Thursday, April 9, 2009

The Washington Nationals Are Quite Desparate For Fans

There have been a lot of weird and unusual pleas by owners to get fans to come to their games, but this one might just take the cake. Washington Nationals GM Stan Kasten went on the radio this morning and pleaded for fans to come to the Nationals opening day. Well, what's so weird about this, you ask? Well, it just so happens that this was a Philadelphia radio station. Yep, that's right. The Nats GM pleaded with Philadelphia fans to come to the Nationals home opener! From a publicized conversation of the Philadelphia Inquirer columnists.

Did you hear Nationals GM Stan Kasten on ESPN-AM (950) with Jody Mac the other day? (It's a radio station. Yes, right here in Philadelphia.) He was actually urging - "begging" might be a more appropriate verb - Phillies fans to go down to Washington and attend his team's games with the Phils next week. "We have an opening day here Monday," said Kasten, "and we'd love for all our Philly fans to come down." Is he mad? I know that execs whose teams don't draw well probably secretly relish those occasions when opposing fans fill their ballparks. But to go on the radio in one of those cities and shamelessly market the fact that you can't fill up your own stadium strikes me as bizarre and damn near traitorous.
And that's how you know that your team is in the crapper for the year!

In all seriousness, though, baseball is the ultimate sport of where if you're team is doing good, fans will flock to the games en masse and you'll pretty much have fans begging and pleading for standing room only "seats", but if you're team sucks, well, at least it will be rather simple looking for any and all homerun balls.

3 comments:

  1. Baseball and Basektball are the only sports where you could have a sellout one night and hardly anybody the next night.

    Owners though can't complain about the crappy economy for the lack of fans at the stadium. Put a winning product out on the field or Arena and the fans would flock to those games.

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  2. And the Phillies are the perfect example of this. They were selling standing room only tickets to yesterday's ring ceremony/game.

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  3. And didn't we realize that Kasten worked with the Braves in their halcyon days?

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