Nationals Park

Somewhere in the avalanche-ready disarray of my storage space, there are Polaroids of Camden Yards stadium under construction taken by an adolescent me. I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world I had seen. Maybe it still is, with the light brick and the dark steel, the warehouse completing the frame and the Bromo Seltzer tower in the distance, but it's far away for a person with a big ocean of dreams and a small trickling creek of income. So if I couldn't be with the one I loved, I decided to love the one I'm with.

I sat once in the unsteady seats of the permanent exhibition field of RFK to watch the Nationals. I recall the drive there and the parking lot more than the game. There's probably a ticket stub around somewhere to fill in the blanks but if I can remember details from the Orioles game I saw there in high school more clearly then I know it was unmemorable.

So this brings us to Nationals Park. After having an “eh, there's always another one tomorrow” attitude toward going to a real game, 2011's life to-do list included making the trip, so I purchased a three-game pack that included Opening Day, a Nats/O's game and the 4^th of July.

It was freaking freezing that day, and drizzly and miserable. The seats were right in front of a row of very loud Braves fans- the kind I was glad to leave behind in Atlanta, who were delighted their team was crushing ours, but the park was bright and red and beautiful and optimistic. I was legitimately in love.

Then there was inter-league month (seriously, when did it end?). It wasn't hard to cheer against a Brian Roberts-less Orioles. They were not the O's of my youth and I was now a resident of Natstown.

I arrived at the park once more at the end of June for the INOVA Blood Drive: another item on the life to-do list. One of the incentives was a tour and I was all on that. 

Now places I had never seen were open to me, the clubs and suites and the press box, where I should have been if I hadn't dropped the journalism wait list and signed up for linguistics instead.

The dugout was big event for my tomboy self. I had my picture taken standing there and I never have my picture taken. I came back bursting to tell everyone about the experience, knowing no one would really care, and when Groupon put tour tickets on discount, I signed up again, and this time I was going to go on a non-game day and see what was different. 

The second tour was bigger on the numbers and facts and history. That was fine with me. I imagined myself having enough money to actually buy a ticket to the Presidents Club, back up to the press box, a different view into the clubhouse and a new route to the dugout, more pictures everywhere. 

Then the bestest best part, a chance to throw in the bullpen. I got to stand where my favorite guys Tyler Clippard and Drew Storen stand and threw a few toward the plate. There is video of me. I wasn't great but I wasn't John Wall either. Happy happy happy. 

Next month, Caps camp will start and the Nats will wind down and I will be more of a mixed bag of emotions than usual. My hockey-heavy last few years made me push baseball back in importance but every visit to Nationals Park brought me back to my younger days when I was reading everything I could about the Black Sox scandal and scoring games off the radio. Thank you for that.