 2008. This is the time to see it, and so I caught jetBlue up and Amtrak back.

• Alarm 0400, Josh 0
• Dunkin Donuts IAD $4, Josh 2 (donuts? OK.  $1.69 for a half-pint of orange juice, not so much)
• jetBlue 1300, airlines that don’t provide DirecTV and respectable legroom 0
• Port Authority $5, Long Island Rail Road $7, subway $7, Josh’s transit pass collection 2 (AirTrain and LIRR sell a combined ticket)
• Bottled waters 5, high temperature 94, Josh 0
• Central Park chillout 45, Josh ++
• Josh 4, NYC subway confusion 2 (only a couple of missteps, neither costing more than 5 minutes)
• Stan’s Sports World $7, travel bags safely checked 1
• Stadium collections: MLB 11, NHL 8, college football 10 (regularly-scheduled)
• Tradition 5, modern accommodations 2 (Hammond organ++)
• White Sox 8, Yankees 0 (middle 2nd)
• White Sox 8, Yankees 8 (end 2nd)
• White Sox 13, Yankees 9 (final)
• Penn Station KMart $16, non-foul shirt and deodorant for the ride home priceless
• New Jersey 40, Amtrak schedule 0 (darn you)
• bedtime 0000, Josh’s day 20 hours
  

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.

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Loyalties and Motivations

I could have been a Mets fan. In late 1988, I took notice of Gregg Jefferies (talk about mistakes) as the Richmond Braves’ season ended, after seeing baseball in person for the first time that summer. For Halloween, I demanded to be the Mets’ rookie shortstop, and my mom dutifully ironed a number 9 onto the back of the pinstriped shirt we had bought in the mall a few months before. A year later, though I would decry the injustice of Jerome Walton winning the National League Rookie of the Year award, I really couldn’t have cared less about the pride of Flushing, Queens. I was a nine-year-old kid. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Sports team loyalty is like that. Though people try to establish rules for sports fandom, the actual practice of choosing and holding an allegiance varies quite a bit. Just take a look at the hockey blogs riffing on this theme:

• Penalty Killer Chris kicking off the topic, with his team loyalties following a combination of parental and personal moves
• Abel to Yzerman demanding some geographic loyalty, after seeing too many out-of-state Wings fans line up with the Yankees, Cowboys and Lakers to boot
• Acid Queen (from whom I found the topic) just asking for honesty about your motivations

So here goes. Read More »

Photoblogging: passing the time

See the full Honeymoon set

Normally I’m the one with baseball on the brain.

See the full DC Scenes Seen set