Gummi Bears! Bouncing Here and There and Everywhere!

A little while back I linked to the DuckTales opening theme song over at Youtube. I even gave you a bunch of different languages, so you could imagine yourself enjoying DuckTales as a young spanish, slovak... or whatever language speaking youth.

Well here is the Gummi Bears Theme:





This time, instead of Gummi Bears in different languages (which you could conceivably just look up yourself) I'm linking to this interesting Techno version of the Gummi Bears Theme Techno version:

Nat's Attendance Woes

So much hoopla was made about how the Nats drew a paltry 20,487 fans in their second game at Nationals Park. Yeah, it sucked... but I'm still making excuses and here they are (in order of importance/reason):

1. Over a week from game 1 to game 2 - These people seem to be missing this fairly important point: The Nats opened Nationals Park with a single game "series", after which they went on a week long road trip. Home Game #1 was on Sunday, March 30th and Home Game #2 came over a week later on Monday, April 7th. Pittsburgh, who was lauded for having 35,045 fans in their game following opening day, had a slightly similar situation. The Pirates had a 3 game series to open PNC Park, and then went on a road trip. When the came back a week later they drew 20,128 fans. And not coincidentally that game was on a...
   
2. Monday night - Capital Punishment compared it to other weeknight game #2, but that entirely ignores that it not only was a weeknight, but it was a Monday night. The following game, on a Wednesday, drew 23,340 fans. Sure, not a huge improvement, but definitely an improvement considering the Wizards and DC United also had homes games that night.
   
3. The Opponent (Florida Marlins) - Capital Punishment glosses over this point by saying "Want lousy opponents? How 'bout the Brewers?" to which I respond: No, not the Brewers. Consider that the Brewers actually draw fans and the Marlins just don't. They don't even draw fans to their own stadium in Miami.
   
4. The Nats don't have a history and just aren't that good - It's just not fair to compare Washington to the rest of the league because the Nats don't have a history here (even if you include the Senators, their last Washington World Series appearance was 1933) and all other recent expansion teams started play in a new stadium, save for the Colorado Rockies who waited only 2 years for Coors Field and were actually a good team that year (they started 7-1, as opposed to the Nats 3-4 record when they returned for the monday night game 2).
   
5. It was 50 degrees - Sure, Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago drew more people on similar weather, but all of those are cold weather towns AND those games were the next game following the opening day.
   
6. NCAA Final Four - The NCAA College Basketball Final Four was on that same night.
   
7. Local Sports competition - The DC sports media was enthralled with the Washington Capitals who had, just that Saturday, made the playoffs with a seven game winning streak to end the season. The Wizards were likewise headed to the playoffs. When you don't have a "time-rooted" following and you've been gone for a week, it helps to have the media pump up game 2 at the new ballpark... which the media absolutely did not.
   

So sure one or two of these factors and it's not a big deal, but this truly was a "Perfect Storm" against the Nats. Although I think the first factor was the biggest reason, all of those things combined just made for a low turn out.

But not to worry, despite the fact that, until a few nights ago, the Nats had the worst record in the majors, the Nats are doing okay attendance-wise coming in at #15 according to ESPN. And don't forget that every team from #1 to #14 has a real MLB history, except for the Colorado Rockies, who went to the World Series last year. Now I'm not saying Washington will be a great baseball town, but I think we'll do just fine.