I liked the Washington Nationals before this week, both as a fun team team to watch and as a seemingly good bunch of guys.  Now I like them even more.

Last month, as they were in Florida for spring training, reliever Ryan Mattheus tweeted out a picture of him and fellow reliever Tyler Clippard.  They were wearing the same shoes, and the message said they both thought the Nike swoosh was blue when they got them, but might actually be purple.

Then he tweeted again, posing the color question to this followers:

Fortunately, one of those followers is me, someone who spent far too many years in the footwear business, including selling Nike products.  I also happen to be a huge fan of them myself.  So I have tons of experience finding the exact color names that Nike uses.  They put a three-digit code at the end of the style number:

In this case, it’s 008, denoting that my shoes are mainly grey, with some silver and orange.  After a minute of Googling, I tracked down the color the guys had on theirs: ultramarine.  AKA, Blue.

When I sent him the answer, Mattheus quickly wrote back that my effort deserved a prize.  The other day I got a package in the mail with this:

And this:

Pretty cool thing for him to do, especially for just answering a question on Twitter.

I did have to laugh though at the way the balls were packaged inside their envelope.  They were enclosed in a white, knee-high baseball sock, which definitely served its purpose in getting them here in good condition.

Not sure what I should do with it now.