(the author of the piece excerpted below, is presumably stuck behind the flag-bearing gent with the beard)
After Washington suffered a 3 game sweep at the hands of the visiting Yankees, right about now would be a rotten time to start lecturing Nationals neophytes about their (allegedly) moronic habits while attending their NL East-leading club’s games. So that’s why I’ll leave the dirty work to The Atlantic’s Steve Tuttle, who calls his fellow D.C. patrons, “dead last in baseball fan etiquette,” (“I’m not even sure many of the new fans are aware a game is going on”).
If you get up during play at a Caps hockey game, the fans threaten to do things to you that are both unnatural and I believe—after much thought—physically impossible. That is as it should be. Even those Philly fans I loathe so much wouldn’t stand for that behavior. They literally wouldn’t stand for it, and they wouldn’t let you do it, either.
You also shouldn’t stand up when you buy a hot dog or a beer from the vendor. Remain seated and pass the money down the aisle and your change will magically make its way back down the row to you. Nats Park is the only place in Washington where your money gets passed along and nobody takes a cut. Decide on your tip before you send the money down instead of making us all do two passes. Better yet, if you’re buying two eight-dollar Miller Lites, you’ve already proven that you don’t value a dollar, so give him the whole twenty. And if the beer man is standing in front of you yelling over and over, “Coors and Coors Light!” don’t ask him if he has any Blue Moon. Because he has Coors and Coors Light. That’s why he keeps yelling it. (He also doesn’t have an orange slice.)
Instead of posting “Make Some Noise” on the scoreboard to tell patrons when to cheer, the Nats should tell them when to sit down. My favorite usher, Martha, does her best, but when she politely asks people to wait until the play is over to make their way down the row, she gets puzzled glares from a lot of the ticket holders. Sadly, the words “entitled” and “Washingtonian” go together like Roger Clemens and denial.
Holy crap, is this on the nose. I just got back from today’s game, and I never once saw five uninterrupted minutes of baseball. Constant stream of idiots moving up and down the aisles as plays were happening. These are clown fans, bro.