Last Wednesday, I took in a game at Nationals Park in some boffo seats — and while the food was tasty, the beer cold, and the ballpark just as nice and clean as it was last year, the on-field play was, as has been the norm, less than optimal. That evening, the home team lost a 1-0 game on a bases loaded walk in the top of the ninth inning; the crowd over the course of a run-less opening eight innings, as you can imagine, was not quite awash with excitement. But still: it was the ballpark. There’s just something about being there to hear the crack of the bat and the monotonous chant of the beer man, to stand for the seventh inning stretch, to eat like garbage and not care, because that’s just what you do. Being in that atmosphere, it’s just…a good thing.

Therein lies the challenge for Nats broadcaster MASN — how is the network supposed to make watching a god-awful baseball team appealing to viewers without the amenities that the ballpark atmosphere can use to draw people to watch? You make some promos, and hope for the best, that’s how. This year, the network enlisted the strategy of featuring “real” Nationals fans from around the area, talking about memorable moments from last season’s campaign as said moments (as shown on MASN) play in the background. Judging from the commercial below, the network seems like it could be able to make viewers think that watching the Nats on television is exciting.

Not bad — it does what it’s supposed to do, in that, yes, last year’s Opening Day was pretty fun to watch on the tube. Unfortunately for MASN marketing department, the following 161 games of the 2008 Nationals campaign wasn’t exactly chock full of enthralling source material for killer thirty second blips. In fact, one could make the argument that outside of Ryan Zimmerman’s walkoff longball at last year’s opener, nothing of note really happened.

Obviously, MASN couldn’t simply replay the Opening Day promo every single commercial break. They had to make others. This, obviously, caused some problems.