To borrow an old cliché, good seats are still available.
A year ago, seats to the Nationals’ first-ever home opener were scarce. Better seats on eBay were selling for hundreds of dollars. It was a star-studded event.
Year two? Ho hum, but easily explainable.
Where’s the marketing effort for this club? I know for a fact some off-season events were planned for and then canceled. A full-blown baseball festival or winter carnival — players signing autographs, conducting clinics, media roundtables, trivia contests, the whole nine yards — was scuttled at the last minute by Major League Baseball, presumably as punishment for the city council’s foot-drag on the stadium issue. A classic nose-cutting move by Uncle Bud. We were left with the unveiling of the new alternate uniform and cap, held at a shopping mallin Northern Virginia. Well attended for what it was, but clearly not enough of an off-season “event.”
You can’t blame the folks who currently work for the Nationals. They do what they’re allowed to do within the confines of a rather meager budget frequently manage to get blood from turnips. But I digress.
Opening Day in Washington — the artist formerly known as the Presidential Opener — should be one of, if not the hottest ticket of the year. At Camden Yards, there were empty seats on Opening Day last week for the first time in recent memory. Part of the issue may have been the opponent — the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are not much of an attraction — but even so, it was Opening Day.
The situation in Baltimore mirrors somewhat the situation we’ll observe here this afternoon. Oriole fans, in general, don’t trust the owner to do the right thing. The difference is, their owner has a name and a face — and, unfortunately, a reputation developed over the last decade he’d like to live down before selling the club.
Here, the franchise is stranded — temporarily, we’re told — on an ownerless island while Skipper Selig and his little buddy Gilligan Dupuy try to figure out what’s really in that coconut milk Professor Bonds has been drinking. (By the way, my computer doesn’t recognize the word “Dupuy” and offers “Dopey” as an alternative. Who says computers have no mind of their own?)
I’ve lived for years with the perception the Senators’ home openers always sold out. But after doing some research, I discovered that really isn’t true. The 1969 and 1970 openers were sellouts, but every other American League opener at DC/RFK drew at least 43,000 — other than 1968, when only 32,063 showed up in the wake of the riots.
I can’t predict what the walk-up will be this afternoon. But if it’s a nice day, maybe enough folks will play hooky or take an extra-long lunch hour.
Maybe we’ll hear who the owner will be. That would qualify as an event.
Phil Wood has covered sports in the Washington-Baltimore market for more than 30 years.
