Soon enough, Nationals fans will be able to complain vociferously about how raucous Yankees fans ruined their day at the ballpark, too! more ›

Nationals Park is now three-and-a-half years old, but outside of hosting 81 games of baseball every year, the place kind of sits there, mostly unused. Aside from its main tenants, the stadium has hosted a mass by Pope Benedict XVI, a few opera simulcasts, and a couple of rock concerts. But shouldn't a building that cost the city over $600 million be in use year-round? more ›

The Washington Nationals are playing some very good baseball these days. That said, it shouldn't come as a surprise that, as the team has played better, attendance has responded. more ›

Okay, enough snark -- this video of Washingtonian online account executive Matt Hendrickson proposing to his girlfriend after beating Teddy in a footrace is kind of wonderful. more ›

Strasburg watchers, take note! Teddy’s Team Blog cites "a source close to the Nationals" who pegs the return date of Stephen Strasburg to the Nationals Park mound on September 6. more ›

Yeah, it's way too hot to be getting upset about the negative news of the day. more ›

Washington Nationals Chief Operating Officer Andy Feffer is really excited about the opening of several new restaurants, including Shake Shack, at his team's ballpark this afternoon. So much so, in fact, that he's apparently forgotten that his business lies primarily in baseball, not delicious custard treats and happy hours. more ›

The Nationals aren't oblivious to the fact that a mid-May Monday night home game against the Pittsburgh Pirates probably won't be a big draw. (After all, when the Nats visited Pittsburgh on a rainy night in late April, less than 3,000 people showed up.) But slashing the cost of tickets and food? That just might get a few more people through the turnstiles. more ›

After President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden late Sunday night, it became all hands on deck time for authorities. The Metropolitan Police Department, the Metro Transit Police, Mayor Vince Gray and the Department of Homeland Security all kicked into high gear, upping vigilance, putting more cops on the city's trains and buses, and even reminding people to watch out for things like "threats from retaliating lone wolves" inside offices. So while experts admit that an attack there would be "unlikely," it's hardly a surprise that the District's youngest sports facility might get in on the security uptick. more ›

Was the highlight of last night's chilly Nationals-Phillies tilt the spirited ninth-inning rally made by the Nationals? Perhaps it was the eight innings of sparkling pitching by Phillies starter Roy Halladay? Or maybe it was the how most of the audience seemed content to sit in their seats, obsessively staring at their smartphones, occasionally voicing their displeasure that the Capitals were trailing the New York Rangers? Think again! more ›

In a not-totally-unexpected development, Mayor Vince Gray was roundly booed as he delivered the ceremonial "Play Ball" before today's Nationals home opener. Of course, the easy explanation is that the crowd really laid into Gray because of the generally poor job people believe he's done over his first three months in office. Add in the gloomy weather and its no surprise that the boo-birds ruffled their feathers. more ›

Tom Sietsema dropped a huge bomb for those following the progress of Shake Shack's arrival in the District -- the roadside burger joint that just started hiring at its 1216 18th Street NW location will apparently have an outlet inside Nationals Park this season. more ›

Are you in possession of tickets for Thursday's Opening Day at Nationals Park and holding out hope that you'd get a chance to see President Barack Obama toss out the first pitch like he did last year? Well, you'll have to settle for simply enjoying some baseball during the middle of the day and a free cap -- Obama won't be uncorking his lefty curve this year like he did in 2010. more ›

A six-person byline focusing on the "timeline of the whitening of D.C." which includes statements like "[bike] lanes manage to merge with the city's history of framing everything in black and white terms," touches on Tony Williams' blackness, the banning of single beer sales, Borf, and HOPE VI in Arthur Capper/Carollsburg, and concludes that "the flood of pale-complexioned fans into the stadium in Southeast...is a reminder of how big a change those curly “W” hats represent"? If this story represents TBD's swan song as a news organization, well, they're going out with a bang. (Appropriately enough: it's even got a correction.) more ›

Look, we all had a good time with the whole "Natinals" debacle. Laughing at high-profile misspellings is fun -- especially when it comes to the Nationals, whose play at the time of that mistake wasn't doing anything to distract us from poking fun. But we didn't think that the Nationals were so determined to wipe that incident from their memory that they would completely eliminate the team's name from their new home uniform. more ›

There's been quite a bit of chatter today about last night's Nationals crowd, a paltry group of 10,999 that was the lowest attendance recorded at a Nationals home game since they relocated to Washington in 2005. more ›

Neighborhood blog JDLand reported last week that ANC 6D voted to support a proposal by the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District to add more words to the Navy Yard Metrorail station name. The BID is angling to alter the title to some kind of combination of "Capitol Riverfront/Ballpark/Navy Yard" -- while the ANC also voted in support of adding "Arena Stage" to the Waterfront/SEU station name. more ›

The idea that the Nationals might be a cursed franchise is hardly a revolutionary thesis. After all, they were birthed from the embers of a somewhat cursed team, the Montreal Expos. (The long sequence of events that began with that team's potentially epic 1994 season being cruelly wiped away by the players strike and ended with the franchise being owned by the league and drawing crowds in the low four-digits just had to be guided by the hand of something more devious than man.) You could make the argument that there's a young pitching curse right now at the Park, considering that 2010 is the second straight season when the team's most promising young pitcher is set for a long-term stay on the shelf with arm surgery. Well, all you Nationals fans should feel free to blame John Wilkes Booth, apparently. more ›

A cauldron of political activity and protest, a venue for gender politics discourse and a theater for civil disobedience. Obviously, I could only be talking about our baseball stadium. more ›

Were you incredibly concerned about the sanctity of Nationals Park being tarnished by soulless corporate branding? Yeah, me neither. More concerning: whether the Nats and Dodgers will play all the way through today's game as scheduled, with rain seemingly inevitable. more ›

U.S. President Barack Obama has been enjoying a surge of popularity after passing health care reform, finalizing a new nuclear arms treaty with Russia, and maintaining a 55% brackets approval rating. But that good will evaporated for some D.C. residents today when President Obama, taking the mound to throw out the first pitch to mark Opening Day, donned a White Sox cap. more ›

The Nationals are encouraging, nay, begging those of you lucky enough to snag tickets to Monday's Opening Day game against the Phillies to get your behinds to the ballpark on the double Monday morning. Due to the sold-out nature of the festivities -- oh, and this Obama fella that is going to be throwing out the first pitch -- the Nationals are recommending that folks arrive at the grounds "several hours earlier than normal" on Monday. Seeing as how the game is scheduled to begin at 1:05 p.m., this likely means that the ticketed among us should follow our normal Monday morning routine, just replacing "the office" with "Nationals Park." more ›

This weekend's weather got you down in the dumps? How about a brief peek into the future: sunshine, the glorious combination of hot dogs with beer, and wooden cracks preambling the pop of gloves and clouds of dust as the home team runs the bases. Ahhh. more ›

Remember those fancy renderings of Nationals Park, the ones which showed it as a center of lively activity from both the land and the river? While the development freeze on the land side has been well documented, we were recently wondering about what's been going on with the plans to make the riverside a fun place to hang out too. more ›

Feeling like you may well die while enduring a game at Nationals Park is a shared experience for baseball fans in Washington, but one group of Nationals fans would like to present a special claim on that sense of imminent doom. For a significant sliver of the population, the vague sense of dread associated with a ballgame at the stadium has nothing to do with unforced errors and botched key plays. Rather, it's a reaction to something so essential to the sport that to consider baseball in its absence is to consider, like, cricket or something. An allergy to peanuts, clearly, is an allergy to the game itself. Peanuts are written into the game's constitution -- it's right there in the song. Nevertheless, on August 23, Nationals Park will appease peanut allergiacs with so-called "peanut-free baseball". For $30, fans may enjoy the luxury of not being forced to buy peanuts in a special party suite that will, in fact, feature no food at all, beyond what fans bring. So this could be a deal for people who are allergic to bananas, or raw foodies, or people who aren't hungry, or people who'd rather bring their own damn dogs and nachos. Sounds like a despicable recession-minded campaign to brand nothing as something, right? Could be. Alternatively: It could be a pogrom! Baseball doesn't take kindly to people who are allergic to peanuts & crackerjacks. more ›