Friday, 22 April 2005
A new distraction!
Got a notice today in the regular stack of snail-mail coupon spam about something that might be a great little distraction:
Potomac Nationals Professional Baseball :: Class A Affiliate of the Washington Nationals
The ad was awfully engaging, consisting of a coupon for buy-1-get-1-free tickets (up to
buy-10-get-10-free!), a season schedule, and a note that Monday & Thursday are
Dollar Nights, with $1 Tickets, $1 Hot dogs, $1 Pepsi, and $1 Popcorn!
Well. For some reason, today I found this appeal hard to ignore -- prices from 5 decades ago do that to me sometimes -- so we checked out where exactly this stadium was (since that key information was, oddly, left off the ad). Lo and behold, it's in Woodbridge, VA, which is about 30 minutes from our place. I think we'll make an excursion down there.
Additional fun stuff I picked up from their website:
Finally, I was eager to find out when exactly they became the 'Nationals', since that's a fairly recent development in baseball? And if they haven't been the Nationals since the last time there was major league baseball in DC, what have they been up to instead?
Their comprehensive archive of
near-daily press releases was very helpful:
2/14/2005:
POTOMAC ANNOUNCES NEW TEAM NAME AND LOGOS
Potomac Cannons club owner Art Silber announced that the team's new name will be the Potomac Nationals for the 2005 season. The announcement took place Sunday, February 13 at the 10th Annual Hot Stove Banquet and Silent Auction at the Hyatt Fair Lakes hotel in Fairfax.
...The then-Potomac Cannons signed a two-year Player Development Contract with the then-Montreal Expos following the 2004 season. 2005 marks Potomac's first season as an affiliate of the Washington Nationals.
The franchise has called G. Richard Pfitzner Stadium in Woodbridge, VA home since the 1984 season and has been affiliated with the Pittsburgh Pirates (1981-86), New York Yankees (1987-93), Chicago White Sox (1994-96), St. Louis Cardinals (1997-2002) and Cincinnati Reds (2003-04).
Hey, they even used to be with the Cards, too...
If you can't tell, I'm really tickled by all this... It's much more fun to contemplate going to a local field (quite cheaply) and following a team that's not made up of rich carpetbaggers than it is to fight the crowds and the traffic to get downtown and back and pay 20x as much for the privilege.
And did I mention, there's fireworks every Saturday?
4 comment(s)
I love minor league baseball. Sitting in the sun, drinking beer, watching the hardcore craziness that accompanies a minor league game? There's nothing better!
You'll have to join us for a game sometime, then! :)
Absolutely!
You should definitely check out minor league baseball.
I'm in between Dayton and Cincinnati, and since the Dayton Dragons started playing in 2000, we've been to 10-12 games a season. This year, we've decided to skip going to the Reds.
I've not seen any Carolina League teams (yet), but I'd guess the games will be as entertaining as the Midwest League games we've been too. We'll be attending a Carolina League game when in Myrtle Beach for vacation this year, too bad it won't be against the Nationals.
Most of the kids playing in A league teams know they won't make the majors, but they are playing just as hard as they can to try and get the shot. I like seeing the hustle the bring to the game, especially after watching some of the sorry play of the Reds.
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