‘The diamond’
courtesy of ‘BrianMKA’
The 2010 MLB season has ended here in D.C., and even though the first six seasons of the Nationals in town have offered more lowlights than highlights, there is certainly hope that things will improve for the better. While local baseball fans take a moment to reflect on where Adam Dunn lands and how Stephen Strasburg recovers, an interesting story surfaced in this morning’s UniWatch about the Nationals past. This one involves the first home the newly relocated Expos had in the District – RFK Stadium – and Paul Lukas takes on an interesting mystery after the jump.
Here’s a weird one: Erick Yohe says this photo was taken in the “M” section of RFK Stadium in Washington during the Nats’ first season, 2005.
See anything wrong there? Click it and look again…that’s an LA Dodgers logo on the armrest. Luckily for us, there is an explanation, and Lukas turned to one of his contacts with knowledge of baseball in the district, R. Scott Rogers. As Rogers unfolded, the outdated stadium needed some work when it was being cleaned up to once again host baseball in the spring of 2005. Since Dodger Stadium in LA and the stadium in DC were built around the same time, there were many similarities, including the seats. Why does that matter? He continues:
If you scour online used-stadium-seat vendors, you find that seats from both ballparks appear to have identical metal fixtures. Probably made by the same manufacturer. Seems likely then that either a few seat-frames made for LA wound up in DC at the time of construction, or that surplus LA seats found their way to DC as replacement parts. Since RFK was operated by the District of Columbia during a long era of notoriously shoddy governance, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the chain of authority caring about, much less noticing, having received the “wrong” seats.
