Attendance: 6,599
Game Time: 2:40
Weather: 81 degrees, cloudy (had some rain driving up, but it was dry
and comfortable for the game)
Wind: 13 mph, R To L.
Section 205, Row U, Seat 1 – just to the right of home plate, 3 rows
from the top of the stadium
Washington’s offense started out in high gear and continued slugging
through the 4th, with 7 home runs in their first 23 plate
appearances. Adam Eaton led off the game with the first dinger, and the Nats
added 4 more tallies in the frame, climaxed by a 3-run shot by Yan Gomes. They
piled on with 3 more runs in the 2nd off Steven Matz, with Rendon
and Zimmerman going back-to-back. The explosion continued even after Matz’s
departure, as Gomes hit his second of the day in the 3rd, while
Rendon (again) and Matt Adams went deep in the 4th off New York closer
Edwin Diaz to finish the Nats’ scoring for the afternoon.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Hellickson pitched his usual efficient 5 innings,
allowing just 2 runs. (An error by Victor Robles, who also looked shaky on an
earlier fly ball, made one of the two unearned.) Matt Grace, Jimmy Cordero,
Henderson Alvarez, and Justin Miller went an inning each to close things out.
It was a little sad to see Danny Espinosa, who played with the Nats
from 2010-2016, lead off the bottom of the 9th for the New Yorkers.
(He grounded out to second.) Now 32 years old, Espinosa is in the Mets minor
league camp and has just 2 hits in 29 at-bats this spring.
Best points about First Data Field – lots of covered seats (so you’re
unlikely to be sitting out in the bright sun or rain), good pizza, friendly
staff
Worst points about First Data Field – narrow concourse, long concession
lines (so get your lunch early), hard-to-read scoreboard (dim red lights for
most of the critical items)
Traffic exiting the field winds up in two lines, which are forced to
turn either left (the way most people come in, with lots of slow traffic) or
right. I wound up in the “turn right” line, which did feature periodic
directional signs for I-95. I finally realized that these were sending me to a
different interchange, north of the usual one (and thus farther away from West
Palm Beach). Naturally I wound up getting behind a school bus, stopping for a
train at a grade crossing, and enduring a mile or two of slow traffic when a
lane was closed for road work (on the section of I-95 that I normally wouldn’t
have even been on). Other than that, traffic was smooth until I got to West
Palm Beach, where it crawled for the last 4-5 miles (normal Friday rush hour?).