Nats Have Toilets and Half-Dressed Women

Flush with optimism. (By Bill O'leary -- TWP)

The message I got Saturday afternoon--"please tell me you're at the toilet flushing"--was highly distressing. Not only was I not at the Nats' giant toilet-flushing event--I was instead at a Cal Davis-Loyola basketball game, and more on that later--I hadn't even heard that 175 volunteers would be steadily flushing 500 toilets and urinals at Nats Park to test the pipes.

The ballpark has 526 sinks, 568 toilets and 218 urinals. The test focused on 503 toilets and urinals in public restrooms. The volunteers flushed, working from the lowest level of the ballpark to the highest, flushing for five minutes before slowly working their way back down.

Alarmingly, this would seem to indicate that the stadium lacks those men's rooms troughs that we all associate with baseball games of a certain era, the era when ice cream came in mini batting helmets and parking cost maybe $5 and the Orioles weren't eliminated from playoff contention in early April. But I'm glad the pipes work, and this is without a doubt the first positive baseball story involving a urine test in a decade.

The event also had commemorative t-shirts; I figured I could buy one on the eBays for $10 or $20 this a.m, but thus far no luck. I did, however, find this photo from a 1924 Nats game, showing a scene Stan Kasten would do well to reproduce on the field this spring, even if it requires giant Teddy Roosevelt to play the role of the half-dressed woman.

$7.95? Seriously?