So I am back from the west...

And am one night past from attending my very first game at Chase ballpark in Phoenix...

The win was great, as most excellently (as usual) recapped by Screech's Best Friend, so I won't go into that part of the experience, but there were a few things I noticed that make me very very proud to be a fan of the Nats...

I went with former section 320-er and now current Phoenix resident Canadian Jim, along with his friend Kathy and her kids, so there was at least us to cheer on the Nats. More on that later...

The stadium's pretty cool, looks like a huge behemoth-type convention center on the outside, but inside the closed-roof air conditioned complex, it's pretty much as described in that reborn (Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and) Chevy commercial, selling sushi, goat-cheese pizza, barbecue, and a weird purple amalgam of the ("wait...what's a") rally monkey (I myself found a most wonderful 20-ounce Fat Tire Amber for $9.50, so I was set). The concourse is wide, clean, and open to the seating, so you can see the action from wherever you walk. They opened the roof pre-game, which was my first time witnessing one of those amazing engineering feats. There are tons of scoreboard bells and whistles, including (as Carpenter just pointed out in tonight's telecast) two out-of-town scoreboards in opposite corners only for that purpose. Nice. The upper deck is all one huge upper deck, and looks from below about as steep as the angled faces at the top of the Washington monument, to which Jim correctly pointed out "you'd need a ski-lift to get up there..." We noticed none of the yellow-shirt concession peoples up there, so we were very happy to be sitting in the visitor's equivalent to the 320 section in RFK...

The 9/11 remembrance proceedings were as one would expect, until the National Anthem was sung by a vocal trio named "Valor," which was pretty much a debacle all the way. I won't go too much into it, but imagine a combination of the Anthem sung in the style of "The Longest Time" by Billy Joel. I was cringing the whole time, and noticed a large assortment of "what the ****" looks on a lot of people around me. Surprisingly they got a good round of applause, but that might have been simply out of respect for the moment, or that they were done.

The game started with our ALFONSO-SORIANO cheer, and Jim noticed a few heads popping up from around the Nats dugout, while I noticed more "what the ****" looks from the crowd around us, much to my delight. Right afterwards someone yelled back "Nationals Suck!" to which I yelled "Well, Duh!" It was good fun.
Today before I left, the game was recast so I listened for our cheer, and sure enough, there it was! Which leads me to why I could hear it on TV in the first place...

D-Backs fans could double as gravestones. It was unbelievable. They'd cheer for the home runs of course, but other than that, it was pin-drop. You know when you're at Camden Yards or now at RFK, and you can hear the radio broadcast of the game in the concourse? Well, I could hear the D-backs broadcast in my seat. The only time the crowd made noise was when the scoreboard would request it. It was like Camden in that respect, with the people there for the food and fun, and oh by the way, there's a game being played...

So we're doing our cheers, and every time Alfonso failed to reach base, I had to give props to one woman behind me who would cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West (no kidding) it was really funny. I was really hoping that Soriano would jack one, as at one point, one D-Backs fan yelled out that he was overrated. It seriously took every single ounce of my father-tought diplomacy to remain seated and quiet. Anyway, as the innings passed on, and the beers were as well, we noticed a group of approx. 20 Nats fans to our lower left who started cheering "Let's go Nationals", so it turned into an "us vs. them" with the D-Backs fans. We won. Hands down. They'd pipe up any time we started cheering, but aside from that, nothing. Bupkiss. I was actually really embarrassed for the Diamondback players. Also, one of the methods Chase field employs to rally the fans is a sound they fill in (presumably) of a rattlesnake rattling, but it wound up sounding like a super-huge radiator blowing steam, which was really loud, and insanely annoying. Didn't help that I was sitting right under one of the speakers. I was one letter shy of going postal by the 8th. Lastly, we got to see the mascot, (I think) named Baxter, who looks like some sort of cat-raccoon-thing which took a slightly larger toke off of a hash pipe than expected. They must be somewhat embarrassed as well, because I only saw him in the stands from the bottom of the 7th. Now, I understand a snake might not be the best choice for a mascot, but jeez, this guy makes me actually proud to have bobble-bellied Screech as ours.

Overall, I gotta say it's wonderful being in a stadium filled with people who are there for the game, paying attention to every pitch, and reacting accordingly. I am very very proud to be a Nats fan!

Anyways, it was a good time overall seeing and cheering the win with an assorted 30 or so Nats fans, I got back just in time to catch the last innings of tonight's game, and Cardiac Cordero's now on the mound to (hopefully) close this sucker, so I'm gonna roll. Have a good one!

Cheers