RFK Stadium

RFK Stadium

2400 East Capitol Street SE

Washington DC

September 1, 2007

We managed to accomplish this road trip in a matter of 24 hours. As in drove down to DC, watched a game, and drove back to New York all in one day. Why would we make ourselves so miserable? Because we’re poor planners, that’s why. Instead of staying overnight in a hotel, our only alternative would’ve been to nap in the Ford Focus in some creepy ass pit stop parking lot. We literally had barely enough money to get ourselves to the game, let alone pay for a hotel room.  Thankfully, Mamadukes loaned us her EZ Pass. It only took us 5 hours to drive to RFK and we made such surprising good time, that Lisa decided she wanted to see “The Pencil.” For those of you who do not know, Lisa calls the George Washington Monument, “The Pencil.” For a good portion of the trip into DC, we could see the monument in the distance and it didn’t seem that far away. Our friends, looks can be deceiving. We called one of Serena’s friends to get directions off of the Google Machine from the stadium to the monument. We had no GPS or road map. According to Meryl, all we had to do was circle the stadium and make a right. To the best of our knowledge, we did just that, but we apparently made the wrong right turn and ended up in some seriously ghetto sh*t. We were lost for at least an hour. At least. Time stands still when you’re in frightening situations, we hear. 10 minutes can feel like a lifetime. Initially, we got turned around because the streets aren’t labeled well and we ended up heading back to Baltimore. Once we realized this error, we pulled over to get gas and received awful directions from a toothless man who said to us, “Oh, baby girl, no. How did you get here?” Sir, if we f*cking knew that, we wouldn’t be here. He was very sweet, but clearly didn’t know his way around his own city. He sent us passed a dilapidated shanty where a man sold crabs from a rusted tin garbage can on his collapsing front porch. Yup, that happened. After several run-ins with extremely a-hole DC citizens and their asstastic directions (one of these charming individuals actually purposefully gave us incorrect directions), we arrived at RFK Stadium just in time to see Barry Zito signing autographs.

We entered the stadium on the third base side and could see him across the field near the right field wall. We shuffled as quickly as we could in flip flops down the third base line, around home plate, and over to right field. He started in the right field corner and moved down the line of fans toward the third base dugout. We slid into a spot closer to the third base dugout. In a matter of minutes, it was all over. He stopped at the kid 2 people away from us and jogged toward home plate to pose for photos with what we assumed was the inner city youth. Not only were we disappointed, but we couldn’t understand why a member of the San Francisco Giants was posing with DC’s inner city youth. It made no sense. Why wasn’t Ryan Zimmerman doing that? He at least plays for their baseball team!

Filled with an intense feeling of failure and rejection, we did the only thing that we knew of that could possibly alleviate this wretched sensation. And that was eat. For $5.50, we got ourselves the best sausage sandwich we’ve ever had (and trust us, we’ve eaten a lot of sausage sandwiches). The sausage was nice and spicy and covered in fresh, crisp grilled onions, green peppers, red peppers, AND yellow peppers! When we say crisp, we mean grilled vegetables that hadn’t been sitting limp in oil for an extended period of time and then served to the masses. FRESH grilled veggies. Oh, yeah.

This was not only our first traveling experience, but Mr. Met’s as well. The game’s free giveaway was a Teddy Roosevelt bobblehead.

The stadium itself is very nice, but clearly not built for baseball. The stands are situated in a way that probably makes watching soccer games more enjoyable.

The most exciting part of the game was the middle of the 4^th inning. It’s called “The President’s Race.” The Presidents in question are Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and fan favorite, Teddy Roosevelt. It’s totally possible that Teddy has more of a cult following than The Goonies. People wear t-shirts with his face on it. The sad thing is that Teddy never wins. He’s like the Susan Lucci of The Presidents. Since our game happened to be Teddy Appreciation Day (hence the free bobblehead), he was carried onto the field on a throne.

While being carried to the starting line, George Washington pushed Teddy off of the throne and the remaining Presidents made a beeline for the finish line. Obviously, Teddy lost again.

At the close of the race, The Presidents gathered at a designated place in field level to pose for photos until the bottom of the 4^th.  Naturally, because we’re furries, we took advantage of this opportunity.   

Note the Secret Service men rolling with The Presidents. Priceless. PS- Jefferson grabbed Serena’s ass. Pervert. Then again, what do you expect from our nation’s leaders?

Next order of business? The Nationals’ mascot. Because apparently every team needs 5 f*cking mascots running amuck. Unlike Mr. Met, Screech turned out to be extremely easy to get a hold of. He spent the entire game hanging around field level without any handlers to protect him from psychopaths such as ourselves.

We stopped by the gift shop to see what we could play with (because that’s what we do…we drive 5 hours to play in gift shops like a-holes…notice how we haven’t informed you about one single thing that happened on the field during the game? We assure you that we sat and watched 85% of it). They had a plethora of Ryan Zimmerman t-shirts as well as select t-shirts on sale for 2 for $10 and a complimentary Screech bobblehead. Unfortunately, the shirts were all players who no longer played for the Nationals. Despite the fact that we had almost no cash left, we actually sat there and tried to rationalize why purchasing 2 t-shirts for a Screech bobblehead made perfect sense. Thankfully, we chose to put the shirts back on the sale rack. Probably the only smart decision of our lives.

Since the Nationals were beating the Giants by a safe lead at so late in the game and since we had a long drive back home, we decided to leave. Before doing so, we snapped a photo of the field (not even from our seats because we’re incredibly smart like that).

In the parking lot, two very nice (said in a sarcastic voice) police officers pointed us in the wrong direction to get back to the highway. Regardless, we managed to make it home without losing any parts of the Ford Focus to theft or our pants. Pretty successful night, we say.

Perhaps we should’ve thought about conducting this trip because it was the last season the Nationals would play in this ballpark. Now we have to go back. Like we said earlier, poor planning.

In the genius words of Kansas, “carry on my wayward son, there’ll be peace when you are done. Lay your weary head to rest, don’t you cry no more.”