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For Nats, What Counts Is Turnstiles
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The team will also put 2 million pocket schedules into the market this week at McDonald's restaurants and through two major beer distributors, which will get them in bars and restaurants. And this week, the team will announce dates for give-away days, when fans will receive such items as visors or six-pack coolers.
The more significant concern, for now, is the condition of the playing surface. The Mets filed a protest of Saturday night's game, saying that the grounds crew did not follow the instructions of the umpiring crew when heavy rains delayed the game in the sixth and eventually caused it to be stopped short in the eighth.
Nationals Manager Frank Robinson was ejected after arguing with the umpires that they should have halted the game. The Nationals, in turn, acknowledged the problem. Tavares said in its haste to begin work on the infield, the grounds crew folded the tarp the wrong way, sending too much water back into the infield.
"Baseball was not designed to be played on ponds," Tavares said.
Andy Dunn, the team's vice president of ballpark operations, said the field drains well enough if the tarp is put on in proper time, and that he has enough staff on the grounds crew -- led by groundskeeper Jimmy Rodgers, who came from the University of Virginia -- to take care of problems. But club officials blamed the umpires for letting too much rain fall before they called for the tarp.
"It's embarrassing for everybody involved," Dunn said. "Jimmy doesn't feel good about it. We don't feel good about it."
But that doesn't go for the crowds. Each morning, Tavares scans box scores from other games around the majors. Saturday night, the Nationals drew 40,913, despite the rain. Tavares smiled.
"Compared with everybody else, [Saturday] night, we had 40,000-plus," Tavares said, "and I looked around league attendances, and I saw as low as 15 to 16 [thousand], even in some good-sized marketplaces."
