The Most Important 2005 Inauguration: The Washington Nationals Home Opener

Prelude and meditation

When I got off the Metro at Silver Spring at 4:30 on the day of the Washington Nationals’ home opener, I saw people dressed in Nats gear getting onto the trains going downtown. When I got on the Metro at 5:00 to join them after changing out of my work clothes and into more casual, redder clothes, there were more people dressed in Nats gear. One was wearing two Nats hats, one atop the other; a man asked him why, and he said he was carrying the other one for his eight-year-old nephew, who was also in attendance but wearing a foreign hat. The two parties instantly made friends, and by the time we got to New York Avenue station, the older gentlemen were discussing Koufax and Gibson, while the younger folk looked on intently. I didn’t join in, but I listened to it all. We were all headed in the same direction.

Before Thursday night, April 14, 2005, Washington, DC had been waiting for major league baseball to return to the city for 34 years. I have not been alive for 34 years, but I was nevertheless deliriously excited about the prospect of having a baseball team to call my own.

I have followed the Detroit Tigers during my stay in Washington. At first, it was because they were my hometown team, as I identified myself as a Detroiter, but when I realized that my home was really Washington a few years ago, I continued to follow the Tigers. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a team to follow in Washington. The Orioles were a good drive up I-95, or you could take a commuter train that didn’t run late enough to get you back. (Later they began running a return trip after the games.) More importantly, they were Baltimore’s team. They had been moved to Baltimore when Washington had a team (a team in the same league, no less), and Baltimore had supported them in the manner they deserved during their long unbroken stretch of success in the 60s and 70s. Memorial Stadium and Camden Yards were both great places to see a baseball game, but I couldn’t see either being home for a team of mine.

This fan identification thing is strange. Why should the exploits of one highly paid group of athletes excite me so much more than the exploits of another highly paid group of athletes, just because one group is based in the metropolitan area in which I live? (At least with collegiate identification, you root for the college that you went to or the one that your taxes support. Or you can be a worthless front-runner.) What such a bloodless analysis does not take into account is the thrill of being one of a vast mass dressed in the same color, hiking up from a subway exit to a stadium standing huge in the distance; the electric feeling of jumping up to cheer or boo and knowing instantly that tens of thousands of people reacted in the exact same way; the feeling of being a thread in a vast fabric as you discuss the outcome of the game at work the next day with people who debate minute intricacies of matchups and strategy.

It’s not that they’re my team, it’s that they’re our team — and especially in semi-fragmented Washington, it’s that the Nats could conceivably create a “we,” a world in which people can connect past class, race, and political boundaries, a world in which I completely agree with a Charles Krauthammer column.

The arrival

Such thoughts were among those coursing through my head as the Metro train headed underground. When we arrived at Gallery Place, the train operator announced that anyone who wanted to go to the Nationals game should transfer at the next station, Metro Center, and take the Orange Line towards New Carrolton or the Blue Line towards Largo Town Center in order to get to Stadium-Armory. Everyone on the train already knew this, but it was a nice touch, and when I did as he said I joined an even larger and more homogenously red-clad group on an Orange Line train; I grabbed a pole and tried not to sway into anyone in the crowded car. We paused a couple times so trains stopped at Stadium-Armory could fully offload, and I began jumping in place just a little bit, but my impatience wasn’t the normal impatience with Metro’s overpackedness; this was the impatience of a kid on his birthday waiting to see what the world had in store for him.

What was there: A beautiful vivid spring day, with a few puffs of cloud emphasizing the dramatic blueness of the sky and a gentle breeze. The laughter and shouts of children, the rumble of adult male conversation. (Didn’t hear all that much chatter coming from the females present, although they certainly were legion.) People promoting two new downtown bus routes collectively called the Circulator and giving out passes for rides. Protestors railing against the D.C. Council’s decision to take out $580 million worth of loans to build a ballpark instead of to build schools and hospitals and other infrastructure. A little carnival set up on the way to the stadium with slides and a moon bounce and a souvenir store. Hawkers giving away free copies of a Washington Post-Express publication called something like “Home Base” and other hawkers giving away entire Washington Timeses. T-shirt vendors, cap vendors, peanut vendors, half-smoke vendors. And everywhere, or at least until 100 feet of the stadium where it has to stop by law, people asking “Tickets! Anyone selling tickets? Anyone got tickets to sell?” They had few takers. (I personally had secured my ticket via Internet scalping the previous evening. It was a single.)

As I approached Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, it was about five minutes to 6 pm; the first pitch was scheduled to be thrown at 7:05. Lines spilled out majestically from the stadium’s ticketing gates over the hills and parking lots, and I was glad I had come as early as I could. Of course, these lines were mainly due to the metal detectors that had been put in place so that our President could throw out the ceremonial first pitch with reasonable certainty for his safety. I walked until I found a line that looked short enough and stepped up.

In the lines, a few frat boys in matching custom-made Nats-boosting shirts were encouraging each other to drink cans of Miller Lite before they were confiscated at the gates. Older men were harrumphing about how you can’t do anything in this town any more without traversing a metal detector. (I agreed with them silently.) A few kids were asking Dad what they needed to do when they went past the cops. The security people were professional and efficient, but there weren’t enough of them; no matter how nice a three-inch pipe you buy, it can’t handle the flow from an eight-inch pipe. I worried that people who arrived any later wouldn’t be able to get in quickly, and I was right to worry; Spam-O-Maticker and all-around exemplar Robert Kahn arrived about twenty minutes after I did and didn’t get in until just before the first pitch was thrown.

Entering

When I reached the actual ticket takers, I was strangely nervous. I had begun to wonder if this all was really happening, whether some jokester baseball god was going to swoop down at 7:04 pm, shout “No team for you!”, and carry the Nats into the night. When the ticket successfully scanned and the elderly ticket taker said “Thank you!”, I said “Thank you!” in return, knowing that no one would want to process this many refunds.

Pressed into my hand as I entered was a package of ThunderStix. I never opened it. I had an ambition to buy a program and score, and scoring is an activity incompatible with banging inflated plastic cylinders together. Besides, silly marketing department, ThunderStix are for kids, and indeed kids were the only ones I saw taking up the polyurethane cudgels. The rest of us made noise with our hands and lungs, which were good enough for our fathers and mothers and are good enough for us, dammit.

Inside, more lines. Lines for Nats gear, lines for hot dogs, lines for sausages, lines for beer. And none of them were moving very quickly at all. Realizing that it would be best to get food quickly and avoid an even bigger line later, I got behind four people at one stand (this was my pick for Shortest Line I Saw) and waited about seven minutes to be served. They were filling the soda and hot dog orders upon request rather than continuously filling the cups and stuffing the wrappers and serving it all whenever requested. No cashier had a dedicated helper to process orders. I got two dogs and a souvenir soda. The dogs were terrible; the soda was cold.

Thankfully, earlier I had gotten to a program vendor just as he was setting up and handed him $10 for the commemorative edition. The program is (ahem) not worth $10, but the event it commemorated was cool enough that I didn’t care. I had brought a pen with which to score, and the program had a scorecard. (It turns out, though, that the Express publication has a much better scorecard; I encourage scoring enthusiasts to pick it up as they enter RFK.) I got up to my seat (top level, but pointed right at third base) right before the teams’ rosters were announced, leaving a bit of time to sit and just look at the field.

I’d been in RFK for a Redskins game, the Tibetan Freedom Concert, and a couple soccer matches, but I’d never seen it in full afternoon sun with the baseball field laid out in front of me. It may have been the euphoria from the thin air of the 500 level (I heard one man mutter as he strode up past my seat, “I’m sure glad I took that mountain combat course”), but it felt like home. The blue sky and the rich green turf (disturbed just a bit by a sod zipper in left field, no doubt an artifact of the soccer-to-baseball conversion) played a part, and the fact that the stadium was completely enclosed in the manner typical of sixties multipurpose stadia made it feel oddly cozy. But mostly, I felt, there was soda to be sipped and dogs to be eaten and baseball to be watched, and I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Festivities

Charlie Brotman, erstwhile announcer of the Senators, first introduced the coaches and reserves of the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose job it was to play the Nats and lose (I was certain). I booed every one of them halfheartedly, almost distractedly. Though the crowd got loud when Brotman introduced the very first (and thus lowest-ranking) National, assistant athletic trainer Tim Lawrenson, we weren’t terribly roused until Brotman intoned the words “And the manager of the Nationals, Frank Robinson!” This produced the first of many earsplitting roars during the evening. When he got past the Arizona starters and began introducing the Nationals lineup, the crowd made up for its sparseness (I imagined lines stretching down to 19th Street at the metal detectors) by standing and yelling for all it was worth.

By this point, numerous soldier-looking people were standing in the outfield holding up what I dearly, dearly hoped was a freaking enormous flag. As they unfurled the rolled-up fabric into a flag that ended up covering about 85% of the grass in the outfield, the U.S. Navy Band Sea Chanters assembled in front of home plate to sing “God Bless America.” They were inadequately amplified, and several of us who could hear the tinny echo the speakers were transmitting began singing along to help. We picked each other out in the crowd and nodded at each other, and held it down until the RFK amplifier people could get their acts together. Their acts would fall apart again many times during the night. Still, seeing a flag that freaking huge stirs the heart of any patriot, and as it rippled in the early-evening breeze and shone in the still-bright sun my mind was cleansed of all amplification concerns.

The sound boys did a little better by Renee Fleming, who came out next to sing the national anthem. The Nationals should have secured Denyce Graves’ services for this duty, since she is from Washington, while Fleming has made her name in New York City (Get a rope!). D.C. was so thoroughly represented during the remainder of the evening, though, that I will grant them this one.

Fleming sang with just enough elisions and interpretive swoons to ensure that no one could possibly sing along with her. I have said this many a time: The person singing the national anthem at a sporting event should be leading the crowd in song, not making it a spectacle for him- or herself; everyone should sing, because we are all Americans, and America kicks ass. Still, she did a good job, even if I was worried that her excessively amplified high notes (sound system overcompensating!) were going to blow out the tincan speakers in our section.

Joe Grzenda, the last man to pitch for the Washington Senators in 1971, came out next and received an uncomplicatedly boisterous cheer. This was not true of the man who followed him out at a brisk walk and took his baseball, who was President George W. Bush.

I had thought about whether to boo Bush or cheer him. On the one hand, I can’t think of three policies he’s advocated that I actually agree wholeheartedly with, and most of his major decisions have to my mind flopped big-time, to say nothing of the “In my world, which should be your world, this is the truth” attitude of his administration. On the other hand, he was wearing a Nationals jacket and here to throw a baseball rather than to lecture to us abour how personal accounts won’t solve Social Security, but we should let them sit next to actual solutions in the same discussion so as to give them a warm glow. I ended up clapping but making no other noise. From the rest of the crowd, fierce cheers were punctuated by audible boos.

As flashbulbs popped, Bush threw a shoulder-high pitch that would have been inside to a right-handed batter (dusting off Kerry?). Nats catcher Brian Schneider made sure to snare it. Bush walked off the field as matter-of-factly as he had walked on it. 

With the field emptied now, the regular (unnamed) stadium announced began speaking names from the past: former Senators who were heading out to claim the positions they had once held on RFK’s turf. As the undeniably stirring music of “The Natural” played, the more experienced and the more learned fans cheered the past heroics of such stalwarts as Roy Sievers, Ed Brinkman, and “The Capital Punisher” himself, Frank Howard. The older men had toted the gloves of the current Nats onto the diamond with them, and when they had all taken their stations under the heartbreakingly setting sun, the less classic but equally stirring strains of southern rapper T.I.’s “Bring ‘Em Out” rang out over the (correctly adjusted) loudspeakers, and the new Nats took the field. Each man had a brief conversation with his predecessor, it seemed, and as some lingered longer than others I was seized with an insatiable and unsatisfiable curiosity about what exactly they could be discussing.

When the old Senators had taken their exits, Livan Hernandez stood with the ball on the mound. An absolute riot of flashbulbs popped after he leaned back and delivered. The first pitch was in there for a strike, striking a great shout of joy from the crowd. Schneider tossed it back to Hernandez, Hernandez tossed it to what I presume were the waiting Hall of Fame reps, the ump tossed Hernandez another ball, and the game was on.

The game

I’m not going to say too much about the game itself. Game recaps are why God made Barry Svrluga. However, I do have a feature that no one else I’ve seen has: most of the songs that played for the starting Nat as they stepped to the plate!

• Brad Wilkerson (LF): Some techno crap. Brad went 0 for 4.
• Nick Johnson (1B): Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”; 50 Cent’s “Hate It or Love It.” Despite this all-star parade of hip-hop songs with interesting beats, all Dr. Nick (Hi, everybody!) could muster was a first-inning single.
• Jose Vidro (2B): Montell Jordan’s “This is How We Do It.” The old-school stylee worked out well for the all-star second sacker, as he smacked a double in the fourth, going on to score the Nats’ first run at RFK, and worked the D-backs’ pitchers for a couple of bases on balls to boot.
• Jose Guillen (RF): Some song by 50 Cent. The Nats are a very 50-heavy team, a choice I am not sure I approve of. Guillen hit into a double play and left three men on, though he scored the second run after being hit by a pitch.
• Ryan Church (CF): In a choice thoroughly incongruous with his last name, the 50 Cent-Lil’ Kim (aka The Notorious Perjurer) duet “Magic Stick.” Later, in the most bizarre musical contrast of the evening, he selected John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son.” He went 2 for 4 and scored a run on a mammoth home run by        
• Vinny Castilla (3B): who had the “Goodies” (Ciara f/Petey Pablo) indeed, popping a double down the line his first time up, clearing the bases with a triple his second, and blasting a home run to left his third. By the eighth, he had moved on to 50 Cent’s “In Da Club,” which was when Lance Cormier saw fit to drill him rather than try to allow him to complete the cycle. (Otherwise, why would you throw at his back?)
  My section had risen as one when Castilla came to the plate, and a fair number of people around me were cognizant that he was going for the cycle, although I had missed the home run while standing in an unending souvenir-stand line and generally enjoying the fact that the evening was happening with Robert. (My hat is awesome!) And when Vinny got popped on the first pitch, we booed our lungs out. We continued booing Cormier on every single pitch he threw as he got a double play and a flyball, and we booed him as he walked off the field. The booing was unanimous and wild and raw and saturated the enclosed stadium. The players later said that they appreciated both the cheering for the cycle-bound Castilla and the booing after the HBP: both showed that their new fans meant business.
• Brian Schneider (C): Some techno crap. Schneider also had a forgettable game, balancing a sacrifice fly against a rally-killing double play immediately after Castilla’s HBP had given the Nats first and second with nobody out.
• Cristian Guzman (SS): I think it’s a G-Unit song, actually, but 50 is definitely doing the hook. Guzman went 1 for 4, which brought his average up to .128 for the season at that point. (Seriously, at this point, is it going to kill you to try Amerie’s “1 Thing”?) In the games I’ve seen since, Guzman has become a devotee of the Terror Squad’s “Lean Back,” which is a much better song, and he’s hitting 70 points higher! Which is still not good.
• Livan Hernandez (P): History (aka my program) does not record what exactly Livan was playing, but we did learn in this game that he just crushes a lot, pitching eight innings of dominant, one-hit ball before falling off like John McCain’s 2000 presidential bid in the ninth and giving up three runs on a booming Chad Tracy homer in the process. Chad Cordero came on to close it out and thus did not have any at-bats. Nats won, 5 to 3.

Despite the fact that I didn’t know any of my seat-neighbors, I was full of chatter throughout the game, frequently attempting to lead cheers (“LET’S GO NATIONALS!! clap clap clap-clap-clap”) and inserting myself into the conversation of the older gentlemen behind me when I felt they had ignored a salient fact (“Glaus is a great hitter as long as his shoulder doesn’t fall off”). No one minded, everyone smiled. Even when the breeze turned into a cold wind in the eighth inning, tossing around hot dog wrappers and making us shiver in our seats, it was that kind of evening.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that go-go swing, y’all

Driving to work on Tuesday, I had heard on Donnie Simpson’s WPGC morning show that Chuck Brown himself would be singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and his biggest hit “Bustin’ Loose” during the seventh-inning stretch. It was this news that pushed me over the hump to buy my scalper ticket. All this time I had wondered whether the new club would be determined to represent D.C. from the get-go, and hiring the nationally obscure local legend over the latest MTV teeny-bopper sensation was a powerful statement to that effect.

Chuck constantly emits love for his audience; if it were visible, it would manifest itself in vast, brilliant, coruscating golden rays. Standing atop the home dugout, guitar in hand, he looked as though there was no place in the world he would rather be. Everyone sang along with his “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at a respectful volume, and certain people (including me) actually danced on the stairs when he broke out the unstoppable “Bustin’ Loose.” I feel like bustin’ loose! Like bustin’ loose! Gimme the bridge, y’all!

I’m not sure everyone around me appreciated the gravity of the decision to invite Chuck — like most of the Nats crowds, this one was largely white and suburban (myself included, of course, so who knows). But I was certainly paying attention when the announcement went out that Chuck would be giving autographs after the game. They said something that sounded like “Section 251.” After the final pitch, and a suitable interval to consider the greatness of this day, I decided that getting Chuck’s autograph was the only suitable capper.

Section 251, of course, does not exist in RFK, so I decided to just wander around the 200 level until I found him. I estimate I circled about 5/6ths of the stadium, picking up a little commemorative coin PNC Bank was giving out in the process (a nice touch), before he appeared in my field of vision, sitting at a table piled high with copies of his new CD (The Best of Chuck Brown! Buy it today! It’s awesome!). A managerial person was suggesting that petitioners purchase a CD for Chuck to sign. Since I lacked the cash for the CD (which I did purchase later), I made the bet that he would sign my program.

Chuck took an incredible amount of time with each autograph-receiver, accepting the expressions of gratitude and respect with his own proclamations of love for D.C. and for the individual in front of him at the time. If this sounds artificial somehow, well, you’re not the person who told Chuck how happy he was to hear that Chuck was going to perform during the seventh-inning stretch and got an ear-to-ear smile and a spontaneous hug in return. No, that was me. And my Opening Day commemorative program says on the table of contents, “To Andrew From Chuck Brown with much love and appreciation for your support.” He wrote this carefully and thoughfully, then said, “Sometimes I write a novel!” and laughed whole-heartedly. I thanked him a few more times, then decided I had probably gotten my message across. and walked out of the stadium and towards the Stadium-Armory Metro.

Denouement

The night was festive with red-clad humanity, laughing and talking and moving towards the Metro station in the bovine kind of mass people get into when they’re trying to fit a fifty foot-wide human stream into a twenty-foot pipe. Clutching my souvenir bag, I flitted about in the stream, listening to buddies joke back and forth, kids beg parents for T-shirts and caps, young hipsters complain about the line, older gentlemen reminisce about opening days past. I made a couple smart remarks to other people about how poorly this all had been organized. Eventually I just started looking around, full of energy even though by now it was quite late, knowing that I wouldn’t be tired at all when I went to work the next day. And as we all slowly made our way to the Metro, a few phrases kept echoing in my mind:

         This is our team.

         I’m really here.

         D.C., represent!

         I couldn’t be happier than I am now.

         And of course: I have to come back as much as I can.

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