09/26/07
There are a gazillion people more qualified than I am to write about baseball's end at Washington's Robert F. Kennedy Stadium.
I've only been to three baseball games at RFK. One was a Senators game around 1969. We only went because the hapless Senators were playing the New York Yankees and my father wanted to see Mickey Mantle who was heading for the retirement dugout.
Dad was the baseball player/fan of the household. He kept the ponderous 1950 edition of The Encyclopedia of Baseball as well a later issue under the bed for handy reference and fact-checking while he was watching or listening to a game on the bedroom receivers. Once he wrote a letter correcting some anecdotal error that Brooks Robinson had broadcast. Brooks replied with a personally noted and autographed picture. Dad, by the way also wrote a letter to Hank Aaron late in 1973, a few months before Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home-run record. It must have been some letter because Aaron wrote back.
Most of my baseball memories are of The Baltimore Orioles who drew a lot of DC baseball consumers after the Senators departed in 1971. Occasionally the folks and I would go to see Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Boog Powell in the wonderful old Memorial Stadium. The abandonment of Memorial was the beginning of an unhappy trend in sports arenas that the Washington Nationals are now following.
But back to RFK, the structure that from a distance looks like a huge coiled snake sleeping 22 blocks east of the U.S. Capitol. I, who could never make time to be a fan of any sport (althou
gh I did publish one sports article), was among the 100,000 or so non-shruggers who witnessed the last few days of baseball at RFK when the still wet-backed Washington Nationals were beat in the entire series by the Phillies. So many Washington institutions have disappeared without my presence among the farewell-sayers (if there were any), so I figured it would be nice to be there. With a school friend I went to the second-to-last game.
I went to many a Redskins game at RFK. In the absence of baseball, the Redskins were RFK's soul and the stadium and its appurtenances have been withering and crumbling like a dead thing since the football team moved farther east. RFK is still the site of concerts and professional soccer, but the gentrification that has been sweeping eastward from the U.S. Capitol since the '80s is only a couple blocks away. Word is that RFK and its disintegrating parking lots will eventually become the site of retail, office and residential development. As all places are destined to become.
Next year the Nationals will be moving to a new home built in the manner of all recent stadia, a structure more costly to get into, a structure with a contrived aura of history, like those phony new diners, a structure with ads plastered or playing everywhere. The new stadium will be one with lots of "amenities" as I heard someone say. Whatever "amenities" are, they're for the female game-goer. Or for the metrosexual male game-goer.
"Amenities" are not guy things. All guys need in addition to the ballgame are hot dogs, beer, a men's room that is hopefully not flooded by the seventh inning and lots and lots of memories of games past.
Below: The Washington National's answer to the Sym-Phony and the recently-deceased Wild Bill Hagey are The Racing Presidents, two of whom are shown here on the dugout. Teddy has already become a legend in that he has never won the race from the bull-pen to home-plate.
Copyright 2007 by Neal J. Conway
