Cubbies in DC

We went to a Cubs-Nationals game at the new ballpark in DC today. A friend of mine in Chicago offered to hook us up with tics to a random Nats game of our choice through a friend of his who works for the Nationals. Being somewhat greedy, I asked if we could get tickets to a game when the Cubs were in town, although I figured that the game would be close to a sell-out since the Cubs draw pretty well when they're in town. Luckily, it wasn't anywhere near a sell-out, so we got great tickets in the lower level up the third base line.

Let's start with a review of the new Nationals stadium. It's a nice enough place. Getting there can be a bit of a hassle on the Metro when you've got a stroller and a kid in the Baby Bjorn, but if you show up at 12:00 for a 1:35 game (since you didn't convert the CST start time on the Cubs website to EST), you won't have any problems with crowded public transportation. The area around the ballpark is a wasteland - absolutely nothing worth seeing or visiting near the park. For now, at least, since there's obviously a ton of construction in the area, so I expect that whole part of the city to pick up soon. You walk from the Metro to the ballpark through a corridor of construction fences.

One "flaw" in the stadium that I've heard people complain about at the dog park is the lack of a "stunning view." The most common counterexample is Pittsburgh's new stadium where the outfield opens onto the bridges and downtown buildings across the Allegheny River. It's true that the new Nats stadium doesn't have much of a view, but that's because DC doesn't really have many stunning views. "What?" you ask. "How can the home of the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, etc. not have stunning views?" Well, it's true that DC does have stunning views in certain areas, but those areas are all taken, and there's no room for a new baseball stadium that would take advantage of them. More generally, unlike Pittsburgh which, for all of its many, many flaws, is a geographically and visually pleasant setting for a city, DC doesn't have any real unexploited vistas to use for the new stadium. So you're stuck with a stadium in an unattractive part of what isn't a very striking city, outside of the core monument area. (Georgetown and other parts of the city are very nice, but, again, you can't put a baseball stadium in the middle of Georgetown.)

The stadium itself is nice, but I wouldn't want to be in the upper deck. Due to our connection, we were sitting in the lower level, about 20 rows from the field. The stadium has a mezzanine level above the lower level that is larger than the middle level of seats at most stadiums. There are then two levels of luxury boxes. Then the upper deck and, around home base, an upper-upper deck. Those seats are way, way up, and I suspect that the view isn't too good from them. The sight lines are good enough, but there really isn't anything that interesting about the stadium - say, a great view out of the outfield or some sort of interesting gimmick in the outfield wall - that catches your eye. All of the people working at the stadium were friendly enough, although they hassled Margaret, in good humor, about her Cubs dress. And the concession line was absymally slow, the worst I have ever experienced in any ballpark.

So how did our experience work? Margaret was excited all morning: "Going to a baseball game!" she kept saying. We dressed the kids in their Cubs gear that, due to the cool weather, didn't have it's full effect as we had to bundle them up in warmer clothes. We did, however, managed to put Margaret's Cubs dress over her sweatshirt. Actually, she's outgrown it as a dress at this point, so it was more of an "empire waist" top. Lots of people, especially other Cubs fans, grinned and pointed at her as she trundled around. Since we got to the game so early, Margaret and Teddy both fell asleep around the first inning. In Margaret's case, it took some time for her to fall asleep since she was overstimulated, but completely exhausted. She fell asleep on my chest, and I watched the next four innings with her snoring away. Both of them woke up in the middle innings, and we actually managed to stay until the end of the seventh. We could've staying longer, but we wanted to beat the rush back to the Metro.

Many teams have multiple characters who run in races at some point in the game. In Pittsburgh, the race involved various flavors of pierogies. In Milwaukee, I think that it's a variety of sausages. Here, it's four presidents: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt. We tried to get a picture of our Teddy with the big Teddy R., but ours was asleep and the big one couldn't really figure out what we were trying to do. So something to shoot for in a future trip to the Nats new digs.

After all that, here are the pics.