My Venture to Saturday Night’s Game Against the Mets – by Deputy Editor Fritz Hamme

It only took me five years of living here, but on Saturday night I stepped foot into RFK for the first time to see my Washington Nationals take on the New York Mets. My father had come down from PA for a weekend visit, and we braved the threatening rain for a visit with our new home team.

The first time I ever saw RFK was on a Sunday afternoon in October 2000. I had only been living in the area for three weeks, and an old friend from PA (who now lived in Arlington) was taking me out to Six Flags. But to get there, we had to cut through the District–driving down C Street NE and circling around RFK as we made our way to Route 214. My first impression of RFK was that it seemed to lack much aesthetic (at least on the outside), and I remember thinking, “This is where I watched the Redskins play on TV lo those many years ago?” Five years later, the outside aesthetic hasn’t changed very much, and the indoor corridors themselves took on a cold, stone, dungeon-like feeling (probably much like how old-school stadiums did, like Philly’s Vet and Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium), but the field itself looked beautiful: perfect green grass, nicely-shaped infield, an outfield wall sporting past Washington baseball numbers, even the big Washington Nationals clock in center field. Throughout the evening, as I got adjusted to the current stadium, I found myself thinking about the proposed new stadium in Southeast and wondered and how it would look and feel–and how nice it will be to see our Capitol hovering above center field.

I almost didn’t realize it was gametime when it arrived (mostly because I couldn’t hear the PA announcers), but I felt very comfortable with the Nats’ solid performance starting off. I had been to the inaugural game in Philly on Opening Day, and there the Nats hadn’t functioned as well as I’d hoped. There didn’t seem to be a lot of cohesiveness that day, but here at RFK I saw the cohesiveness I sought. Our hitters hit, our fielders fielded, and there seemed to be relatively little slop on the playing field. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find a single weak player in our lineup! Wilkerson was his usual best, as was Johnson, Guillen, Vidro, and the rest of the crew. Even Guzman did surprisingly well! My father, a relative newcome to the team, had already been aware of Cristian Guzman’s shortcomings as a fielder (he had seen on a TV recap Guzman’s bad throw that cost us the game against the Braves), but even he thought his performance was on par.

The Nats played solidly from the beginning, landing a two-run homer early on and getting one run walked in. The 5th inning had me scared, though. Bad fielding on our part allowed the Mets to get three men on base pretty fast, and thankfully Ohka’s pitching and some improved fielding silenced that threat, bringing a collective sigh of relief to Nats fans. The Mets themselves played pretty well. They had their act together, their fans at RFK were quite vocal, but they showed one very big weakness: the Mets starting pitcher (can’t remember his name) seemed to tire out early in the night. Most of his pitches went low, and I was surprised to see him hit several batters with his pitches (not to mention walking in one run). What surprises me even more is that the Mets didn’t relieve him sooner. Mind you, I wasn’t complaining, because he did give us one run to work with, but his pitching situation just struck me as odd.

The irony was, all the great plays that the Nats had came on 2 outs, i.e. we’d hit a homer of have a great double only after we had 2 outs.

I first noticed the rain in the 4th inning, but I didn’t worry about it, because it seemed rather light. Though that didn’t stop a lot of people from breaking out the umbrellas and heading for cover at the first raindrop (much like the Blue/White game recently). The rain was really of no consequence to me or my father–primarily because we were sittng under the overhang, but with this being baseball, we knew that games could be called or delayed because of the weather, so we made the call that if the ground’s crew made a beeline for the tarps, that’s when he and I would jump ship and beat the Metro rush. That came in the bottom of the 6th, right after a terrific one-two-three inning over the Mets. As the Nats took the field for the bottom half of the inning, I looked up at the lights to ponder our options for the current downpour, and when I looked back down towards the field, all the players were running for the dugouts, and that’s when my insides cried out, “Uh oh . . .” Sure enough, the ground’s crew jumped to life and began peeling the tarps out onto the field, and both my father and I knew that it was time to beat the Metro rush.

Let me state here that the Metro performed well. They were monitoring the fans coming in and out of the station, and they ran trains every 10 or 15 minutes (at least when we were leaving).

By the time we got back to my car in Pentagon City, we were nice and soaked. The rain came on very heavy as soon as we got out of the Metro, and according to the radio, it was no better out at RFK. When I tuned into Z104, it was the top of the 8th, and as we drove down 395 to my apartment in Alexandria, the Mets scored 3 runs. The radio announcer shouting, “The Mets are back in the ballgame” gave me a chill for a few moments, because at that point I hadn’t heard the score, and didn’t realize the Nats had scored another run after we’d left. (When my father and I had departed for the Metro, it was 4–0, Nats.)

They’d gone to a commercial break by the time I stopped for gas, and was shocked to hear that Frank Robinson had been ejected from the game during the commercial, evidently for arguing with the officials over whether or not to continue the game. Before I had left, I’d seen the ground’s crew throw down sand (or was it sawdust?) to dry out portions of the infield, but with the rain pummeling the field since our departure, even the radio announcers were amazed that the game hadn’t been called yet. One of them stated point-blank that this field was now unplayable.

I immediately ran for the TV when I walked back into my apartment, tuned it to UPN 20, only to find That 70’s Show running. I didn’t even know if the game would be on TV that night, to be honest–but then I noticed the announcement in the bottom right corner of the screen: Nationals, Rain Delay. It was another half hour before I went online and saw the MLB scoreboard declaring an end to the game in the 8th inning from rain, with the Nationals defeating the Mets, 5–3. With that, I rested easy.

All in all, it was a really great night! My first visit to RFK, my first home visit with my home team—hopefully the start of many more to come! Just wish I’d remembered to buy a program, though.