- My favorite smell of baseball: the sweet smell of (Bond?) bread baking mixing with cigar smoke from all the fans. That's Griffith Stadium.
- Last time I saw the New Senators at DC Stadium? Don Lock leaping to snare a drive off the CF fence.
- First time I saw the New Nats? I had promised myself to see a game that first season, after all those years when DC had no team and fans were being siphoned away to our traditional enemies, the Baltimore Orioles. In 2005, I had a nasty heat attack about a week before the game I had tickets for. So, in 2006, even more determined, I took my wife and my Harmon Killebrew replica 1959-60 jersey, autographed, down to Washington. Having left her, happily reading, back at the hotel, I trudged through the heat. A day game in DC has to be hot, but the awful thing was to see that someone had built a statue of George Preston Marshall near the gate. Went to my seat in the upper deck in right field. Astonished to see so many fans...nobody sat in the upper deck for the New Senators, except a few smart people clustered above home plate. The Nats were playing the Yankees, a team I had come to follow during the Long Road Trip from 1972 through 2004. In the 9th inning, the Nats trailed by a run and I was sweating under the wool jersey. Nats got a runner on when a rookie third-baseman drove a ball over the left-field wall. I waved Killebrew's jersey, knowing, just certain, that the kid third-baseman from when I was little had come back to help another kid third-baseman. A worthy successor. Ryan Zimmerman us still my favorite Nat.
- 2019, mid-October, Game 3, NLDS against the Cardinals. Zimmerman was still there, although he had had to move to 1B. No bread-baking smells, and no cigar smoke. Nats Park so crowded that we gave up trying to get to any of the classy barbecue or sausage places. Daughter and I were in the RF stands when the Nats crushed the life out of the Cards. Nats were sure to go to the World Series -- something unimaginable in 1957 or 1965 or 2006.
I can't wait to get to Nats Park again.
