Today Dad and I went to see the Miami Marlins play the Washington Nationals at the Nationals spring training home, Space Coast Stadium. The first stop was the Team Shop to get Dad a Nats shirt, so he did not keep wearing his Cubs shirt to the games. Also, got some pics outside with the Casey at Bat and space shuttle statues, although the car salesman kind of made it not worth going near the Casey at Bat one.
For the game we sat in the bleachers (219). The view of the field was good and the bleachers are not bad since they do have backs. Dad found the $10 deal for a hot dog, fries, and souvenir cup of soda pretty good. I was disappointed to find them have stands advertising cheese and pizza pretzel only to go up to order and find out they only had plain ones this season. How hard is it to cover up the options no longer available?
The game itself was nothing special, as spring training usually is not. Mik actually almost wished he was going when this morning he heard Dan Haren was starting, as he liked him when he played for the Dbacks, but he never has been into spring training ball even when the Dbacks used to play down in Tucson. We actually only ended up staying through three innings for the order to go around once. It just was not much fun sitting in the hot sun (they have pretty much no shaded seating in the whole ballpark) and no reason to stay when we gave up scoring spring training games years ago since it gets annoying with all the lineup changes.
Overall fun to see the Nats play some baseball and looking forward to them playing at the Braves Friday, but still anxiously awaiting some real baseball come April and seeing if they can be good again.
I was kind of disappointed that they do not really have an unique Grapefruit League logo and the Spring Training 2013 logo is for both Arizona and Florida, but I still decided to get the baseball to for my collection. Certainly better than the plain white ones they had with the Curly W. The Strasburg and Harper ones were more interesting, but I am not much into collecting the player specific baseballs.
