True Doubleheader

• Giants: 5 / 4
• Nationals: 1 / 1
• Sold: 89 beers, 81 peanuts/Crackerjack

Once again, as in the night Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's home run record against them, the Nationals found themselves on the wrong end of history. After last night's rain delay, Randy Johnson was still trying to get his 300th win, and to best avoid the rains that lingered on through the day the game was scheduled for 4:35 in the afternoon. This made for a modern-day rarity: the true doubleheader. Not a 1:00/7:00 doubleheader that's become common (in the interest of booting everyone out before charging them to come in again for the second game), but a game that had not much more than a half hour between final out of game one and first pitch of game two.

Plenty of people -- probably all of them -- were there to see Randy Johnson win. And the game was the focus of the day's attention, as most everyone filtered out when it was over, the 300th recorded (thank heaven for the base-10 system to get people excited by a number ending in zero). What I felt was that, in being the real focus of attention, the game was a throwback: not a marketing opportunity, not a place to park a busload of schoolkids on field trip, not a chance for tourists to check out the stadium, not a novel place for people to party or to entertain clients. The roiling weather had kept out the riff-raff (a good steady source of my money, let's be honest), drawn the baseball nuts, and the game had taken precedence. I'm not sure when was the last time I felt that the stadium existed to show people games rather than to provide a platform for cross-promotional branding, and the irritatingly gleeful Nat Pack and their limp-armed T-shirt tosses, and the Geico lizard running the outfield with the big-headed Racing Presidents.

As a True, back-to-back Doubleheader, an odd and non-sensical rule was imposed on beer vendors: cutoff for game one would be at the end of the 7th as usual, then sales would resume the moment that first game was over. For two innings only, sales would be cut off in the interest of alcohol control. Not enough time for anyone to really sober up if they had to, but since no one was really drinking it didn't matter anyway.