Social Event Journal: Redskins Writers Night at the Ballpark, 6/10/2009

In the course of being and becoming The Curly R, I have had the excellent opportunity to meet many other Redskins fans and enthusiasts, a particular subset of which are the writers, bloggers and fan journalists who, like me have an emotional or economic interest in chronicling and analyzing everything Redskins, to an outsider it might appear that we harbor an unhealthy obsession, ascribing way too much significance to events that mean nothing in the grand scheme and lauding and criticizing people in the business of a game, people that for the most part make more money than most football fans will ever make, people that vary somewhere between indifference to the chatter and active antagonism toward the outside world.

Why exactly this is, why we care so much about a game that we have to tell you about it, that is another story. The upshot of this shared interest is that with the internet lowering the marginal cost of entry into the market for information, anyone with an opinion or story and access to a computer and the internet can publish it.

And so there is a community. As Curly R grew into something I decided to pursue past that first season in 2006, I began to make acquaintance with many of the other bloggers and a few of the beeg ah timers as well, Redskins blogfather Rich Tandler and I had bandied about for some time the notion of getting everyone together and so we finally set Saturday 10 June 2009 as the date, at Nationals Stadium, all the Redskins writers we could muster would get together at the ballpark and see the hometown Nationals take on the visiting Reds.

Ultimately we had seventeen RSVPs, representing fifteen outlets covering the Redskins, it took more than 150 emails to corral this bunch, and no small amount of browbeating to get some off their asses. Let me tell you what we did was well worth it and validated my belief that the Redskins writers are a pretty tight bunch...

=====

The appointed day came, I bailed on work early and hit Metro out to the stadium.


The approach to Nationals Stadium from the Navy Yard Metro station.

It is a pretty hard up approach, bare pavement with scalpers, merch hawkers and smokers puffing up before going into the nonsmoking confines of the stadium. At some point when we get out of economic purgatory both sides of this approach will be sheathed in a comforting layer of upscale condos, retail and dining, think Rosa Mexicana, Coach and hairgelled douchebags rolling Beamers in and out of underground parking.



As you get closer to the stadium you begin to see that Washington baseball fans are a pretty homogeneous bunch. Also, this is the stadium main gate, the fact that it is a brand new state of the art venue is more or less hidden from views on approach. The round thing at top left is the roof of the Red Loft Bar, where we would spend the entire game.

From here the ticket holder enters into center field with diversions such as the PlayStation I can Jam Guitar Hero for Free All Night? Pavilion and the Build a Bear Ripoff Workshop on the left and private label concessions, including Red Hot and Blue Hold the Roaches Bar-B-Que and Hard Times Ah Fuck It Just Give Me the Oil and Meat Chili on the right. I headed straight to the bar.



Thomas Jefferson solemnly taking in pregame activities on the field.

Volunteers, prize winners, charity hawks and team employees dress up in giant headed costumes of Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, the four presidents on Mount Rushmore, and race from center field to first base every home game in the middle of the fourth inning.

Since this race began as an animated sequence on the retrofit big screens at RFK Stadium in 2005, it evolved into a live action event after the All-Star Break in 2006, Teddy Roosevelt has never won, the four year standings, according to Let Teddy Win are

Abraham Lincoln: 125 wins
George Washington: 80 wins
Thomas Jefferson: 76 wins
Teddy Roosevelt: zero wins

I have always believed Teddy never winning is a reflection of a generally held belief that he does not belong on Mount Rushmore.



The MASN team's pregame coverage. That is Thomas Jefferson in foreground, note George Washington and Abraham Lincoln at left beyond the booth and Teddy Roosevelt at right behind the pole.

Rich organized and we printed our own tickets and met up at the Red Loft Bar, the idea was meet up there, grab a drink and be social, then get a burger or a dog and get down to our right field seats, just below the Loft.

And so I headed upstairs for the bar where immediately I connected with our crew...



Michael Richman on left and David Elfin on right, Michael is author of The Redskins Encyclopedia and often seen or heard on local media and David is formerly of the Washington Times. Michael is dialed in to the Redskins experience, like the historian he is he was tempered in his comments about the 2008 team and 2009 prospects and David has been covering local sports so long talking to him can be awkward because he remembers everything you only read about.



Rich Tandler on the left and Mark Newgent on the right, Rich has been a Redskins season ticket holder since the 60s, runs Real Redskins, one of the oldest Redskins blogs on the internets and most recently, covers the Redskins for Comcast SportsNet. Mark runs the Redskins Examiner blog and like Rich has become a good friend through our mutual experiences covering the Redskins. Mark first reached out with extra tickets in the 2008 preseason and we have been fast friends since. Both of these guys know the Redskins inside out and I am proud to call them friends and blogbuds.

As the beers and whiskeys flowed the game may or may not have started behind us, more degenerate writers began to arrive...



Ken Meringolo at left, Michael Richman center and Kevin Ewoldt at right. Ken and Kevin are the second generation proprietors of Sports Blog Nation's Redskins entry, Hogs Haven and they are a frigging riot. They churn excellent content, get great interviews and exclusives and generally are awesome. I know a bunch of SBN bloggers and the company is lucky to have Ken and Kevin.



Mark and Tony Brown, who runs Hog Heaven, formerly an MVN blog, recently moved to the Bloguin network. Like Rich Tandler, Tony was an early supporter of Curly R and also like Rich has years more experience following the team than do I which makes them good sources for me and helps me keep things in perspective.


At this point we appeared to be reaching critical mass the real hanging out started...



Michael Richman's Redskins watch...



Tony Brown's Redskins belt, wish I had gotten a better photo...



Hogs Haven's Ken and Kevin, these guys were just getting started...


As we started getting into deeper conversation I thought it was time to break out the video camera...

video one top-----

video one bottom-----
Rich Tandler holds forth with me and Tony Brown over the potential for no salary cap and how the moving target of an uncapped year has benefited the Redskins. I ask a question about why, if the Redskins methods for snaking out of cap trouble year after year are so reliable, do other teams not pursue this strategy? Rich believes it is an access to cash situation and Tony thought it was evident that the Redskins were more willing to gamble on players. Whatever the actual reason the Redskins do it and most other teams do not, it would appear the team has a durable and repeatable model for kicking the salary can down the road in a manner that the bills never actually come due.

video two top-----

video two bottom-----
Ken and Kevin threw down for several rounds and we sort of looked around and realized it was the seventh inning and we had not even considered heading down to our seats.


video 3 top-----

video 3 bottom-----
This video picks up with Rich telling the story of the 1979 Redskins season finale, a game played at Dallas, the winner of that game was division champ and in the playoffs, the loser would miss the playoffs. After taking an early lead the Redskins would ultimately lose the game to Roger Staubach and the Cowboys, yielding this iconic photograph of Joe Theismann leaving the field in dejection. That game is covered in the Washington Post's Redskins Book, as well as in Curly R's 2007 series on the Redskins coach at the time, Jack Pardee.

We also learn in this video that Tony Brown, living in Chicago at the time, had to drive an hour to a bar in Milwaukee to see that game, it being blocked by the Bears game that same day. And Mark Newgent betrays only a slight hint of bitterness as he describes Chicago as the city where all Big Ten grads go to get work, the city where dreams are swallowed whole.



Poop on this picture, if I had used flash this would be a better shot of Tony, Mark, Kevin, Ken and Rich. At this point the game going on behind us is in a rain delay and I am not sure we noticed.



Always the production nerd I could not resist getting a shot of the right field camera crew buttoned up for the rain. It was really starting to come down at this point.



We even had a late arrival, on the right that is Gary Fitzgerald, Redskins director of digital media and head writer at Redskins.com, Gary and I chatted for a good long while about what his job entails, some of the limiting realities and what it is like working on permanent staff as the public faces of the franchise change.



Proving how awesome he is, Ken Meringolo convinced these randoms to pose for a picture with him, I may have had something to do with that, the game behind us was halted but the booze was still flowing.



Ken and Gary Fitzgerald, at this point the rest of us have been pounding for almost four hours, I am sure Gary the late arriver was appalled by our state of sobriety.



Your author and Ken, at this point we were devolving into the youse guys are grate part of the night and Ken wanted to be sure I did not escape the camera.



The Nationals Stadium grounds crew tending to the tarp on the field, at this point the rain delay is nearing ninety minutes. The bar had stopped selling beer after the seventh inning as usual and no amount of sweet talking and pretty pleases would convince them to open it back up during the rain delay which in the grand scheme of things was probably a good thing.



Mark contemplating the continued rain delay and the long ride back to bumfuck Maryland still in front of him.



Finally at around a quarter to eleven pm with the game in rain delay for nearly two hours, Mark decides to bail, voluntarily dressing himself like a second grader at the bus stop.



The parting shot as I departed ten minutes after Mark, it was still raining and the game was still in delay, the stands were already empty when I left, the delay would last another fifty minutes until 11:40pm, the Nationals scored two runs in the resumed ninth inning before losing in the twelfth. Baseball owners will do anything to keep from giving away free baseball.


All in all this was an excellent adventure, I got to hang out with my blogbuds, I got to know some I only knew by name or by their work and made some new contacts in this business, a big thanks to everyone that came out, it was a lot of fun. We are already planning the 2010 Redskins Writers Night Out, date and location are still TBD, I will toss it up on the blog and maybe if you are there that night you can come over and we'll tip one back together.


Not pictured: Any of the other nine people that RSVP'd to the game, we never made it to our seats!



All pictures and video by me except for the one of Joe Theismann coming off the field, that one is from the Washington Post here.