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Jim and Michelle Matthews met at a Dodgers game, got married and had Mindy, now 13, and Will, 14. The whole family wrote letters to help bring baseball back to D.C., bought season tickets to Nationals home games and split them with friends.
Washington Nationals souvenir hunters' treasures include tickets to opening day and 2005 inaugural season baseballs. |
Jim and Michelle Matthews believe in God, baseball, apple pie and the miracle of infield box seats.
That's why the Stafford County couple will sit within a peanut's throw of Washington Nationals third baseman Vinny Castilla at tonight's home opener.
They swallowed hard when they got the bill for their four Washington Nationals season tickets: $12,960.
That's $40 each, times four, times 81 home games.
"Oh, my gosh!" Michelle Matthews said at the end of January, when the invoice arrived. She admitted that in her initial excitement about the new team, she had lost sight of how many games there are in a Major League Baseball season.
"We were shocked," Jim Matthews said.
The thought of declining the tickets briefly flitted across their minds.
The Matthewses are huge baseball fans, who met at a Los Angeles Dodgers game at Chavez Ravine. And they dearly want to pass their love for the game on to their children, 14-year-old Will and 13-year-old Mindy, students at Fredericksburg Christian School.
They had been writing letters urging the D.C. City Council to grab the team and asking about tickets ever since they heard the Montreal Expos might move to the area.
But they're a one-salary family. He's a 43-year-old commuter, working for Raytheon in Crystal City. She's a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom who volunteers at the homeless shelter and their church.
And the price of four lower box seats could buy a car--well, at least a Korean car.
But then they looked closely at a seating chart.
"When we saw where they were, we said: 'These are great seats. How are we going to make this work?'" Jim Matthews recalled.
Indeed they are great seats, right next to third base, undoubtedly better than the seats wheedled by many members of Congress.
"We have to do something," Michelle Matthews agreed.
Many area fans pooled their money with friends and co-workers to buy season tickets.
But the Matthewses put up all their own money on sheer love of baseball and the faith that others shared that love. They were counting on local enthusiasm for the new team to recover the money for the 61 games they didn't want to see.
One might expect that selling 244 tickets to dozens of baseball games an hour away--most on weeknights--might be a long, hard slog, even using bulletin boards, newspaper ads and eBay.
But Michelle Matthews said they were all snapped up in four days, all sold simply by word of mouth.
"We're really blessed," she said. "People are very excited about baseball coming back to the area. They've been waiting a long time. And it's just too far to drive to Baltimore."
The kind of enthusiastic response to season-ticket sales the Matthewses exemplify is critical to the Nationals' survival in D.C.
The team has sold 20,000 season tickets, an extraordinarily high number.
In spite of that and the high prices fans are paying for tickets, Bill Collins, the Northern Virginia telecommunications billionaire who's trying to buy the Nationals, told The Free Lance-Star he expects the team to lose $30 million over its three years at RFK Stadium while a new D.C. ballpark is built.
One reason, Collins said, is that the antiquated stadium has very little luxury box seating, and that's where today's teams make much of their profits.
And, he said, he expects it may be difficult to fill seats for weeknight games at RFK.
"It's no problem getting people there on the weekends," he said. "The key is how many show up on Tuesdays and Wednesdays."
But RFK's location isn't as easily accessible from Interstate 95 as the new ballpark scheduled to open in 2008 in the Anacostia area on the southern edge of the city.
And, since the Washington Senators left the District in 1971, operating costs for a Major League Baseball team have risen faster than a Barry Bonds home run.
Free agency caused the average salary to jump from $31,543 in 1971 to $2.6 million now. And Major League Baseball's minimum salary has gone from $12,750 to $316,000.
A point of comparison for Joe Six-Pack fans unsympathetic to billionaire owners and millionaire players: Over the same period, the federal minimum wage went from $1.60 per hour ($6.50 in current dollars) to $5.15 an hour.
The top salary in the Senators' final season was $166,000 for Boston Red Sox star Carl Yastrzemski. Now it's $25.7 million for New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez.
Over the same period of time, Major League Baseball's annual national television revenue has gone from $16.5 million to $560 million.
In recent years, skyrocketing salaries and gradually increasing suspicion about steroid use have supposedly soured fans on the game.
But consider this:
When the Senators left Washington, the average American League team's season attendance was 989,000. Last year the average AL attendance was 2.3 million.
The National League Nats hope to exceed that average, based largely on season-ticket sales.
There must be a lot of people like Stafford's Jim and Michelle Matthews out there.
Staff librarian Craig Schulin contributed to this story.
To reach MICHAEL ZITZ: 540/374-5408 mikez@freelancestar.com
