The “A” Teams Announce Stadium Upgrades
With Opening Day still another week away, the Nationals full-season affiliates in Hagerstown and Potomac have announced stadium upgrades and changes to the fan experience.
In western Maryland, the Suns have announced you can now buy tickets via text and/or mobile devices while going paperless with scannable tickets. New fencing has been installed behind the picnic area while the food stand has been renovated and the menu expanded. View full press release.
[Disclosure: I am a season-ticket holder] In Woodbridge, the P-Nats have extended the netting behind home plate (presumably replacing the existing netting, but also a reminder that the facility is owned and maintained by Prince William County) which will enhance fan safety and irritate people who believe they can react faster than a professional athlete. New food items have also been added, along with a “Party Zone” on Thursday to Sunday. View full press release.
Now, do I get credit for not using the rather obvious image?
Great photo! 🙂
Was thinking the same thing.
Where are the bulldogs in the photo? Has to be dog-friendly?
Kudos for the local communities in resisting pressure to give their scarce tax dollars to the rich team owners. Pay the teachers, screw the owners, I always say.
I’ve been to some of the minor-league parks that are built like mini-MLB stadiums. They’re nice. But I also don’t know that they contribute much to my enjoyment of watching the game. In this area, I live closest to Potomac and go there most often. Yes, it’s pretty spartan, even by minor-league standards, but it’s also A-ball. I don’t particularly mind it. (My back might mind it if I went to every game like Luke does, but that’s another story.) I feel worse for the players in the cramped clubhouses there than I do the fans. And, like Karl, I have a hard time stomaching teams that want the localities to pay for their stadiums. (I’m still not happy with Ted Lerner for fielding such a crappy team for three years after DC gave him a stadium, but I’ll get over it sooner or later.)
“I’m still not happy with Ted Lerner for fielding such a crappy team for three years”
look at the game today and one could argue he was ahead of the curve on this one
we were crappy enough to get Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper. I bought my tickets in 2008 and 2009 knowing full well that winning 69 games instead of 59 wasn’t going to be helpful.
Well . . . yes, the Nats certainly benefited from tanking, but I don’t know that Bowden & Co. were actually smart enough to undertake it as a “strategy,” as the Cubs and Astros did (to the embarrassment of MLB). The Nats just happened to end up with a really crappy team because Ted was cheap and Bowden was an idiot. He truly believed that Elijah and Lastings were stars. Rizzo arrived at just the right time to rebuild the team around Stras and Bryce, plus he convinced Ted to open his checkbook in a way that Bowden and Kasten never did.
You could be right but when you look at their free agent signings that offseason 2007-2008 you’ll have a good chuckle. Bowden wasn’t given any money so he took opportunities to get talented cheap but very questionable folks like Milledge, Dukes and Alex Escobar . Anyway they apparently didn’t plan to spend money just to put a team with name players in the new ballpark.
This is outside the scope of this site so I think I’ll leave it at that.
Oh I think they knew quite well what they were doing.
Agreed. Bowden was proud of himself for hiring a dirt cheap criminal Elijah Duke.
Bowden would never have made the deals Rizzo made. No Max, No Eaton, No Gio, No Roark, No Turner … and then there’s Latin America which Bowden made into such a huge Cluster F embarrassing the Lerner’s with Smiley Gonzalez. Today its not the best out there but good enough to produce Robles, Soto, Difo et al.
Bowden somehow convinced the Lerner’s he could build a winner using dumpster diving on a shoestring budget. They gave him his chance and he failed.