Giddy. That's the only word for the WaPo Sports pages today. Here's Tom Boswell, whose column head is titled "Pacing Before The Blessed Event":
The president will throw out the first pitch, symbolic of the pomp and power of the nation's capital that the sport spurned for so long. Enormous cheers of vindication, relief and simple pleasure will fill the air after a third-of-a-century rain delay. But mixed in the tumult will be the same tremors of doubt and concern about the future that attend the arrival of every new infant.
Since I left the area in 1968 at 18, I can agree with this description of the city as it was then:
The weather on Sept. 30, 1971, the last evening in the life of the Washington Senators, was overcast and blustery. And the city where the game took place seemed, at the moment, as forlorn as the departing team. Three years removed from devastating urban riots, and eight from the vanished glory of the Kennedy administration, the District was afflicted with urban blight, a not-wholly-deserved image as a dangerous place and the insult of losing its baseball team to what one columnist called "some jerk town" in Texas.
The paper's "Nationals" section has a countdown clock running. I find that a little touching.
Posted by Linkmeister at April 14, 2005 11:45 AMI still think it would have been a lot cooler and a lot better for baseball if the Expos had moved to Puerto Rico, but I'm glad that the city where Walter Johnson pitched his whole career, the city that gave the devil Joe Hardy, Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo, has a ball club again. I wish them luck and hope they make a race out of it and finish second in NL East.
Go Mets!
Posted by: Lance Mannion at April 15, 2005 02:16 PM