When you demand and get taxpayer money to build a $611 million
baseball stadium, it’s probably not the best idea to boast that an
additional $30 million was generously donated by the team’s owners
to “jazz up the park.” Especially if you know full well — as
Washington Nationals president Stan Kasten must have known when
making the boast — that the new Nationals Park, opened for
business this April, is about as jazzy as a kazoo.
Baseball stadiums may not be the kind of thing you can just
plaster over with a Bea Arthur poster, but the gall with which
Washington has celebrated the unveiling of one of the blandest,
most poorly designed major league stadiums in the country is still
difficult to fathom.
Nationals Park really has to be seen to be pitied. The
Washington Monument, potentially visible to half the crowd, is
concealed from all but a tiny nosebleed section by a staircase
perfectly placed in the adjacent parking structure. Any sights
available from the other side are blanked by a giant generic
scoreboard, and I’m sure no other stadium contains a large section
of $30 seats whose view of the right-field corner is entirely
obstructed. The food is limited and awful.
Most new parks contain a quirky distinguishing feature.
Houston’s Minute Maid field takes a sudden spike in elevation at
deepest center. AT&T Park in San Francisco is backed by the
bay. Diamondback Stadium has a swimming pool.
Purists find this stuff gimmicky, but Nationals Park could’ve
benefited greatly from, say, a water hazard behind second base, or
barbed wire along the foul lines — anything to make it more
memorable than the cheap movie-studio set of a baseball stadium it
presently resembles.
There is a slope behind the right-centerfield wall that might
grab your attention for several minutes as you slowly realize that
it’s covered by a dark-green felt trying to imitate grass almost as
successfully as a foosball table. Dark-green felt. $611
million.
I WASN’T AROUND when excuses were being made for the $611 million.
That kind of money could’ve gotten Washington the Oakland A’s —
175 more wins than the Nationals franchise since 1999 and worth
only $323 million according to Forbes — with plenty left
over to bring a Wal-Mart to Dupont Circle.
Apparently the excuses had to do with revitalizing the Navy Yard
district where Nationals Park resides, but it wasn’t long before
the focus shifted to revitalizing Nationals Park. A sizeable “Kids
Zone” arcade already exists to distract patrons from the pathetic
display of baseball on the field. It hasn’t been enough to prevent
the Nationals from drawing record lows in attendance for a new
ballpark’s opening months.
Nor does the behavior of those who do attend indicate that
baseball’s comeback to Washington will, as comebacks go, rate any
closer to Jesus II than Michael Jordan III. The bulk of the crowd
at the Nats-Brewers game on Memorial Day, which featured two
identically fat first-basemen, filed out by the fourth inning.
When the game went into extra innings at the wee hour of four
o’clock PM, the place was basically
empty. I was there, but that’s only because I could enjoy the
privilege of rooting against both teams.
Baseball isn’t really a game of strategy, much less of
personality or drama. It’s a game of endurance — of grinding down
the pitcher’s arm and then getting the other team out. Each game
has minimum of 51 definite moments of pain and uncertainty.
But for paying observers at Washington’s latest subsidized
monument to mediocrity this summer, those many moments won’t be the
only thing they’ll have to endure.
