Safe at Home

Still, I was curious enough about how, after 34 years, RFK would look in a baseball configuration that I attended the new Nationals' first game in Washington, an exhibition against the New York Mets on Sunday, April 3, 2005. The afternoon was so cold and windy that it felt like no baseball day I had ever experienced in Washington. And yet what struck me most forcefully was just how familiar so many things seemed. I sat in Section 516, where I had sat so many times on Sunday afternoons with my father and my uncle, in the upper part of the upper deck directly behind home plate. The first few rows of the section had been replaced by plastic seats, but I sat in one of the wooden ones in Row 5. The yellow paint was peeling, and I could see through to the pale green that I had sat on with my father and uncle. The field was laid out in exactly the same position, and the view from 516 through the far portals of the upper deck in the outfield was identical, too: the banks of the Anacostia, the river where I had played on sandbars at low tide after school as a boy. The weather drove me from the stands before the game was over, something that never would have happened in my days of hard-core fanaticism, but I knew I would be back.

THE OFFICIAL OPENING NIGHT ON APRIL 14, 2005, was a glittering affair that turned into a fantastic game. The problem was the starting time. Let's get one thing straight: There is no Opening Night in baseball. Opening Night is for "Cats" and "42nd Street." In baseball, there should be only Opening Day, and Washington taught the rest of the major leagues how to do it for the better part of a century.

The following Sunday, as the Nationals completed a sweep of their first home series, the weather was warmer and sunnier than it had been two weeks earlier, and my feeling of connection to the past grew stronger. The whole experience was so pleasant that I could even smile at the "hatching" of the team's new eagle mascot, the kind of thing that had driven me from the game in the '90s.

I continued to attend games throughout the opening home-stand. I arrived about an hour early on April 27 and began to walk around the stadium. As I watched the late-afternoon shadows fall on the diamond and the ground crew water the infield and lay down the base lines and batter's boxes, a realization hit me. I really had loved the game. I had to admit that baseball had been the happiest part of a happy childhood. Baseball was the first thing I became aware of beyond my little world of home and school, and the first subject about which my opinions were taken seriously. It was better than the amusement parks at Marshall Hall and Glen Echo. And it was better than summer trips to the Jersey Shore. While I was not an especially good player, I could be an especially good fan. And I had been.

FRUMPY, DUMPY OLD RFK STADIUM was, next to my boyhood home, the dearest place in the world to me. I knew every crack in the ramps leading up to Section 516, and no place felt more comfortable.

It was as if the Dodgers had come back to Brooklyn, and Ebbets Field had still been there. But RFK is no Ebbets Field. No one will ever call it a "lyric little bandbox of a ballpark," John Updike's classic description of Fenway Park, though many people thought RFK was quite beautiful at the time it opened. In its current state, though, with its wonderful physical and technological limitations, a game there can be something more than the delivery system for merchandising and promotions that it is at the retro parks. Its blessedly narrow concourses allow for minimal pushing of souvenirs and food, while the low-tech scoreboard permits relatively little between-innings foolishness -- and what there is I can tune out completely by sitting in one of the pathetic old public address system's marvelous dead spots. The overall effect is the opposite of slick.

I went to the same ticket seller before every game in 2005 -- I'm strictly walk-up, no advance purchase. Then I used the same entry gate, the same ramps and the same men's room before going to my seat. I did not always have the same seat. The downside of not buying tickets in advance was that Section 516 was frequently unavailable. When that happened, I usually ended up between sections 518 and 521, on the third-base side of the upper deck. For most games, I was able to kick back and spread out, approximating the kind of casual experience that a game in the '60s was.

I couldn't help noticing some of the changes. I really missed the old scoreboard in lower right field where you could follow out-of-town scores all day long. And whatever happened to the fungo circles? Didn't anyone hit fly balls to the outfielders in fielding practice anymore? And what about all the balls thrown into the stands by players? That never happened in the old days. Players were charged for the cost of those balls, and, on what they were making then, they couldn't afford it. Now it happened several times every inning. Still, it was baseball at RFK.

BY MEMORIAL DAY, I HAD BEEN TO 15 GAMES. Almost all of them were close, and we were certainly winning our share. (Did I just refer to the Nationals as "we"?) At most games, I found I could go into a sort of baseball zone where I was locked in on every pitch and the outside world fell away.

The team came into one Saturday night game in June riding an eight-game winning streak. Like most in the crowd, I entered the stadium in high spirits that night. But almost as soon as I got through the turnstile, something seemed not quite right. My unease mounted as I took my seat. No one else seemed bothered. What was troubling me?

By the third inning, as the lights began to take hold, shining off players'

batting helmets, I realized what the problem was. Saturday games at RFK were supposed to be played in the afternoon. Through 1968, Saturday games started at 1:30. They were relaxed, intimate affairs with the upper deck closed.