Matt Eagan of the Hartford Courant seems to think so:

The Red Sox have at least one tough offseason decision to make. Jason Varitek has been the soul of the team for a decade. but he is now a steady drain on their efforts to score runs. The Sox have been wisely unsentimental in the Theo Epstein years. They'll make the captain an offer but won't overpay. Fans should expect to see Varitek getting a standing ovation at Fenway while wearing an Orioles uniform next season. Why the Orioles? Who else would overpay for a 36-year-old catcher? ...

http://www.courant.com/sports/other/hc-onthefly1021.artoct21,0,4792414.story

Oh, Matt.  Based on the other comedic gems found in your blog post, it seems that you fancy yourself as something of a comedian.  Hah hah.  I guess the O's have a reputation for overpaying old, washed-up Red Sox players after they signed Millar and... uh, no one else.

So the game was delayed three hours and ten minutes by rain, but it finally got started at 5PM EST.  Anyone else watching?  I have it up on mlb.tv, and Freddie Garcia just walked the first two White Sock batters.  Does anyone care about this game?

Jermaine Dye base hit = 1-0 White Sox.  The CHW announcers on WGN just did some sort of choreographed chant as the first run crossed the plate.  I wonder if that's something they do every game.  I think it'd get pretty annoying.

Is it three hundred words yet?

So last week I went to Luke Scott T-Shirt night, aka the 50 Millionth fan night.  In honor of Luke Scott, during one of the between-inning breaks, the Orioles showed a Star Wars-themed video on the JumboTron that showed Luke batting with a lightsaber, etc.  They added Star Wars clips, sound effects, and characters to Luke Scott gameplay footae -like the "svoom" lightsaber sound effects when Luke was swinging, R2D2 and C-3PO were behind home plate cheering Luke on, and, at the end, Luke hit a home run so high and far that it blew up the Death Star.

Anyone have it, or know if it's online?  I checked masnsports.com, as well as google/youtube, and can't find it.

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.

Tomorrow, the Rays will attempt to do something they have never done before: record a winning month.  In their entire existence, the Rays have never successfully accomplished this feat; however, for the first time in history, they have the chance to taste success.

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