This has probably all been said before, but here are my impressions.

Went to a Nats game last night.  Normally I wouldn'tve made the trek all the way down to DC on a weeknight, but was invited by a friend who I don't see much and thought, why the hell not.

I;ve been there twice before - saw a game early in the season, and also went to a Nats/O's game in late June.  Last night they played the Mets, and it was a pretty good game - the Nats had a chance to tie/win the game in the bottom of the ninth, but ultimately the shaky Mets pen held on to beat the Nats.

Sounds like a decent time, right?  We had nosebleeds that were $10 but weren't bad at all.  Even the rowdy New Yorkers in our section slithered away to another part of the park by the second inning.  The fans around us actually seemed to be "real" Nats fans (if there is such a thing), not backing down from the stupid childish taunts from the New Yorkers.  The Rushmores were also awesome, as usual.

But there's a lot of shit that just rubs me the wrong way about the whole experience.  Clint, who for those that don't know, is the on-screen emcee for the stadium.  He travels around with a camera crew, giving out prizes to fans who compete in little mini-game shows and trivia contests.  It doesn't seem like a bad idea I guess, and Clint seems like a decent enough dude himself, but the entire enterprise comes off as trite, corporate, and superfluous.  Does a stadium or a team really need a cheerleader/narrator?

In this case, the answer might be yes, because the stadium sucks. This is probably why Clint exists in the first place - the stadium cannot speak for itself.  I mean, it's new and clean and has decent sight lines and has a beautiful big-ass hd scoreboard, but it's pretty much a modern-day analog of the all-purpose cookie cutter stadiums of the 70s.  Take away the bigass scoreboard (which will probably be obselete in ten years anyway) and the place has no character.  What is the view beyond the outfield?  Parking garages.  You can see the Washington Monument if you sit at JUST the right spot down the first base line, through a tiny gap in the stadium out in left field.  The concessions, while decent, are expensive as all hell.  Same with the seats.  People might come once to see a shitty team play, just for the novelty of baseball/new stadium/etc, but will they come back with prices so high?  Thankfully, this time we didn't have much trouble with the ushers, who, in the past, have been total assholes.  But in the cheap seats they pretty much left everyone alone.

I guess as an O's fan I'm kind of spoiled by Camden Yards.  I've been to Skydome, Fenway, Yankee Stadium, and Nationals Park, and OPACY is by far the best place to watch a game.  But cmon Nationals, your stadium is brand new.  You had a chance to really make something special that reflected the character of DC and included some scenic and historic scenes.

Instead, fans look out onto parking garages, and the dominant archiectural motif is concrete blocks.  No one even uses those parking garages - they were only half-full, and there were 32,000 fans at the game last night.  Everyone uses Metro, and the station is tiny.

End rant.