Safe at Home

Because my father worked on Saturdays, my mother would take me to those Senators games. My mother didn't claim to be a big fan, but she was curious about this interest that had taken over my life and eager to share it with me. Saturday afternoons provided the perfect opportunity. Saturday afternoon was both Ladies Day and Family Day, meaning that my mother and I each got in for 50 cents. We would sit lower, in Section 316, behind home plate and below the press box.

With my father and uncle, I observed how men interacted with each other when there were no women around, and I made my own tentative attempts to imitate them. Saturday afternoons with my mother involved no initiatory rites; they were just about baseball. Mom could tell that nothing made me happier than a day at the ballpark, and we rarely missed a Saturday game, although it meant she would get a late start on our Saturday night dinner, steak pizzaiola, a labor-intensive dish.

AFTER BUYING THE SENATORS between the 1968 and 1969 seasons, Robert Short proceeded to end Saturday afternoon games. So, I hated him long before he moved our team. I hated him before his trades wrecked the franchise. I hated him before the Senators had played a single game under his ownership.

He fired the terrific radio announcers Dan Daniels and John MacLean, and, worst of all, raised ticket prices to the highest in the major leagues, eliminating most general admission seating. Section 516 had been general admission under Short's predecessors, and tickets cost $1.50 for my father and uncle and 75 cents for me. After Short, the same tickets cost $3 for each of us. The lowest price for any ticket was $2. In Baltimore, where the Orioles would finish 23 games ahead of the Senators, bleacher seats were 75 cents, general admission $1.20, and almost 34,000 of Memorial Stadium's 52,000 seats cost $1.50 or less.

Under the Short regime, general admission was restricted to the upper deck outfield seats. While we occasionally broke down and paid Short's price for seats in the now-reserved 516, we were general admission people, and we usually followed the other lost souls to those awful seats in the outfield, where you couldn't see most home runs or warning-track plays by the outfielders. Those seats made us feel like second-class citizens. What's more, Short posted ushers, sentry-like, at the foul poles to make sure you didn't give yourself an unauthorized seating upgrade. It was the beginning of the kind of rigid stratification now found in the retro parks.

Thinking back on the Short era forced me to acknowledge to myself just how sad the last two years of the Senators had been. We paid exorbitant prices for bad seats to see a pitiful ballclub with an owner we despised, and lived under the constant threat of losing our team. Nevertheless, the Senators were still our team, and when their departure hit the news, none of that softened the blow.

It is hard for me to admit it, but the wild ride that was the 2005 season topped anything from my boyhood memories of the game. Being in playoff contention almost the entire year added a dimension that had never been present for as long as I had been following the Senators, even during the high-water-mark year of 1969, when they won 86 games. Who would have thought that the past could be surpassed?

The truth is, I had been hoping for a series of ice storms that would delay construction of the new stadium long enough to give me one more opener at RFK. As the inaugural season at Nationals Park approaches, I feel much like a teenager in 1945, who, at the death of Franklin Roosevelt, had known only one president. I've known only one home park. RFK is where I learned baseball, and where I had an extraordinary three-year Indian summer in midlife. What now?

Walking along the South Capitol Street side of the new stadium, I note the obvious references to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. A triangular tower and a sharply angled corner are clear nods to I.M. Pei's masterpiece on the Mall. At first, these touches seem surpassingly odd. Why refer to a structure that is so far away it can't be seen and that serves an entirely different function? This, after all, is a stadium, not an art museum. Before long, though, the point becomes clear: The architects want this to be not just a ballpark, but a beloved landmark. So they've chosen to connect it with the best building erected in Washington in at least seven decades, one that I love almost as much as RFK. You might say one of their architectural forebears is Daniel H. Burnham, designer of Union Station, whose motto was "Make no little plans." I have to admire the brazenness of their ambition.

During the early discussions of possible sites for the new stadium, I ridiculed all the talk about views of the Capitol. Who cared about such trivialities as what you could see outside the stadium? So I wasn't expecting to be stopped in my tracks by the view of the Anacostia River from behind the right field stands. Other stadiums are located near rivers, most notably Pittsburgh's PNC Park, dramatically sited along the Allegheny. But the Anacostia is my river, and nowhere in the District does it look better than it does from here.

When you grow up east of the Anacostia, as I did, the river becomes part of your identity. If you're from Cleveland Park or Palisades or Capitol Hill, you don't say you're from West of the River. But if you're from Anacostia or Penn Branch or Randle Highlands, you're from East of the River, and you never forget it.

As a boy, I thought the Anacostia to be about as grand as a river could be. It might as well have been the Mississippi. Those days when I played on a sandbar with one of my school chums, we were Huck and Jim, and the sandbar was our Jackson's Island.

Then I grew up, and I found out that not only was my river not the Mississippi: It was a joke, a symbol of urban blight, an embarrassment. Early maps of the area even denied its river status. In L'Enfant's plan of Washington, it's referred to only as the Eastern Branch of the Potomac.

From Nationals Park, the Anacostia is every inch a river, broad and expansive, caressed on the opposite shore by the gentle hills of its eastern bank. Here, it holds its own with other urban rivers, including the Potomac. And, from here, I can see why the Nacotchtank Indians, who had been here for centuries when John Smith arrived, chose to live just east of the Anacostia. It may just be that Nationals Park has given me back my river.

Almost everything about the new stadium is undeniably impressive. Maybe too impressive. I wonder if it doesn't have too many focal points, and whether a child coming to a game here for the first time will know where the real action is. That's never been a problem for me. At every baseball stadium I've ever been in, my eye has been drawn immediately to the field. There's just something about a baseball diamond. Football and soccer are both played on large green fields, but neither a gridiron nor a soccer pitch delivers the kind of visual impact that a diamond does. I think it's the swath of infield that runs from first base to third that sets the diamond apart. There is a rural quality about all that dirt. It could be the bend in a country road. For an instant after my first glimpse of a diamond, I feel connected to baseball's pastoral roots. It's 1845, and I'm at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., where organized baseball was first played.

The real measure of Nationals Park will be whether boys and girls who see their first games here come to feel the same affection for this place that I now feel for RFK. Ballparks belong in perpetuity to 8-year-olds. But will a diamond be able to compete for an 8-year-old's attention with such features as the spectacular main scoreboard, the largest that I've ever seen, or the wide main concourse (with its ATMs) that will no doubt house a dazzling array of food and souvenirs, or even the cherry trees that will one day fill a plaza beyond left-center field?

I can only hope that it will.

Rocco Zappone is a Washington writer. He can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.