Wary at Nationals Park

I am sure you are not aware, but the Nats have one of the truly great young ballplayers ever produced: Bryce Harper.  Last year, at 19, he was the Rookie-of-the-Year and became the youngest player to have ever made the all-star game; he plays hard like Pete Rose used to, when he hits a home run he RUNS around the bases instead of strolling.  He is the epitome of hustle and effort.  People love him.  And miss him, he's been hurt and the entire team of guys way older than him have collapsed without his energetic presence. The Nats, to put it bluntly, suck without him.

So we went to his bobblehead give-away game the other day.  We figured it might be popular, so we left a little early.  Good thing.

This is Carol guarding our bobbleheads in the most secluded place we could find at Nats Park.  Why?  Because at at 12:04pm, they ran out of bobbleheads.  The game starts at 1:35.  They had 15,000 bobbleheads: the usual giveaway amount. This is a picture of the large pressing crowd at the exact same time.

 It never looks like this.  The final crowd tally was just shy of 40,000 paid attendances. And 25,000 of them were bobblehead-thwarted on a 90°+ day. These are people who thought that coming to the park 90 freaking minutes early would be enough.  It wasn't. People were pissed.  Fortunately, we brought a bag to hide ours in.  We only left as early as we did because of false bad traffic reports. So yay for misinformation!

Oh, and the Nats got crushed early, 7-1 and came back in the eighth to make it 7-6 and then just couldn't do it.  Why?  Cause the only Bryce that was there was a damn bobblehead, that's why.

But we did get two of 'em and they're going for $50-90 on eBay, so it may work out just fine.  :)