Your semi-faithful correspondent went to Wrigley Field on Saturday to see the first of two Nats wins this past weekend, and it reminded me that a trip to the North Side is among the best baseball experiences a fan can have. Yes, the Cubs have modernized the stadium, at the cost of squeezing in a few too many seats for the amount of concourse or bathroom that can exist in a building that opened a couple months before Gavrilo Princip ignited World War I. But the overall vibe is impossible to beat. It is a neighborhood stadium in an organic way that few others are or can be. The red line drops you half a block away, after you’ve seen the light towers come and go between North Side apartments. There is every type of bar you could want within a three-block radius, from Slugger’s (with rickety pitching machines, fried pickles, and cans of Old Style) to wine bars with leaded glass windows. The main gate, of course, is preserved in amber, and the quirks of the park, from the dimensions to the basket to the retro scoreboard to the rooftop bleachers across both Sheffield and Waveland Avenues (I once attended a bachelor party that closed with a Labor Day game at one of those) to the famous brick-and-ivy walls. Early September in Chicago is also in my experience just an outstanding weather experience, with low-60s-to-low-seventies highs and enough wind and night chills to give you a welcome taste of fall after a hot summer (although of course August here was the most pleasantly cool it has maybe ever been in DC). The fans are passionate but friendly enough - unless perhaps you are a Cardinals fan. And the afternoon games allow you to go almost anywhere you want in Chicago afterwards (my friend Paul - whose 40th birthday celebrations were anchored around this pilgrimage to a baseball Mecca - chose an excellent Tiki bar in the River North neighborhood, Three Dots and a Dash). It is really a perfect fan experience, and I would encourage anyone who has not done so to go see the Nationals play there at their earliest convenience. To see Brad Lord get back on track with five and two-thirds innings of two-hit ball with a career-high seven punchouts and Daylen Lile homer off a lefty for what turned out to be the game-winning run in the fourth inning was icing on the cake.

Josh Bell is the type of guy everyone really likes to see succeed, so when he hit a three-run ninth-inning bomb to spark a comeback (series) win yesterday, every National and National fan was happy. After scraping by on a run and three hits through the first eight innings, Bobby Barrels took Cubs closer Daniel Palencia - who registered 101 on the stadium gun several times on Saturday - deep to pull the Nats within one, before CJ Abrams singled and James Wood walked in front of Bell, whose towering, tailing deep fly ball to dead center got pushed into the basket above the 368 sign in left center. Daylen Lile also scored in the inning on a Brady House sacrifice fly after tripling for the eighth (!!! - were you aware that Lile in half a season is third in the National League in triples?) time this season, and the Nats won the game and the series 6-3…behind strong performances from a pair of neophytes in the rotation, Lord and Andrew Alvarez.

I would absolutely encourage everyone to read Thomas Boswell’s baseball obituary for former Nationals manager Davey Johnson, who passed away over the weekend at the age of 82. Although he ultimately wore out his welcome in most of his stops, Johnson was a brilliant baseball mind who perhaps belongs on the Mount Rushmore of baseball’s greatest thinkers. He had a Hall of Very Good career for four teams (principally his eight years with Baltimore and his three with Atlanta, where he set the record for homers by a second baseman with 43), but as a manager he has an argument as the best of the last half-century if not more.

My principal defense of this argument would be that he managed probably the most dominant team of that period, the 1986 Mets, who went 108-54 - cruising to a 21.5-game division win over the Phillies - before winning eight more games against the Astros and Red Sox in October. Videos of that team as a young boy were what cemented me as a baseball fan. He was exceptional at putting players in optimum positions to succeed, something he did again and again in his career, culminating in guiding the 2012 Nats into realizing how talented they were. Rest in peace, Davey.

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