This is the mobile that hangs from the ceiling near the home plate gate at Nationals Park in DC. There are four big cylinders with baseball players on them that rotate slowly as a nearby speaker plays "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." It's a cool, artsy element of the ballpark that most people miss because not much traffic passes through the home plate gate. And the people that do pass by tend not to look up.
There were a host of reasons to skip tonight's game: it was a rather chilly evening at the ballpark, there are only a couple weeks left in the season, the Nats are 48-92, they'd lost 9 of their last 10 games, they were playing the defending World Series champs, and they long ago surrendered any hope of making the playoffs. But I went despite all that.
Tonight's game was being started by once and current Nats heavyweight hurler Livan Hernandez (Viva Livo!). It was also the major league debut of Nats shortstop and September call-up Ian Desmond. Desmond had quite the coming out party. He got his first hit and his first home run and drove in four runs, a franchise record for a player making his major league debut. He also made an error on an airmailed throw to first, but atoned for it in the end.
After quickly going down 2-0 in the first inning, the Nats tied it up the third, scored the go ahead run in the fourth, and surged to a 6-run lead in the fifth. Then things got a little more interesting than they needed to in the 9th. The Phillies scored 5 runs in the top of the frame, with the majority of them coming on a pinch hit grand slam by Matt Stairs.
With the Nats clinging precariously to a 1-run lead with only 1 out and runners on the corners, Ian Desmond scooped up a Ryan Howard grounder and started the game-ending double play to preserve the victory for Livo. And that's why you go to games at the end of the season when both the temperature and your team are lowly -- you never know what might happen.
Baseball... it's like a slow motion roller coaster.
(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)
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