Good Baseball

Camden Yards

Baseball has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember.  My dad was a huge Cardinals fan and I played baseball two seasons every year for the first six baseball playing years of my life.  I grew up in Houston and Wyoming, so I pledge allegiance to the Astros and Rockies every year; two of the worst teams in baseball.  It’s usually a fairly miserable existence during the summer.  The only relief comes with the noise of football season that drowns out things like children, presidential elections and mercifully: baseball.

Camden Yards is a lot more
fun when there's no
torrential downpour.  

So when I left Colorado for DC, I braced myself to leave one bad team for two perennially terrible teams.  In 2010, the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles were a combined 135-189, making them two of the worst teams in the league.  The one positive was that I was looking forward to seeing two ballparks I’d never been too, especially Camden Yards.  That’s where my all time favorite player, Cal Ripken Jr. finished his iron-man record of consecutive games played at 2,632.  This year had some promise to be different though.  The Nationals made trades for Gio Gonzales and Edwin Jackson on top of having a couple of young stud pitchers, Strasburg and Zimmerman.  The Orioles fired their manager halfway through 2011 and then went on a tear with their new manager, Buck Showalter, hoping to bring that momentum into 2012.

The promise became reality pretty quickly.  For the past six months, I’ve been in baseball heaven.  The Nationals finished the 2012 season with the best record in baseball and the Orioles were in a pennant race with the Yankees all year long and secured a wild card spot.  Strasburg and Harper had historically great rookie years for the Nationals, and the Orioles finished 24 games over .500 with only a +7 run differential, going 29-9 in one run games with an amazing bullpen and clutch late inning at bats. 

Presidents Race!

The best moment was on the last day of the season. I played hooky with a couple guys from work to watch the last Nationals game.  They were still playing for home field advantage throughout the NL playoffs, so all the starters were out there and the crowd was amped.  Someone else still had something to play for: Teddy Roosevelt.  Every game for seven years, Teddy has not been allowed to win the infamous Presidents Race, done during every home game in the middle of the fourth inning.  Going into this game Teddy was 0-525.  Then, in a heroic effort, with a little help from the Phillies fanatic, Teddy finally won.  There were seriously more cheers when Teddy won than when the Nationals put the first run on the board in the bottom of the same inning.  Oh, by the way, the Nationals won and secured home field advantage throughout the playoffs.

It’s been a great year to be a baseball fan in the DC metro area.  I’ll always be a Rockies/Astros fan first, but I think after all the excitement this year, and a lot more still to come, maybe when my teams are mathematically eliminated on August 1^st, I’ll still have someone to root for....