A Site To Behold

By Thomas Boswell
Wednesday, March 5, 2008

VIERA, Fla.

Manager Manny Acta already has his favorite seat picked out. Not a fancy box seat or suite, but a lower-deck outfield perch just above the Nationals' bullpen in right field with the game spread out before him like a panorama and the Anacostia River just over his shoulder. "The perfect place to watch a game," he says, as if he wishes, for a day, he could be a fan.

Reliever Chad Cordero finds himself so curious and vaguely excited by the final touches at Nationals Park that he goes on the Internet "almost every day" just to look at rooftop photographs -- updated every 15 minutes -- that show the tarp being taken off the field, exposing a winter's growth of brilliantly green grass, or the first nighttime lighting of the huge scoreboard.

John Patterson has deliberately never visited the site. He wants to be hit in the face with the whole experience so, he hopes, it will leave the same indelible impact as "the first time I saw RFK the day before baseball came back to Washington. I want to know how the new park looks, but I'm more interested in how it will feel. Will it be exciting, full of energy? What makes Wrigley Wrigley or Fenway Fenway? You don't know until you're there and feel it."

Ryan Zimmerman, Nick Johnson, Dmitri Young and Austin Kearns buzz about the same subject: Just how much closer will the fences be than they were in enormous and almost certainly mis-marked RFK Stadium. "It can't be worse," Zimmerman cracked. "The difference in how the two parks play could be huge, just huge. We'll find out," Johnson said. "You had to crush the ball to get it out of RFK."

Those 377- and 370-foot signs in the left and right field power alleys in the new park, in the same place where so many solid drives turned into outs for the Nats in the past, may now be doubles or homers that skim into the seats. Supposedly, RFK was 380 feet in the gaps, but almost no Nat believes it. Try 390.

"If it's really 10 to 20 feet closer in some places, that's a whole lot," Kearns said. "Only two guys hit opposite-field home runs to right field in RFK last year: Ryan Braun [of Milwaukee] and Zimmerman."

Felipe L¿pez "hit one down the right field line," Young corrected. They all agree that doesn't count. Will proper hitting -- taking the outside pitch to the opposite gap -- finally be rewarded on a Nats team full of gap-to-gap rather than dead-pull hitters?

"In RFK, you'd kill one to the opposite field, it'd be caught, but everybody would slap your hand in the dugout and say, 'Keep up the good [hitting] approach,' " Kearns said.

Washington players are counting the days until their final exhibition game March 29 against Baltimore. As much as they're teased by what $611 million can build, they are perhaps even more ecstatic never to see RFK again.

"You had at least 90 to 1,000 generations of rats and cockroaches that had multiplied in RFK since the last baseball team left," Young said. "I think the rats probably ran the Redskins off to FedEx Field."

"I only had a few mice in my office," said Acta, defending the dungeon.

"You'd come to the park and see the paint peeling off the facades," Young said. "When you left, walking through the tunnel back to your car at night, cockroaches would fall down in front of you from the ceiling. Thanks for helping me remember that."

At least the new park won't have one narrow wind tunnel in right field in an otherwise enclosed park. "On cold nights, the wind chill was 20 degrees colder in right field," said Kearns, who sometimes held his arms across his body to keep from shivering.

"When the wind blew through that tunnel, you could test the aerodynamics of airplane wings out there," Zimmerman said.

That tunnel also turned the Nats' bullpen into an Arctic outpost on cold nights. Why not put the home-team relievers in left field? "That's worse. We were there in '05. There's no shade. In August, it feels like 105 degrees," Cordero said. "If you go under the stands for shade, it's 15 degrees hotter in there. We decided to let the visiting team have it."

Of course, after road trips, the Nats came home to an infield on which D.C. United had played soccer. "I took a bad hop off the side of my head and missed 12 games," Young said. "I won't miss that about RFK either."

What was the worst of the worst? "The smell in the dugout," Zimmerman said.

"Now you know why all of us were always up on the top step of the dugout leaning on the railing," Johnson said, laughing.

Perhaps no one knows more about what the Nats are about to discover than Tony La Russa, manager of the Cardinals. The new Busch Stadium, opened in '06, is basically the same architectural blueprint as the Washington park, except St. Louis built with brick and few frills, Washington with far more expensive limestone, glass and steel outside and lobbyist mahogany inside.

"The Nationals will probably play better. A new park is a boost," said La Russa, whose Cards won the Series when new Busch opened. Especially when the escape is from RFK? "Oh, it was the worst," La Russa said. Studies have shown that, through history, teams in their first season in a new park have improved by an average of about four wins. Not insignificant.

"When they were building new Busch, they asked for my two cents. I said, 'Just don't let the park play small where a routine fly ball is a home run,' " La Russa said. "It's hard to build a winner in a home park where [good] pitching is penalized."

At the moment, that is the central concern of Nats officials. They also asked for "a slight pitcher's park" with the same theory in mind. The Red Sox finally overcame Fenway, but it took 86 years, and Wrigley still curses Cubs pitchers. New Busch and Nats Park are nearly identical, except in the alleys where St. Louis is deeper at 385 feet. Have the Nats cut it too close? Especially if prevailing winds, with a big gap in left field and two rivers behind the park, tend to blow out.

General Manager Jim Bowden keeps visiting the park, watching the wind. "How can you tell in the winter? It may tend to blow in from left, then swirl in the [stadium] bowl and go out to right-center field," he said. "But I promise it's fair to pitchers."

It better be. The pitchers think about it plenty. Listening to the hitters discuss the closer fences, reliever Luis Ayala chuckles, "That's why I don't like it." Patterson calls himself a "flag watcher" and plans to spend the spring playing meteorologist.

Everywhere you go here, everybody seems like kids before Christmas. Principal owner Mark Lerner proudly carried around a large book illustrating the memorabilia that will fill the park, restaurants and suites. Bowden can't believe that, after muttering he couldn't see the spin on pitches in his original roof-top box, the Lerners built him his own low-level suite. Such transformations almost leave the Nats disoriented, as if they still can't quite believe what awaits them. At last, the poor-cousin Nats, the co-tenants of RFK, the team belittled just a year ago with predictions of a record 121 losses, will be living in a baseball Taj Mahal. The meek haven't inherited the earth yet, but this is pretty close.

"To go from the worst to the best in one year will be amazing," Zimmerman said. "We really appreciate it. They say, 'If you look good, you play good.' We want to play like we deserve to be there."