Winterfest!

For the first time ever, I decided to go to Nats Winterfest today.  Truth – I’ve never wanted to go before because tickets aren’t the cheapest, and on top of that, you have to pay for autograph session vouchers.  And those sessions are a total crap shoot as to who you are going to get, so, OBVI, you want to buy as many sessions as you can.  So now we’re looking at a pretty expensive day.  No thank you.

So what changed?  This year, I was offered tickets to the free autograph session that was reserved for the fancy season plan holders.  When this past season ended, the season plan holders that sit around me and Lulu made our new found friendship facebook official.  One of these lovely people was unable to go to this particular plan holder event, so he offered me his tickets.  Score!  Since I was going down to Winterfest anyway, I decided to get tickets to the actual even and check it all out with a friend.

This autograph session was ass early at 8:30.  How they got players to agree to this, I’ll never know.  Krissy and I exchanged a few texts about the unknown players we would be up close and personal with in just a few short hours as I was getting ready to leave my house, and I specifically said that as long as it wasn’t Bear, I’d be good.  As we anxiously stood in line for our table (there were 3 total), we saw freaking Bear walk up and sit down.  You’ve GOT to be kidding me.  On either side of him, however, was Zimm and Joe Ross, plus Charlie and Dave from the radio, so, overall, huge score.  We scoped out the other tables, and we think we ended up with the best one.  I managed to be nice to Bear (almost killed me), and enjoyed getting to talk with Zimm about UVA.  I ended up gushing all over Joe Ross, which I apologized for (ha, he told me I was embarrassing him), but I just couldn’t help myself.  I also told him to tell Rizzo that we should trade for his brother.  Because… I think we should trade for his brother.

We got to go into Winterfest itself an hour before the general riff raff (yay! for season plan holder perks!), and we listened to a Nats Q & A with Mark Lerner, Rizzo, the head marketing lady, and Dusty.  We then stood in line to try and get a photo with Espi, because Krissy has been mildly obsessed with him ever since dreaming that he was an endocrinologist.  Unfortunately, his photo time was over before we got to the front of the line, but he got sucked into conversation with two older women as soon as he left the photo booth, so we saddled up and waited for him to finish talking to them.  I was able to ask (translation – BEG) him to bring back his amazing handlebar mustache for photo day at the start of spring training.  He laughed, and told me he was going to go with his full beard.  As awesome as his beard is, it’s so not that amazing handlebar stache, so color me disappointed. 

I was able to get his autograph, and Krissy got a (blurry) picture with him (sorry about that…).  We stalked Clint around and were finally able to catch him without much of a crowd, so we scored his autograph as well, and we watched Anthony and Max square off in a pretty entertaining lip sync battle.  Anthony did an AMAZING ‘bad to the bone’ while Max showed the world that he didn’t know any of the lyrics to ‘livin on a prayer’… he still rocked it, though.  I also got to catch up with in game host Mike Ploger, managed to win a Nats yoga mat, and a chance at PNC diamond club tickets (fingers crossed!), and I got two game used balls in a grab bag for a good price (Anthony vs Teheran and Det (as a Nat) vs someone).  All in all, pretty damn good day.  Exhausting, but fun.