Shorn, Rested, Ready

• Giants: 6
• Nats: 10
• Sold: 78 beers, 41 peanuts/crackerjack

It's amazing what a little rest can do. After 18 straight days of vending, including an all day Preakness and two Baltimore-Philly double headers, I've had two days of rest in the past three. I caught up on some sleep, some daytime lounging rest, plenty of rich food, and a trim that took off half my hair. It was all enough to send me flying up and down the steps light as a feather. Still the usual lightly attended Nats game I expected on a Tuesday night, but I hit it with plenty of fuel to spare, instead of huffing and lurching around all drawn and hollow-eyed and spectral.

During 8th-inning checkout the vending manager made an unexpected proposition. "Do you want to be in a movie?"

Movie?

"They're going to be filming a movie at the stadium; Owen Wilson plays a pitcher, and Reese Witherspoon's in it. Filming June 12th and 13th -- I think it pays about 250 a day. They needed vendors as extras selling peanuts, Crackerjack, sodas, hot dogs."

No beer?

"No beer. They just wanted to keep it no alcohol. So I thought of you because of the peanuts and that stuff."

Sure, I said. I think I could juggle a few to add something to the scene.

I tentatively signed on, knowing that those dates -- Friday and Saturday -- are the same nights as Boston's first two games in Philly. A rock-solid moneymaker. But how often does something like this come along?

IMDB doesn't have much on the movie yet; it still has it as "Untitled James L. Brooks Project." A little searching reveals that Witherspoon plays a softball player caught between love interests Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson. Reuters even says that Jack Nicholson is trying to get into the movie.

According to other online gossip, the movie is called How Do You Know? and Wilson plays a reliever for the Washington Nationals, which I take to be a borrow from the Jerry Maguire playbook: they had to pick a major league team for a central character to play on, but they couldn't pick a team that people were actually aware of, else it seem too unreal. Enough people know who are actually on the Sox and Yankees and Dodgers teams, that to throw Wilson into the mix would be disorienting and unreal. But who knows anything about the Nationals, apart from the baseball diehards, the 12,000 people that apparently tune in to Washington's games on MASN? Wilson's Nationals will function, I'm guessing, as Cuba Gooding, Jr's Arizona Cardinals did in Jerry Maguire; a sort of in-joke for those who know how bad the team is. And making him a reliever (the worst part of the worst team in baseball) makes it richer. Almost gilding the lily, if D.C. locals are going to get defensive about it.

But let's think positive. If the Maguire model holds -- a 1996 movie featuring a bad team that only made it to the Superbowl 13 years later, in 2009 -- then, assuming How Do You Know? is released next year, it should be 2023 before the Nationals make it to the World Series. Dare to dream, Nats.