Baseball on the East Coast!

Since today is opening day of baseball, I am posting about the Washington Nationals. I am thrilled that Washington has a baseball team, because I love the city of Washington, DC. I've lived there, and I always like going back to visit. I would like to root for the Nationals, but I already root for one baseball team (the Yankees) and one team in Washington (the Redskins). I am geographically diverse in my sports teams: I also root for the Lakers, because I live in LA, and the Pistons, because I was born in Detroit, and my parents still live there. And the Connecticut Sun, because I once lived in Connecticut, and that is a great state for women's basketball.

There's a good article in Fast Company about the new stadium. Apparently it's quite the green machine. It's LEED certified, and has all kinds of fancy new environmental technology. Best of all, they weren't that expensive:

"We'd heard it would be $10 million or $20 million more than normal to build a LEED-certified park," says architect Joe Spear of HOK Sport, which designed the stadium with Devrouax + Purnell. "In the end, it was pretty affordable -- somewhere around $2 million more."

$2 million out of $611 million sounds like chump change, and I'm sure they'll realize that in savings fairly quickly.

But I can't root for the Nationals, because I don't root for National League teams. Why? Because of the designated hitter rule. The American League has a designated hitter, and the National League does not. And for me, the designated hitter represents innovation and progress. It makes the game more exciting. And that's what America is all about: innovation, progress, and giving the customer what she wants. So I root for American League teams, because, while I believe in tradition where appropriate, as an American, I take pride in our ability to constantly improve ourselves. Not just our in our politics, but in our stadiums.