Back in the days when your nation’s capital had a horrible, perennially cellar-dwelling baseball team, the Senators, the catch-phrase was “Washington: First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the American League.”
Times have changed. The Senators left for Minneapolis. The reconstituted Senators left for Texas. And the newest Senators, now rechristened the Nationals (which had been the nickname of the original Senators and the reconstituted ones, if a team nickname can be said to have a nckname) arrived from Montreal, where they had been languishing as the lowly, attendance-starved Expos. And given all these changes, the old saw no longer pertained. Now it’s “Washington: First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the National League.”
Although my passion for baseball now lives only in memory, on occasion (and twice this season), I tag along with a friend and venture out to the Nationals’ new home field. The team is astonishingly bad and regularly embarrasses itself by devising new ways to display its ineptitude (as they did in both games that I attended this season). Still, those two nights have been pleasant, as it’s nice to sit out on a balmy evening in the shiny new ballpark, munching on burger and fries from the Five Guys concession and reliving my innocent youth.
All this by way of wind-up. Here’s the pitch. One of the few things I like about the Washington Nationals is their “curly W” logo. It looks great on their paraphernalia, especially on their caps. It’s a good logo. I was thus especially pleased to see that the curly W is actually inscribed in the outfield grass. That looks so very cool — cooler in person than in the picture above.
Being ignorant of anything that has to do with the real world, I was totally clueless about how the groundskeepers had created and were maintaining a grass tattoo. Because I’m certain that you’ve been wondering the very same thing, here, as a public service, is the answer, which turns out to be a combination of art and science, as reported in today’s Washington Post.
[Hat tip to Chris Deering]