Take me out to the ball game

Scarlett and her boyfriend took me to my first ever baseball game last night. It was rad. The weather was balmy. The Nationals, who are now my team, were reliably terrible. It was almost comical really, they kept dropping the ball and hitting it in the wrong direction. Apparently this is not unusual as hitting the ball in this sport pastime only three times out of ten is considered rather brilliantly good. It's known as America's Pastime and I much prefer that to sport because it's such a friendly, convivial game. If you screw up one innings, you get eight more to give it your best shot.

Though the Nats were rather reliably screwing up. We didn't even get a run until the 7th, and that was be default for heaven's sake. In the end we lost by 9-3 to the Florida Marlins, who are like the second shittiest team in the league after the Nats.

The good thing is with supporting a shitty team is the tickets are really cheap, which makes the exorbitant prices for beer (we had a very funny beerman in our section) and hot dogs more tolerable.

I never knew I even had a sports function on my camera until last night.



For some reason the guys who rake the infield amused me beyond belief.



Some other random things which amused me:

1.When the 'guess the attendance' bit came up halfway through the last innings, the crowd booed when the right answer was '20,854' because by this point the Nats sucked so hard that at least 15,000 people had left. This is not an exaggeration.

2. The fifth innings was so boring there were concentrated efforts to get a Wave round the tier.

3. There is a race of guys dressed up as dead presidents round the field.


So it's a bit like cricket I imagine, in that the actual game can be quite incidental at times. Unlike cricket though, you have a winner in under three hours and I actually want to go the baseball. Perhaps many times again. The dawning of a frightening new era in my life this is.