The Moines Witness Sporting History

The Moines are adventurous. Not sure if you know this about us...but we like to be spontaneous sometimes. On the very first day we were in Virginia (last Tuesday)...we showed our adventurous side.

Keep in mind we had taken a red eye...and neither of us can sleep all that well on airplanes. However, the cable guy had come, the electricity had been turned on and our cars had been delivered...so the only options in how to spend the remainder of our day were...nap on the borrowed air mattress we had...OR...witness sporting history.

We chose the latter.

So, we hopped on the metro into DC and decided to venture to National's Park to see if we could find tickets to the sold out game that was happening that evening. I'm not sure if you've heard of Stephen Strasburg...but he's kind of a big deal around here. The Nationals (who have sucked) picked him up in the draft last summer...and people are REALLY excited about him. Tuesday (the game we went to) was his first major league start. Apparently, this is a big deal.

On big games where they sell out (which this day may have been the only game in their brief history) the Nats release $5 day of nosebleed tickets. So we picked up some of those and headed in. We were a couple hours early because we didn't know what the ticket situation would be like...but you would have never known it was that early because there was already a lot of people there and the Baseball Tonight guys were there filming. When we had left the house we were watching Orel Hershiser on the TV talking about the game...and now we were there watching him in person. Pretty cool.

So the whole experience was pretty surreal. People were REALLY excited about this kid. People had signs that said "Strasburg is our Savior" and you should have seen all the flash bulbs that went off when he threw his first major league pitch!  I mean the guy got a standing ovation just walking from the dugout to the bullpen before the game even started. Talk about pressure! Just seeing his face as he walked across the field made me want to cry. But he did great!  He threw 14 strikeouts...and with every pitch the whole stadium went nuts. It was definitely a cool experience.

We must admit that BOTH of us fell asleep during the game...but we are definitely glad we entertained our adventurous side and went to the game. We'll definitely be saving our ticket stubs and we feel a little bit connected to the Nats now that we've witnessed their history.

Here are some pics from the adventure.

P.S. Go Angels!