The major projects in preparation for the Washington Nationals' arrival are obvious: selling tickets, re-sodding the field, making sure the team is competitive. But when a franchise moves from one city to another -- in this case, from Montreal to Washington -- there are countless peripheral projects involving other businesses in this country and elsewhere.
Take, for instance, video games. When game-maker EA Sports went to work on its MVP Baseball 2005, it suddenly had to come up with a virtual version of RFK Stadium -- which hadn't hosted a baseball team since before "Pong" was popular.
Companies ranging from video game makers to baseball card producers are having a difficult time finding the best way to incorporate the Nationals into their products. An EA Sports video game features a generic version of a Washington Nationals player.
(Courtsey EA Sports)
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"It's actually a pretty tedious procedure," said Ben Brinkman, an associate producer of the game. "We try to be as realistic as possible, so we had to dig a lot on this one."
The digging by Brinkman, who works out of the company's offices in Vancouver, began with sifting through Web sites that had information about the park, which housed the Washington Senators from 1961 to '71. They took into account the dimensions and how the stands look. "It's not guesswork, but more like educated guesswork about how it's going to play," Brinkman said. "It's kind of a weird throwback, something [baseball] would like you to forget: The era of the cookie-cutter stadium."
With spring training beginning in less than two weeks, other companies are scrambling to adjust as well. Topps, one of several companies that produce baseball cards, has one product on the market already that lists the team's players as Washington Nationals, though they wear their old Expos uniforms. But another line of cards that debuts next week -- the "Heritage" brand -- will have pictures of the players from their Expos days, but with new Nationals' uniforms superimposed.
"We knew people who wanted to be Washington Nationals fans would want to have these first, so we just retouched the uniforms," Topps spokesman Clay Luraschi said.
Upper Deck, another card company, will wait until spring training to take actual photos of the players in their real-life uniforms, so though they'll have a product displaying Montreal pictures with Washington colors around the borders, their updated line won't roll out till around June, a spokesman said.
So many changes. And what about the past -- like what happened to the old video-game version of Olympic Stadium in Montreal?
"We made it a classic stadium," Brinkman said, "so anyone who wants to relive the glory days in Montreal can do it."
-- Barry Svrluga
