Less than a month from now, the folks in the Washington DC area will be inundated with stories in the local papers about the glory of the new baseball stadium in town. Fans in other parts of the country will hear about it but won’t necessarily have it hammered down their throats for about a week. I said many times that I wasn’t anywhere near certain it would be ready to open on time; I was wrong it will open on time. But when you hear about the “glory” and the “magnificence” and the “paradigm changing nature” of the new park, please take all of that poesy with a grain of salt. Here are some things that are going on.
The stadium itself has 1,200 parking spaces. The DC government has decided that it will place restrictions on street parking around the stadium as a way to encourage people to take mass transit to the games. The Nationals have arranged with private parking areas to have spots for season ticket holders only and they plan to run shuttle busses to and from the park from various other hubs nearby the stadium. This is truly a “new paradigm”. You spend more than $600M on a stadium planning to recoup a large fraction of those costs from fans attending the games and then you make it inconvenient for them to come to the stadium.
The Nationals count their “season ticket holders” in a very generous way. If you buy a 20-game plan, you are a season ticket holder. The way I learned math, that would make you a “one-quarter-season ticket holder” but whatever… Last year, the Nationals had about 16,000 of these “season ticket holders” coming to see a miserable team in a miserable stadium. Let me paraphrase Dennis Miller in describing RFK Stadium:
It stunk like a guy eating cheese while getting a permanent inside the septic tank of a slaughterhouse.
Naturally, you would presume that with the magnificence of the new stadium all of those fans in DC who had been starving for baseball for all those decades would be knocking themselves out to get tickets. New stadiums have done that to attendance just about everywhere else even without that level of pent up hunger for baseball in their fandom. As of the last week in February, the Nationals had sold 18,000 season tickets – a rise of approximately 12%.
The Washington Post has already begun its drumbeat to build up the stadium. In its Food Section last week, there was a feature article on the culinary delights that will await fans in the new park. Of course, sushi and vegetarian options will be available – - as if no other park in any other city had thought to do something so new and different. But what caught my eye was something that may indeed be the biggest “paradigm shift” in recorded history. An outfit known as “Kosher Sports” will have several kiosks in the stadium that will feature – according to the Washington Post – kosher hot dogs, potato knishes and Italian sausage.
I am not a graduate of any culinary institute; I am not a theologian; I have never participated in any rabbinical studies. But the juxtaposition of “Italian sausage” and “kosher” is a bit difficult for me to get my brain around. Those two things go together about as naturally as do peanut butter and champagne – - or maybe Roseanne Barr and Aida.
If you go searching for information about how Italian sausage might get to be kosher, check out www.worldpork.org. According to that site, “If it’s about pork, you’ll find it at NPPC’s World Pork Expo,” this June in Des Moines, Iowa.
Speaking of baseball stadiums, the nonsense about the “re-naming” of Wrigley Field goes on and on and… Seemingly lost in the rhetorical flourishes is a statement from the Illinois Sports Facility Authority – an entity which might think of buying the stadium from The Tribune Company at some date – that it will take between $350M and $400M in renovations to fix up Wrigley Field. That’s close to the cost of a completely new stadium so that should give you an idea of what Wrigley Field is like. Other than its iconic status, it is basically falling apart.
Here’s an idea for Chicagoans. How about someone with more money to spend than brains paying for the naming rights to Wrigley Field and changing the name to Comiskey Park? Talk about cheesing off the fan base…
I am beginning to hear stuff on sports radio that it’s about time for Barry Bonds to get an offer to play for some major league team because he can “help a team win” and because he would be the player that would “put such-and-such a team over the top.” Let me be clear about this; I don’t care a fig if Barry Bonds plays baseball this season in the major leagues, the minor leagues or in the Inter-Galactic League. But the rhetoric is what is really over the top. Unless I was in a coma for a while and missed a few seasons, the last team that Barry Bonds put over the top won 71 games last year and the Giants have been mediocre at best for several years now with him as their centerpiece. Barry Bonds might be relevant if he were with a contending team but he will be irrelevant at best with a team like Tampa where he might “lead them” all the way up to 78 wins. So what?
If Barry Bonds is to be of value to any major league team, it would have to be an American League team where he would DH for most of the time and actually play in the field about once every three weeks. If he has to play the outfield on an “every day basis” – whatever that means for someone like Bonds who prefers to make his own decision as to whether or not he will play in any given game – he will cost a team about 10 wins over the season. He can’t run anymore; he cannot get to balls down the line or in the gap to cut them off; his arm is good but not great; and if he makes a leaping catch to snag a fly ball over the top of the left field wall, check to see if his eyes were open when he made the catch. His only position on a baseball team anymore is “batter”. That is fact and not wishful thinking or social commentary or any other nonsense of that sort.
In college basketball, Harvard may have some recruiting violations on their hands and the NCAA is “looking into it”. When the NCAA looks into things, oftentimes it takes until the glaciers come again and then recede again before they find anything; so it may be a while until those super-sleuths unravel whatever is going on there. But I think there is a larger question here:
Shouldn’t the folks at Harvard be smart enough to find ways to cut corners without even raising suspicions that something untoward is going on?
Finally, here’s an item from Dan Daly in the Washington Times:
“So I’m watching the Tournament Formerly Known As The Bing Crosby Pro-Am on the Golf Channel, and I’m thinking: Maybe that’s what the NFL should do to spruce up the Pro Bowl — let celebrities play. Who, after all, wouldn’t tune in to see Shawne Merriman blindside Kenny G?”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…