Tag Archives: RFK Stadium

Ballparks I’ve visited: 17 and counting

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Spending Monday through Friday in New York to attend a couple of conferences brought a couple of benefits a little afield of work: catching up with old friends and crossing another ballpark off my list.

Photos from the stands of Fenway Park, Safeco Field, Dodger Stadium, Rogers Centre, Wrigley Field, Citi Field and Jacobs FieldWith Thursday’s visit to Citi Field, I’m now up to 11 current ballparks, plus six defunct stadiums. The ones still in use, sorted by how often I’ve been there and, for the places I’ve visited only once, oldest to most recent attendance:

  • Nationals Park: In three words, my baseball home. It’s not the best looking ballpark, but it works well. And it’s been amazing to see the neighborhood grow up around this place. Now if I could just be in the stands to watch the Nats win a postseason series instead of lose one…
  • Camden Yards: I don’t know exactly how often I’ve been to Orioles games here–I don’t have dates for the visits in the ’90s before I kept a digital calendar. Anyway, it’s a great ballpark, aside from having concourses without a view of the field.
  • Fenway Park: Seeing the Red Sox beat the Yankees here in 2002 remains one of my better baseball memories, and that experience also finally got me to start paying attention to standings and box scores.
  • Pac Bell Park: No, I’m not calling it “Oracle Park.” Three renamings in 16 years is weak, and Oracle’s abuse of intellectual-property law is grotesque. Aside from that, lovely place.
  • Wrigley Field: My wife and I saw the Nats beat the Cubs 5-4 here in 12 innings during the magical first half of the 2005 inaugural season.
  • Progressive Field: My uncle got some amazing seats for an Indians-Yankees game in 2007–so good that my friend Robert Schlesinger, watching at home, noticed somebody wearing a Nats cap behind first base and then recognized me. Thanks, Uncle Jim.
  • Dodger Stadium: We were in the stands here in 2012 for Bryce Harper’s second game as a Nat.
  • Coors Field: On the first day of Free Press’s National Conference on Media Reform, I decided to ditch the afternoon events and scalp tickets so I could see my second home opener in a week.
  • T-Mobile Park: My wife and I caught a game at the then Safeco Field in June of 2013. Good job on the ballpark, Seattle.
  • Rogers Centre: I had a ballgame-sized hole in my schedule the day I arrived in Toronto for the Collision conference last month, so I bought a ticket and saw the Red Sox thump the Blue Jays 12-2. Sadly, the long security lines outside prevented me from getting in before the first pitch and hearing two national anthems.
  • Citi Field: This is another good retro ballpark, but the absence of development nearby makes it an outlier among ballparks.

And here are the defunct ballparks I’ve visited, listed in the same order:

  • RFK Stadium: My fondest memory of this concrete donut will always be watching the Nats bring baseball back to D.C. in 2005.
  • Veterans Stadium: The first major-league baseball game I ever attended was at the Vet, which probably explains why the baseball gene didn’t activate until years after that childhood outing to Philly.
  • Astrodome: This should come with an asterisk, as I definitely remember going to the Astrodome during the year my family lived in Houston but can’t swear under oath that it wasn’t a rodeo.
  • Three Rivers Stadium: My brother and I saw Barry Bonds play for the Pirates here in the summer of 1991. As I recall, the Pirates lost.
  • Yankee Stadium: I wore a Red Sox cap in the bleachers in 2005. Let’s just say I felt like quite the minority at this Yanks-Jays game.
  • Shea Stadium: I saw the Nats edge the Mets here in 2007 and kept thinking of how much the place reminded me of RFK, but with a lot more air traffic overhead.

As for ballparks I haven’t visited, PNC Park tops the list by a considerable margin. (Anybody know any tech conferences in Pittsburgh?) Petco Park probably comes next; I could have crossed that off the list last summer had I flown into San Diego two days before a family wedding there instead of one. After that? I’ll leave that up to where travel takes me and if it leaves ballgame-sized gaps in my calendar.

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Another experiment in spending Facebook’s money on a Facebook ad

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Last week, Facebook offered me a chance to play with the house’s money: a $10 ad credit to boost my ode to RFK Stadium, which the social network’s algorithms had seen drawing an outsized audience on my page there.

Facebook RFK-post ad reportLike the last time I got this freebie, I could target people for the ad by geography, interests (as perceived by Facebook), age range and gender. Unlike the last time, I got this warning, Facebook’s belated response to learning that its self-service ad system was not magically bigotry-proof: “Ad sets that use targeting terms related to social, religious or political issues may require additional review before your ads start running.”

The logical demographic to target for a post about RFK would have been the greater Washington area–but Facebook didn’t present any such option. In a hurry and on my phone, I told it to target users in D.C., Bethesda, Silver Spring, Alexandria, Arlington and Fairfax.

Then I stuck with the default age range of 21 to 65+ and added the following interests: music festivals, Washington Redskins, Washington Nationals, D.C. United and local history. RFK being its dilapidated self, it’s too bad “peeling paint” wasn’t a choice.

Three days later, I got my results: The ad reached 847 people and yielded all of 26 clicks through to my post here. That leaves me nowhere near Russian propagandists in using money to get people’s attention on Facebook–even if in terms of reach I fared about as well as Sens. Mark Warner (D.-Va.) and Amy Klobuchar (D.-Minn.) did in their test purchase of ads to lure Hill staffers and reporters to a fake Facebook group.

But while I still see no reason to spend my own money on Facebook ads, I hope the site continues to throw out these freebies. It’s fascinating to see how the marketing machinery works from the inside; that alone easily justifies the time I put into my Facebook page.

It’s been real, RFK

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The circular shrine to crumbling concrete and peeling paint at 2400 East Capitol St. SE is about to lose its last reason for existence. More than 56 years after it opened, RFK Stadium will host D.C. United’s last home game–and then, with United moving to Audi Field next year, face a future of essentially nothing.

It’s been over 10 years since I’ve had a chance to inhale any of RFK’s fumes–since Sept. 23, 2007, when the Nationals closed out their three-year tenancy there with a 5-3 win over the Phillies. Beyond the win, the highlight of that afternoon was the “SHORT STILL STINKS” banner fans briefly hung from the outfield wall–a nod to the protest of fans at the Washington Senators’ final game at RFK in 1971 before villainous owner Bob Short moved the team to Texas.

Washingtonians tend to have long memories about RFK.

Mine start with the Rolling Stones concert I saw September of my freshman year at Georgetown, when anything east of Union Station seemed unimaginably distant from campus. I had neither the budget nor the interest to pay for tickets to any Redskins games–even though our NFL franchise wasn’t objectively cursed at the time–but I did make my way back to RFK for the occasional mega-concert: U2 in 1992 (still the best show I’ve seen there), the Stones again in 1994 and U2 for a second time in 1997.

For Generation X D.C., however, “RFK + concert” will always equal “HFStival.” That all-day music festival put on by the long-gone modern-rock station WHFS packed the stadium and its parking lots every summer in the mid 1990s. I attended it two or three times as a paying fan–then covered it for the Post in 1995, 1996 and 1997.

Seeing Soul Aslyum, Tony Bennett (!) and the Ramones close out that first show from the risers was definitely one of those “I can’t believe I’m being paid to do this” moments. So was taking a break from carrying a notebook around 1997’s show to try crowdsurfing for the first and only time.

I also saw one or two Skins games on other people’s tickets, then later went to a few D.C. United games, but it took most of the next decade before I got any regular acquaintance with RFK as a sports facility.

The Nats’ home opener in 2005 kicked off the place becoming a part of my life every summer for the next three years. I developed a profound acquaintance with the many ways a bad baseball team can lose games, along with how hot a 45,000-plus-seat concrete donut can get when no outside breeze reaches the stands.

But we did win a few games too. My favorite after the team’s debut: the Father’s Day victory over the Yankees in 2006, when Ryan Zimmerman belted a walk-off home run over the outfield wall and the place erupted in bedlam. I still don’t think I’ve ever heard RFK get so loud.

Sunday, I’m going to see if RFK’s last home team can win one more there. Soon enough, RFK will become like the old 9:30 Club’s smell or National Airport’s Interim Terminal–something D.C. types of a certain age laugh knowingly about more than they actually miss. But first, I want to see those stands bounce one more time. Vamos, United!

4/15/2018: I finally spotted an error or three and fixed them.

A game 7 or 79 years in the making

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Today, I’m going to the first postseason baseball game I’ve ever attended. Game 3 of the National League Division Series between the Washington Nationals and the St. Louis Cardinals will also be the first major-league postseason game to take place in the District since Oct. 7, 1933.

I didn’t quite allow myself to think that we’d reach this moment in the middle of July. Going back to a chilly April night in 2005, I was just happy to have a team with my city’s name on its jerseys.

Now? The next few days or weeks may send this place into delirious enthusiasm or push it off a cliff into a level of sports-induced despair I haven’t felt since the horror of the Grady Little game, or maybe Georgetown’s Easter Sunday gut-punch loss to Davidson in 2008. Yeah, I’m kind of a mess right now.

So if anybody needs me, I’ll be at the ballpark this afternoon. Go Nats!