Opening day recap

Well, it's official: spring has sprung, and baseball season has begun!!! (And no, despite the rhyming scheme, I'm not a poet.) The Nats fell to the Marlins, 9-2, but despite the loss, it was nevertheless an fun and exciting afternoon—starting with a pre-game tailgate hosted by MissChatter.

A few quick highlights:

• The weather was unbelievably beautiful for Opening Day!!! It easily made it up to 80 degrees, and the sun shined brightly for much of the day. A cool, refreshing breeze every so often made it the perfect baseball weather, too.
• Adrian Fenty did, in fact, throw out one of the first pitches! Because of this, I must now live up to my claim that I will forgive his earlier opposition to the Southeast ballpark deal.
• Baseball fans came out in droves to fill RFK. Though attendance was never, in fact, announced! But I'm willing to bet it was well over 40,000.
• Teddy Roosevelt made a remarkable entrance into the President's Race by repelling down from the roof of RFK (right above where I was sitting, in fact!) straight to the finish line—but he didn't quite make it, and was disqualified for his efforts.
• Center fielder Nook Logan made a remarkable catch in the 4th inning to prevent a Marlins home run, but hurt his foot and had to leave the game early.
• Pitcher John Patterson had a somewhat decent start, but only lasted 4 innings. Pitching is something we'll clearly need to work on this year.
• Lines at the concessions were surprisingly long (I think Will waited an hour just to get the hot dogs), and I'm willing to bet there'll be a lot of complaints about the slowness of food service. And while I didn't make it down to the food court above the main entrance, there's a rumor that Hard Times has been replaced by a hot dog vendor, which saddens me because I loved eating the chili nachos from Hard Times last season. I'll have to go down there soon to see if Cluck-U Chicken Cluck University is still there, too.

With that, we now begin season 3 of the Nationals! I'm not entirely disheartened by the Opening Day loss (though I was hoping for a few more runs from the Nats to make the loss a little more bearable), but as Will so aptly stated when we took our seats, "It's good to be home."