Water Gate

Yes I know… watergate was one word. But this is a different kind of watergate, it actually refers to water. Today the Washington Redskins took to Fed Ex Field to play the Baltimore Ravens in a scrimmage. The day was marketed as a scrimmage / fan appreciation day. The only problem is… I didn’t see much real appreciation for Redskin fans at all. For starters, there was a section reserved at Fed Ex Field for RAVENS fans. Yes, that’s right… it was a free-for-all for Redskin fans to find a seat, but Ravens fans were treated to an entire reserved section in the lower bowl at center field… arguably the best section in the stadium. Fed Ex Field staff went to great length to keep Redskin fans out of the great seats… awesome. But no Ravens fans showed up to sit there. To make it just a little more irritating, they kept the section EMPTY for the entire day. Seems like the Ravens appreciate their fans enough to ENSURE they have a good time even at an away game by securing seats for them. Heaven forbid that the Redskins take the opportunity to do something like, thank some of their bigger fan sites by giving them SOME kind of sectioned off area of the stadium, or some kind of acknowledgement for the THANKLESS work they put in supporting the team. I didn’t get as bent out of shape as some people did about the $25 parking. Last year I went to M&T Stadium and I paid $20/ticket to watch the scrimmage… so paying $25 a car didn’t seem that bad to me. I do know however that a lot of the people that showed up today had a few things to say about it; and most of it wasn’t very flattering. I figure they didn’t have to come if they didn’t want to pay, but plenty of people had a few whines in my ear at Fed Ex over the course of the day regardless. But this has nothing to do with water gate. Water gate is actually about WATER. Who knows how hot it was in the stadium today… 100 degrees plus I’m sure… a day in which all of the 47,000-plus fans in attendance would need liquid replenishment and need it all day long. I guess that’s why a bottle of water was five dollars . Yes, that’s right folks… water was a walloping five dollars a bottle today at Fed Ex Field. If you brought a family of four with you to the scrimmage, you could treat your family to a round of water for the low, low price of twenty bucks. I find it odd that I asked for a four-dollar milkshake instead (as listed on the menu) but was told that it wasn’t available. I also found it odd that the menu was in order of price all the way down to the bottom where you reached water and the price suddenly went back up again. I swear it looked like a water might perhaps normally be three bucks but had been bumped to five. Does ‘ouch’ even cover it? I know that as I walked back to my seat with that liquid gold that looked a lot like a bottle of water, I hardly felt ‘appreciated’ as a fan. As a matter of fact, I actually felt totally exploited. Please don’t misunderstand, I’m used to exhorbitant arena and stadium food costs, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never paid five dollars for a water. You can rest assured that were it not for the fact that I might have dropped dead of heat exhaustion out there, I wouldn’t have today either. But there was a real threat of sunstroke or dehydration for all in attendance today, and most of us had to take the plunge. Of course fans aren’t allowed to bring their own food and drink into the stadium – not even on Fan Appreciation Day. Who cares if a lot of the people there were there only because they can’t afford to go to a regular season game, that’s no reason not to rape someone’s pocket at every turn, right? There may not have been a ‘Deep Throat’ today at Fed Ex, but almost 50,000 Redskin fans had to dig deep into their pockets all day long… and most of them just to keep from passing out. If we had passed out, who knows how much we would have had to pay for a little first aid. It wasn’t until late in the day that I realized the error of my ways. I actually felt kind of stupid once I figured it out too. Fan Appreciation Day apparently isn’t about the team showing you how much they appreciate you… it’s just another day that Redskin fans got to show and how much they appreciate the team by paying five bucks for a bottle of water. As we figured out in the jersey blog , apparently KY jelly has become a staple for Redskin…