Opportunity Knocks, But Nats Kick It Away – The Post
It must have been frustrating to see the Nats blow see key chances, but I would not know because Peter Angelo$ won’t let me watch me team.
More from The Wash. Times: Missed chances, errors doom Nats
Boxscore – ESPN
Washington Is the King Of the Road – The Post
After starting last year with nine straight road games, the Nationals start this year with seven in a row and 13 of 16.
More from The Wash. Times: Nats about to come home
Mets, Nationals told by MLB to keep cool – Star-Ledger
Skipping ahead to tomorrow’s game against the Mets. MLB has advised the Nats and Mets to just “play ball” and put the malicious Pedro Martinez’s deliberate hit batsmen behind them. We’ll see…
Nationals: Major League Baseball wins in D.C. – Wall Street Journal/The Capital (Annapolis)
An overview article of the Nationals from the Wall Street Journal, reprinted on Annapolis’ newspaper Web site.
PRESS RELEASE – Safeway, Washington Nationals Sign Two-Year Joint Marketing Agreement – PR Newswire
Is it just me or is it incredibly appropriate that the people behind the “Soviet Safeway” are sponsoring the Nats?
Don’t forget, it is still not too late to take tomorrow off and go to the game. Tickets are still available. My advice is to arrive at RFK early to get them.
Also, check out the previous post about starting a “where’s our owner?” chant. I still need to decide what inning to do it though. I suppose we ought to do it while the Nats are batting, rather than pitching. I don’t want our LF to lose his focus.
THIS JUST IN
National Tragedy – CityPaper
D.C.’s alternative newspaper slams Barry Svrluga’s National Pastime. For reviewer Mike Kanin, this book review is a chance to exhibit his own xenophobia and whine that the book is not written to support his own point of view. To wit:
The officials who brought the woeful Expos south, and the mostly doughy suburban white guys who have supported them, acted as if the return of baseball were some sort of gift that would bring prosperity to the banks of the Anacostia and easy coin to city coffers, never mind that many experts and most D.C. citizens felt otherwise…
Doughy white suburban guys — oh boy, nothing like that self-righteousness, if not racist, attitude that some District residents have…
The perfect author would have to be a committed anti-fan—someone willing to put all the gosh-it’s-great-to-have-baseball-again bullsh-t aside and take a hard look at just exactly what is going on. Instead, we get someone who really hasn’t been there before: the Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga, whose first full-time hardball assignment was the 2005 Nationals beat.
Svrluga might have used his naiveté as an asset, allowing him to look past the clichés and hyperbole flung at any MLB beat writer.
It is not as if Svrluga just showed up from J-school. He spent several years covering ACC basketball as well as the Carolina Hurricanes Stanley Cup run.
Svrluga’s material, much of it recycled from his Post reportage, comes off like he wrote it with one hand on the keyboard and the other super-glued into a foam “Nationals No. 1” finger.
Well, of course it is recycled, this is the Nats beat writer’s book. Also, everybody knows that Tom Boswell is the one wearing the foam “Nationals No. 1” finger.
In the end, Kanin is mad and personally attacks Svrluga because it is a book about baseball and not politics. That book may be written yet, by someone on a city government or sports business beat, but given that the politics have not fully even played out yet, Kanin will just have to wait a while. Until then, perhaps Kanin would be well-served by reading The Last of the Black Emperors : The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in a New Age of Black Leaders.