The only Baltimore team I have alliegience to is the Orioles. I'm a neutral observer and there are pros and cons when comparing the two cities.
For a Sunday football experience Baltimore blows DC out of the water. The bars are packed with beautiful girls, and the city is decked out in purple.
In DC you walk into a bar and there are packs.... PACKS of out of state Cowboy fans.. I can't imagine a worse crowd than Cowboy fans who aren't even from Texas...
DC nightlife isn't better than Baltimore, but the crowd definitely is. Baltimore has some cool venues/neighborhoods (Fed Hill, Mt Vernon, Canton Square, Power Plant, Fells Point, etc..) All DC really has is Adams Morgan and Georgetown....
Problem with Baltimore is that it is townie as ****--A lot of large girl/guy groups makes it really difficult to socialize...
In DC everyone is from out of town, and its not hard to meet a girl at a bar and hit it off...
Traffic blows in both cities, and both areas are ghetto as **** outside of a few places.
But where are the hockey fans in Baltimore? Are all football fans hockey fans as well?
You should make some little petition and see how many signatures you get there...
But where are the hockey fans in Baltimore? Are all football fans hockey fans as well?
You should make some little petition and see how many signatures you get there...
Considering that I like hockey more than I like football I would say so...
What I don't get is how a Rangers fan who's a transplant ... gets his rocks off by starting a thread about how a team he doesn't like should host games in a city that he's not from.
The only Baltimore team I have alliegience to is the Orioles. I'm a neutral observer and there are pros and cons when comparing the two cities.
For a Sunday football experience Baltimore blows DC out of the water. The bars are packed with beautiful girls, and the city is decked out in purple.
In DC you walk into a bar and there are packs.... PACKS of out of state Cowboy fans.. I can't imagine a worse crowd than Cowboy fans who aren't even from Texas...
DC nightlife isn't better than Baltimore, but the crowd definitely is. Baltimore has some cool venues/neighborhoods (Fed Hill, Mt Vernon, Canton Square, Power Plant, Fells Point, etc..) All DC really has is Adams Morgan and Georgetown....
Problem with Baltimore is that it is townie as ****--A lot of large girl/guy groups makes it really difficult to socialize...
In DC everyone is from out of town, and its not hard to meet a girl at a bar and hit it off...
Traffic blows in both cities, and both areas are ghetto as **** outside of a few places.
Unless you are Prince or Barney the Dinosaur I don't see anything being decked out in purple as a good thing. As for bars filled with girls, Baltimore can't hold a candle to Annapolis.
DC has embraced its storied history and built upon it with the monuments and the museums, Baltimore has taken its storied history and crapped upon it. End of story.
If one is equating DC nightlife as 'Georgetown and Adams Morgan", their view of the District is very 1970's or 80's. There are scores of neighborhoods now boasting fantastic venues for music and socializing. Just dig a little deeper.
This is real simple, 18,506>11,286. In all seriousness, the Caps would be better off playing a couple games at the Giant Center in Hershey.
I would be absolutely thrilled! However our absolute max capacity with standing room is just shy of 11,000. Might be just the excuse to get Hershey to expand seating above the home goal; lots of wasted space. Considering all Saturday games are basically sold out through the end of the season (again), I can't believe they leave all that revenue on the table.
Wasnt the ice pretty much slush last time the caps play there? you want the best hockey players in the world to play in baltimore you better invest some money in making that rink suitable playing surface.
Unless you are Prince or Barney the Dinosaur I don't see anything being decked out in purple as a good thing. As for bars filled with girls, Baltimore can't hold a candle to Annapolis.
DC has embraced its storied history and built upon it with the monuments and the museums, Baltimore has taken its storied history and crapped upon it. End of story.
As a 23 year old girl living in Annapolis...
Steinberg actually wrote a piece about Caps fans in Baltimore last spring. I remember him asking on twitter if there were any Caps bars in Baltimore and I think he was surprised at the number he found.
There are lots of Maryland Capitals fans that were disenfranchised by the move south, but it was done to take advantage of the gentrifying Northern Virginia demographic boom, and I think to a large degree it was successful.
As mentioned, the Caps have their share of problems, but the fan base is not one of them. The fans are there, both in the building and the latent fan base that gets excited when the team does well. They draw, and they have become more of a presence in the DC and NoVa area.
The biggest problem is that Leonsis doesn't just own a team, he owns three teams and a venue. His empire is centered on the Verizon Center, and having the Capitals, Wizards and Mystics as tenants provides synergy.
I'd say that having more than a single exhibition is probably a good idea. The team recognizes that it hasn't done enough to acknowledge the Maryland fans that kept the team afloat in leaner times. Yet there are limits to how far they can go in terms of games, when the Verizon Center and its teams form a package deal.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next Capitals regular season home game not at Verizon Center was the Winter Classic at Nationals Park. I don't see a lot of Baltimore games in their future.
OP, we're going to act like there isn't a reason why DC has five professional sports teams and Baltimore has two? We're going to just consign that reality to happenstance? The DC metro area (all teams actually represent metro areas), is twice as big as Baltimore's, the area is SIGNIFICANTLY more affluent, prestigious, important nationally and internationally, attractive to owners/patrons and is much more of a destination city than Baltimore allowing for potential supplementary gate sales from people visiting the city taking in a game at one of the sporting venues. If Baltimore held more appeal than DC to owners of these teams, over the last 50 or 60 years you likely would have seen one of these teams relocate there. They haven't and literally none of them are even considering doing so.
@BrooklynCaps: These things are subjective so I won't really quibble with your opinion on the city, but objectivally speaking, DC has TONS of things going for it that have contributed to it being one of the two fastest growing major cities in the US over the last decade (the metro area is BOOMING as well). Obviously it's an EXTREMELY important city/metro area, it's extremely affluent, very underrated culturally, world class performance arts (Kennedy Center/Lincoln Theater/Folgers theater etc), world class museums and world famous, iconic buildings and structures (National Cathedral, Kennedy Center, White House etc.) some of the most important and prestigious employment opportunities in the country, tons of entertainment options, I could literally go on and on.
I had the opportunity to move to some of the premier cities in the country (San Fran, Chicago, NYC etc) thanks to the hard work I put in through college and law school, and I decided to stay in DC because (imo of course), it definitely does not suck. I truly love it here.
This organization has plenty of problems right now but the fanbase is not one of them.
Maybe not a critical problem, but the pulse is beating faster. A missed playoffs or another early exit and the longstanding run of sellouts (which in my opinion has already been broken) will "officially" end.
People just aren't going to keep paying thousands of dollars for constant underachievement and failure. Not in this city.
@Molseed: Isn't that more of a problem then with the product and not necessarily the fanbase? I mean, aside from the NFL, are there really a bunch of cities/fanbases that constantly sellout strings of professional sporting events in the face of consistent failure and underachievement? There are a few that I can think of (Cubs fans, Knicks fans etc), but for the most part, fanbases come out in droves to support winning, functional teams.
Even in cities with "great" fanbases, Philadelphia, New York etc., numbers at the gate have dwindle in a number of sports with repeated failures. We've seen the Phillies for protracted amounts of time struggle to draw, the Sixers last year didn't boast strong ticket sales, the Mets had legions of empty seats last season etc. If the Caps produce a reasonably consistent team (consistently competitive), I think they'll be fine at the gate now that they've captured a legitimate share of the public's eye (Ovechkin obviously helped as a gate attraction), and should they produce a legitimate contender, I think we've seen that they can sell out games consistently in this city under those circumstances.
@thirm_man_in: We're just going to let the troll win like that? Isn't that the job of trolls, to stir up rancor and discord amongst the herd? The Redskins have sucked for an extended period of time and have a racially insensitive team name. The Ravens have been perennial bridesmaids and the dominant feature of their color scheme is my wife's favorite color. All true. Now, less animosity, more harmoniousness!
I wish NHL teams would play one game in their AHL arenas. Obviously the seating capacity is cut in half in the case of the Giant Center. Just think it would be cool to do. Don't know when they've done that last but years ago I remember catching an exhibition game between the Caps and Rangers. At the time it was cool.
