The Only Time I'll Address This "Take Back The Park" Debacle

There's a natural order to how things are supposed to work in the baseball world.

• Step 1: Develop good players
• Step 2: Win baseball games
• Step 3: Draw fans
• Step 3: Profit!

It seems to me that a team who hasn't had a .500 record since their relocation and hasn't won a single post season series since their franchise was born over 40 years ago would be a little more receptive to anyone that walks in their door and hands them a stack of money. But that doesn't seem to be the case with you, Washington.

Listen Nats fan(s), I understand. It's hard enough to transplant a team to a town as disinterested as Washington DC. Considering the amount of politicians, lobbyists, and activists living in the metro area, sports are an afterthought as it is. Then, to make matters worse, your geographically nearest competitor goes on a sustained run of success.Your neighbor to the north (remember, we were the capitol first!) is winning World Series games while your team comes in last place in five out of six years. And then to top it all off, your big free agent signing is a bust (Jayson Werth), your young phenom pitcher (Stephen Strasburg) needs Tommy John surgery, and your most valuable player in 2011 ends up being a 27 year old middle reliever (Tyler Clippard with his 3.4 WAR).

But don't take it out on me. I'm the guy who bought tickets when you still played at RFK and helped you pay for some of that new stadium on the waterfront. And I'm the guy who led a bus load of fans down to your stadium two years ago, buying tickets at full face value from your website despite them being much cheaper on the secondary market. You had no problem letting me pose for pictures with Teddy, George, Abe, and Tommy when the lines were so empty, the geico gecko was off taking a nap on a concrete bench. And you had no problem charging me and 30 of my friends $7 for a beer and $4 for a hot dog when you couldn't fill your own stadium on opening day.

You're a team that has more instability than the stock market. Five managers in seven years (Phillies, just one). A front office GM that resigned as a result of a signing bonus skimming for overseas talent. And a roster that has featured some of the scurve of the baseball world in recent years (high school expellee Lastings Milledge, wife beater Elijah Dukes, notorious loudmouth Nyjer Morgan, and that Teen Wolf that plays right field).

And yet for some reason, right when you're on the precipice of success, signing Ryan Zimmerman to a long team deal, trading for a legitimate starter in Gio Gonzalez, and developing great young talent like Strasburg and Bryce Harper, you go and foul it all up. Simply put, the "Take Back the Park" campaign is putting the cart before the horse.

First of all, there is a time and a place to develop ticket sales gimmicks and for the most part that time is BEFORE money is accepted as a deposit. You can bet that the moment MLB announced the 2012 schedule on September 13, 2011, front office folks were hard at work coming up with wacky promotions to get butts into seats. That gave Naitonals COO Andy Feffer nearly 5 whole months to come up with his weasely plan to keep Phillies fans out of Nationals Park. The problem is, his team had been taking group ticket deposits for nearly three months before the plan was announced. As a matter of fact, I could go on the Nationals Group Ticket Sales page right now and place a $200 deposit without any indication that my money would later be deemed no good for the May 4-6th series against the Phillies. Instead the Nationals have offered full refunds to all groups of fans that may have been looking to make the trek to DC that weekend. Obviously that timing has repercussions for organizations that plan trips in advance like the group at IPS who were left high and dry after putting down a deposit on a bus as well. And while that story had a happy ending as the Reading Phillies offered the group complimentary tickets to their stadium on the same day, you have to imagine that many fan groups won't be so lucky.

But the bigger thing that irks me about you, Washington, is the overnight sense of entitlement you've developed. It's as if an entire organization and fan base has suddenly adopted the same snide attitude of Jayson Werth that made Phillies fans only half interested in even seeing their team make an offer for the guy to come back. Says Andy Fefferer:

"If we lock a few Phillies fans out, so be it. They can be angry all they want... look, we’re not gonna make it easy for group sales, for buses coming from Philly. I will not make it easy for those guys to buy tickets or get into this ballpark... Forget you, Philly. This is our park, this is our town, these are our fans, and it’s our time right now.”

"Your park" only holds the team's namesake because naming rights couldn't be sold and was funded with $611M in tax payer dollars that most DC residents were furious about. "Your fans" have filled that park to the rank of 13th, 13th, 14th, and 14th out of the 16 teams in the National League in attendance. And "Your Time" is after an 80-81 season in which you were 21.5 games out in the division and 9.5 out of the playoff picture. This isn't how you build a fan base. You can't shove a subpar product down their throats with "#FUPhilly" radio bits by giving away tickets in the hundreds. "Your" inferiority complex is getting out of hand!

The concept of "taking back the park" is something Jayson Werth mentioned immediately upon joining the team. It's also something that popped up on a fan forum of yours over a year ago. (Your COO jacking ideas from a FAN FORUM, think about that possibility for a minute). But it doesn't work that way! Banning Phillies fans does not create Nationals fans! Instead you end up with a handful of Nats die hards, a handful of guys that thought it'd be cool to stick it to Philly for the weekend, and a whole lot of irate Phillies fans who had to spend an extra 20-30% secondary market to get tickets (over a thousand available on Stubhub right now). I'll be there on May 5th with a group of twenty blog readers. I suspect that many area bloggers will have similar groups. And PhilsFever will still roll down I-95 in a caravan of coach buses.

A good product brings people on the bandwagon and bandwagons drive out opposing fans! See Phillies, 2007.

Jayson Werth is Delusional

One one hand, you can't fault Jayson Werth for trying to make the best out of what is destined to be a bad situation for a number of years. It's going to take a few more rounds worth of can't miss prospects and some incredibly lucky free agent finds before the Nationals are a competitive team. On the other hand, he may just be out of his mind...

“Last year when we played the Mets, there weren’t any Mets fans in the seats,” Werth said. “They wouldn’t dare come down. I think four years from now, it’ll be the same way in Washington. Or sooner.”

First of all, I completely disagree. While there may have been more Mets fans at CBP in years past, their proximity to Philadelphia makes them plentiful in our ballpark regardless of their record. I would say that Yankees and Red Sox fans are the only larger groups at CBP (arguably the case with every stadium in the country.)

But more importantly, Jayson, the Nats are still the Nats. While I think it's great for baseball that our nation's capitol has a team with an owner that is willing to spend some money to produce a competitive product, Jayson Werth's 4 year prediction probably isn't realistic. The Mets are a rare case of implosion due to financial woes and terrible management. Don't expect the rest of the division to fall off the wagon in the same fashion.  The Braves are on the rise and have as much young talent as any team in the game. The Marlins are loaded with Logan Morrisons and Mike Stantons (and hardly a single player on their roster over 30). The Phillies are in their prime with a surprisingly well stocked farm system. And the Mets... well, okay Jayson, you win that one.

Like it or not, this Jayson Werth vs. Philadelphia story line is going to exist for a little while longer. When he makes his first visit to Citizens Bank Park on May 3rd, prepare to hear some boos. Hell, there's a pretty solid chance he'll get boo'd at his home stadium tonight with a crowd that is destined to be almost 50% Phillies fans once again. But you probably won't hear them from me. He was a nice player, but I neither miss him, nor hold any ill will. He took the money and ran... but who wouldn't? If I was offered $126M dollars to blog about the Mets, we'd be talking about Carlos Beltran right now and there would be a Jose Reyes Bobblehead on my desk instead of Jimmy Rollins. He was a scrap heap project that Charlie Manuel was successful with, but I think guys like him can grow on trees. Despite the numbers he put up the past two years, he's far from a polished hitter. Todd Zolecki just posted up a series of rankings for Jayson Werth's numbers and he falls in the mid 20s for most categories. A good, but probably not great player (and certainly not one worth $100M +). I cringe watching him drop to one knee after a hack that was 12" away from the ball. He was brutal with RISP last season. And I'm a firm believer that Ben Francisco's early success as an every day player this year is no fluke. This lineup simply gives opportunities for guys like Werth & Francisco to see strikes.

The Nationals are 21-51 against the Phillies in the last 4 years for a .291 win %. Don't expect that to change in the next four years, Jayson.