Weekend Fail: Nationals Park Is No Longer A Place For The Common Man

Charlie Klein

This just in: stadium food is expensive. Having attended many a baseball game in my time, this is just an evil I have to accept as part of the fan experience. I usually eat before I go to the game anyway.

However, during my trip to Nationals Park last Saturday to watch the Boston Red Sox take on the Washington Nationals at Fenway Lite (there were way too many Sox fans there to consider that a home game for the Nationals), I attempted to purchase a jumbo soft pretzel. The kind of pretzel available in every stadium all over this beautiful country of ours.

Imagine my dismay when I finally got to the front of the line that promised me a soft pretzel only to discover that in a new brain blast of genius the Nationals had replaced soft pretzels with heated bags of Snyder's hard, crunchy, not soft pretzels, which I could have easily bought from a vending machine.

This is where it has to stop, people. They cannot just go and eliminate the classic stadium pretzel from their food selection. This was the one thing I could justify spending money on (aside from peanuts, which I ended up buying instead) at a stadium and now it is gone.

As a point of clarification, there are still pretzels available at Nationals Park, just ones that cost seven dollars to purchase. Although they are shaped in a curly 'W' they do not have that classic taste of the jumbo pretzel stadium-goers have come to enjoy down the years.

I say we go out there and protest this change! We cannot allow for baseball teams to just eliminate a core element of our baseball watching cuisine. What's next, removing the hot dog and replacing it with some ten dollar Italian sausage? No thank you.

And you want to know the worst part of standing in that line? Having to listen to some Red Sox fan whose not even from Boston (proven by his liking of the Wizards, Capitals, and Redskins) try to explain to an equally stupid Nationals fan why it was ridiculous for the Nationals not to have Stephen Strasburg pitch in the exhibition game.

This is stupid on three levels. The first of which is why would the Nationals want Strasburg's first appearance at their home stadium to be in a game that does not count? Second, the Nationals are saving Strasburg's debut for a rainy day when they need an attendance boost (i.e. when everyone realizes Pudge is washed up). And finally, the game was pretty much sold out anyway, so it is unlikely that the Nationals could have made much more than they already did by having Strasburg pitch in a meaningless game.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make here is that it should be against league rules to remove soft pretzels from a stadium. And that I will not be going to many Nationals games this year either.