Tubesox Nation Bay-cott #3: Arcadia

Match-up: Nationals-Giants
Date: 5/13
Weather: Sunny, 66 degrees
Five-Fold Path adherence: cycle
DOOSH: $15.75

An abbreviated sortie today . . . I arrived in the sixth and the ambos were long gone. After various fruitless attempts to scrounge an extra ticket from late arrivals (although one guy did offer me a lit reefer instead of a ticket), I phoned a friend inside the stadium and he said they'd scored $7 tickets at the ticket window.

Hmmm . . . decision time . . . not. A midweek tilt against the Nats is no time to lose focus and diverge from the Five-Fold Path. So, I ended up catching the final three innings from the freebie standing area under the right field arcade with a bunch of true fans.

Top six arcade highlights follow (maybe you can recognize your Tubesox Nation correspondent):
1. Nattily attired guy with walking stick suddenly pacing and screaming something about "put on your bullpen hat" and then returning to railing and falling silent again.

2. Verbose thirty-something skate-punk/union plumber in Rusty Staub-era Expos hat singing along to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame, accusing a batter of being "on Hillary Clinton's payroll," and screaming "yo, Adrian" when "Rocky" theme played in 9th.

3. Borderline ptero using "colorful" language to heckle Nats RF Austin Kearns after a Nate Schierholtz gapper eluded him.

4. Slightly less aged guy screaming "you're still playing Canadian baseball" after same Schierholtz gapper, provoking someone else to begin chanting "Eh . . . Eh . . . Eh . . . Eh!"

5. Wild-eyed woman worming her way in front of some poor schlub because she's "legally blind". . . and then sticking out a bare leg and ordering the Expos skate-punk to feel it, before saying "I need to find my boyfriend" and wandering off.


6. Yours truly attempting to nail down the exact pre-Gold Rush boundaries of Mission Bay with the ptero and the skate-punk . . . the general consensus was that it originally stretched approximately from 17th Street to Townsend Street.

Nats win 6-3 as Zeets takes a hard-luck loss, the Panda gets a ribby, and Ryan Zimmerman's 30-game hit streak ends. Post-game beer in the sun at The Ramp, Mission Bay's premier waterside joint.