I am of two minds when it comes to baseball. I have a deep affection for the game itself, its history, the ups and the downs, the whole 9 yards. But let’s be frank for a minute here:

The Nationals are six and a half innings into their first game (and likely their first loss of the season) and all I can find on the Nationals Website are press releases that serve one purpose and purpose alone: blowing sunshine up our asses. There’s a paean to Mark Lerner’s first opening day as the owner of a baseball team. There’s a love letter from Dontrelle Willis (wait, doesn’t he play for Florida?) and how much he likes DC (too bad we can’t talk to him about moving up here…) and an article about how glad the team is that they don’t have to move this season.

Wow guys, I’m so glad that you’re skirting the issue that the Nationals are going to be a historically bad baseball team. As in, give a run for the money to 62 Mets for sheer infamy in the annals of the game. As in, Good God, I hope we win 60 games this year. Or, “please God, can there be a rainout tomorrow?” bad. This team’s depths are entirely the doing of hapless GM Jimmy Bowden and his absolutely, positively inept front office. I need only turn you to the page in history, just last year, where we let Alfonso Soriano go to the highest bidder in exchange for…

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs
Right. Nothing.

My understanding of our pitching rotation is that it consists of John Patterson and three guys that we hope can get through four innings without giving up a dozen runs each. Trading Soriano for a pair of pitching prospects might have made some sense. Trading Soriano for someone who can throw the ball over the plate on a repeated basis might have been reasonable.

Now, let’s not heap scorn on just the baseball players. Let’s talk about RFK for a second. I was physically unable to get a hotdog today.

At no point during the game were the linesa shorter than two innings. When I tried to go back in the 7th, there were hotdogs, but no buns. Who the fuck orders more hotdogs than they order buns? I mean, I get that they come 8 buns to a pack, but 6 dogs to a pack, but the solution here is to use combinatorics, a word which I alone learned on Square One back in the late 1980s, and come up with an equal fucking number of hotdogs and buns. Folks, this is not rocket surgery. It’s fucking concessions. Owners were supposed to fix this situation, not carry it forward. Yet, this opening day, much like the previous two, have brought concession lines that were unacceptably long, and concessions unable to cope with the demand of a full stadium.

I can’t speak to the truth of this, but when RFK held the Redskins, and 70,000 screaming fans came to each game, the concessions must have held up, so how is it that they couldn’t deal with a measly 40,000? You had to think that they would have a pretty full house today. But, either the ownership was too cheap to supply the stadium properly (which, given their offseason move, I can see being the case), or the concessionaire Aramark was completely unprepared, again, (which, having seen their performance in the past could also be the case) and the result is unhappy fans watching horrifically bad baseball.

Gosh, and they wonder why they’re not selling out?

Mr. Lerner. Mr. Kasten. Fix the problems. Either give us a club that we can truly root for, or give us a ballpark experience that’s at a bare minimum enjoyable.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs