This is the home baseball stadium but there's nothing Nationals-istic about it and it's clearly not the real Nationals Park. Among other things, there isn't a 360-degree concourse all around the playing field; at least part of stands are just like public school bleachers, only bigger: nothing but grass and dirt underneath.
I'm not sure whom I'm here with to start, but we're talking baseball: about the trades and rosters of our team and teams across MLB. As usual, I'm a little behind with the who's who and feeling like a dilettante. This event may or may not be Opening Day—indeed, right now it may not even be a game, because players and managers and suchlike are standing around on the field in clumps, definitely a pre- or post-game kind of atmosphere. It's probably being televised and thus timed and choreographed for broadcast.
Much like the park I was in last week, I'm over on this side of the field and I need to be diametrically on the other side. But this stadium is more definitively than usual divided between home and visiting halves, with more draconian rules about walking on the wrong side; so to get from here to there I'm limited to going widdershins through or under the stands. But perhaps because this is an exhibition event of whatever kind, the stands are blocked off; and after wandering around on the ground for a while I realize anything that would be a reasonable under-stands path (or "paths to understanding!" scream Messrs. Freud and Jung, unison) is also blocked off (with a plain old rope in some cases), so my last resort is to exit the stadium and walk around outside.
I'm not sure the stadium has re-entry, but as I approach the gate in the fence, a jovial employee says, "Coming back in? I have to stamp you." In order to do so, she needs to see my ID. My driver's license is issued in California and there is another piece of evidence present (can't remember what) linking me to Florida. Perhaps I am from Florida but currently reside in California—this is all counterfeit, of course; I'm from New Jersey. While this is happening, I do not know why I'm a counterfeit Califloridian, and it doesn't seem important that I know.
In any case, the counterfeit is good because the park employee tells me she can see both states "on" or "in" me, even before she stamps some sort of Florida stamp onto my right hand and California onto my left, with big ol' banker stamps that she rocks back and forth between us to apply the ink evenly. The ink is not visible.
Throughout this stamping process we have wandered over toward ground-level concessions, where Jimmy Richards joins me for coffee. The format of the coffee is nominally similar to espresso in that an expensive doohickey is employed to force the coffee into the cup—or more accurately, to *stamp* (once again) the coffee onto the bottom of a very shallow vessel, which is actually more of a saucer but from which the thick, strong coffee is drunk. When you drink the "cup" dry you are left with that stamp on the bottom, in a dark mauve splotch that is different every time. Jimmy explains the process as the concessionnaire is making the coffees for us; this is not a brand-new thing on the market, but Jimmy just read or saw something documentary about it and is eager to share details, the last of which is about the tenacity of the coffee in the cup once stamped. Apparently it just never comes off.
We each get two of these, and when the fourth saucer is placed on the counter I take a sip and immediately say, 'Wait, was that one yours?' 'No,' Jimmy says, 'I have both of mine over here' at the next window, not currently in use. I grab both my coffee saucers, which are now large oyster shells.
Jimmy and I wander over toward the field again (I never do exit the stadium) so we can chat. It occurs to me we never talk about baseball, despite the fact we frequently go to the park together. Just as I'm wondering whether he's even a fan, he asks me whether I know anything about microbaseball. This is apparently a recognized sport with rules similar to regular baseball but with only three players on each team. I recall having seen even more minimalistic attempts as a child: one-player teams where the at-bat player throws a baseball or softball up into the air a few feet and attempts to smack it on its way down. I consider that the batter may actually have been my dad at one point, but he gave up quickly because I was quite obviously hopeless at fielding.
Jimmy is now Dan Ebeling and while he's explaining about microbaseball we wander over to a demonstration thereof. Apparently there are only three stops around the bases in microbaseball: first, second, and home. That is, once you get to second base, you need to score on your next legal run—you do need to touch third base, but there's no safe stopping there. I voice as much to Dan, who's standing on my right; but as I finish with "You have to tag third but then you have to come home," the fellow standing on my left clears his throat in an attention-getting way; I look at him and he's making a "you're an idiot" face, rolled eyes and all. He gestures with his eyes and head that I should look again: and I see on the demonstration field that home plate—bizarrely and in posible reference to _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_—is actually labeled "5th base". I try to make sense of this seeming absurdity: it *would* be fourth base, except you can't call it that because it's the third place you need to run to; but you can't call it third base because there's already a third base even though you can't stop there. So fifth.
Nope, that's still really dumb. Maybe it's called fifth because it's the only base that's five-sided.
Oh, yeah, the guy on my left making me feel like an asshole for using the wrong terminology? He's Donald Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment