Nats 2nd home game in new stadium: 20,497 fans

[DrungoHazewood]

Personally, I want it to stay the way it is. The talent pool was stretched thin enough with expansion. I don't want each city to have 2-3 teams.

Personally, I think that the talent pool is deeper than ever. The United States has more than twice as many people as it did in 1950, all races, creeds, and colors are eligible to play, and major league baseball draws talent from across the globe, from a pool of players that reaches many hundreds of millions of people. If you compare to 1920 or 1901, well, there's no comparison at all. Today's teams draw from vastly larger pools of talent, and do it in a much more organized and efficient manner. Yet we don't even have double the number of teams we did in 100 years ago, 30 vs. 16.

If you set the baseline talent level you want in a major league as Mickey Mantle's rookie year I think you could support 50 or 60 teams. If you want Babe Ruth's 1927 season as the baseline you'd probably have to field 100 or more.

Do you think it's a coincidence that the O's and Peter Angelos finally figuring out that they need to build the right way happened just after the Nats arrived and built a nice new park? I think competition drives innovation and punishes complacency. 3-4 teams in the Washington-Baltimore area would be good for the Orioles as long as every market faced the same kind of competition.

[howie14]

Do you think it's a coincidence that the O's and Peter Angelos finally figuring out that they need to build the right way happened just after the Nats arrived and built a nice new park? I think competition drives innovation and punishes complacency. 3-4 teams in the Washington-Baltimore area would be good for the Orioles as long as every market faced the same kind of competition.

That last sentence was my biggest argument when the national press and others started going after the Orioles for fighting the Expos' move. Let them put teams within 40 miles of all the other existing franchises and see how they like it.

The truth is, though, that PA-like him or hate him-did make the best deal for the Orioles future that he could out of this. If the Nats existence has also spurred a new found era of competence for the Birds, so much the better.

BTW, the Nats got 23,000+ last night. It's a little disappointing, but new parks just don't have that kind of impact on attendance anymore. The revenue from such a crowd is probably at least twice as much as the revenue for the same size crowd at RFK.

And, to be fair, we wouldn't have drawn 12,000 last night without a giveaway.