P-Nuts

With Mom in town and no WGN on our cable system and with the Washington Nationals on the road this week and knowing she'd be in baseball withdrawal, I purchased some tickets to the see a local minor league game -- the Potomac Nationals vs the Lynchburg Hillcats. Not knowing that it was going to be 42 degrees still at night. But the beer and nachos and luke warm dogs kept us luke warm, and our front-row seats thirty feet from the plate were pretty cool. But because this is Class A ball, or maybe because of the weather, the stadium was ridiculously sparse. On a bad night, a major league team pulls 10,000 folks. A minor league team maybe 1 or 2 thousand. I counted 127 people.
It was so quiet, I could hear discussions from the dugout on the opposite side of the field, and felt compelled to turn my phone to 'vibrate' lest I get a call during a tactical moment in the game and cause the pitcher to throw the ball at the mascot. ("Uncle Slam.") The atmosphere was like being at a tennis match, save for the sound effects coming over the loudspeakers.
It was typical small-town stadium, with billboards plastered all over the outfield walls for local insurance companies, pizza places, and Hamburger Helper (?), plus little skits and competitions between innings for the kids, as well as local discounts if so-and-so got a hit.

I never liked the nickname for the Washington Nationals ("Go, Nats!"), and thought it was even sillier to refer to the local club as the "P-Nats." But their lead-off hitter's name sounded like "Placenta", so they have bigger issues.

April 13, 2007

Final

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 R H E

Lynchburg 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6 0
Potomac 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 X 3 10 0

W: J. Lannan (2-0, 0.69); L: T. Redmond (0-2, 7.27); SV: J. Spradlin (1) HR: POT: B. Powell (2).