The Post’s Thomas Boswell has a great article today about the new Nationals’ ballpark:
Manager Manny Acta already has his favorite seat picked out. Not a fancy box seat or suite, but a lower-deck outfield perch just above the Nationals’ bullpen in right field with the game spread out before him like a panorama and the Anacostia River just over his shoulder. “The perfect place to watch a game,” he says, as if he wishes, for a day, he could be a fan.
Reliever Chad Cordero finds himself so curious and vaguely excited by the final touches at Nationals Park that he goes on the Internet “almost every day” just to look at rooftop photographs — updated every 15 minutes — that show the tarp being taken off the field, exposing a winter’s growth of brilliantly green grass, or the first nighttime lighting of the huge scoreboard.
John Patterson has deliberately never visited the site. He wants to be hit in the face with the whole experience so, he hopes, it will leave the same indelible impact as “the first time I saw RFK the day before baseball came back to Washington. I want to know how the new park looks, but I’m more interested in how it will feel. Will it be exciting, full of energy? What makes Wrigley Wrigley or Fenway Fenway? You don’t know until you’re there and feel it.”
Ryan Zimmerman, Nick Johnson, Dmitri Young and Austin Kearns buzz about the same subject: Just how much closer will the fences be than they were in enormous and almost certainly mis-marked RFK Stadium. “It can’t be worse,” Zimmerman cracked. “The difference in how the two parks play could be huge, just huge. We’ll find out,” Johnson said. “You had to crush the ball to get it out of RFK.”
Those 377- and 370-foot signs in the left and right field power alleys in the new park, in the same place where so many solid drives turned into outs for the Nats in the past, may now be doubles or homers that skim into the seats. Supposedly, RFK was 380 feet in the gaps, but almost no Nat believes it. Try 390.
“If it’s really 10 to 20 feet closer in some places, that’s a whole lot,” Kearns said. “Only two guys hit opposite-field home runs to right field in RFK last year: Ryan Braun [of Milwaukee] and Zimmerman.”
From everything I’ve read it looks like a great ballpark.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
When you know what a real baseball game looks like, you can really appreciate this park. Its awesome.