“Sometimes,” said a minor leaguer whom the Bunyanesque bombardier managed, “I think he’s too good for this game.” About Frank Howard, now gone, the gentlest giant of them all.

All of a sudden there’s a pall overhead. The one Washington Senator above all who didn’t want to move to Texas to become a Ranger has gone to the Elysian Fields at 87. The gentlest giant. The guy whose nickname Capital Punishment was as much a misnomer as The Killer was attached to his contemporary Harmon Killebrew.

Frank Howard. The behemoth whose home runs were conversation pieces long before that phrase was attached to the blasts hit by the likes of Dick Allen, Dave Kingman, Mike Schmidt, Darryl Strawberry, Albert Pujols, and Shohei Ohtani.

The third of six Ohio Howard children who had scouts bird-dogging him in the mid-to-late 1950s offering six-figure bonuses but who insisted that the money be divided as $100,000 for himself and $8,000 toward a new home for his parents, a condition only the Dodgers were willing to heed.

The 6’8″ galoot who became a Senator in the first place because of Sandy Koufax.

Howard had come forth as a Dodger who had that intergalactic power at the plate matched only by an inconsistency or three. The National League’s 1960 Rookie of the Year could break a game open with one swing but chased too many balls out of the strike zone. The giant with a fine throwing arm who moved too slow for an outfielder.

The guy who had enough trouble being the first Frank Howard without shaking off enough early career hype that sometimes called him the next Babe Ruth. The guy who assessed himself to Sports Illustrated too realistically despite a 1963 World Series performance that included a 450-foot home run off Whitey Ford en route the Dodgers’ sweep:

I have the God-given talents of strength and leverage. I realize that I can never be a great ballplayer because a great ballplayer must be able to do five things well: run, field, throw, hit and hit with power. I am mediocre in four of those—but I can hit with power. I have a chance to be a good ballplayer. I work on my fielding all the time, but in the last two years I feel that I have gotten worse as a fielder. My greatest fear was being on the bases, and I still worry about it. I’m afraid to get picked off. I’m afraid to make a mistake on the bases, and I have made them again and again, but here I feel myself getting better.

Howard ended up asking Dodger general manager Buzzie Bavasi for a trade after the 1964 season. As things happened, Bavasi was also hunting a solid lefthanded pitcher to plug in any spaces left by the possibility that Koufax—who’d been shut down for the year in August 1964, and diagnosed publicly with an arthritic pitching elbow (it turned out that was for public consumption)—would only be able to pitch once a week if at all.

Bavasi sent Howard plus infielder Ken McMullen and pitchers Phil Ortega and Pete Richert to the Second Nats in exchange for lefthanded pitcher Claude Osteen, infielder John Kennedy, and $100,000. Osteen became the reliable number three starter behind Hall of Famers Koufax and Don Drysdale; the Dodgers won the next two National League pennants plus the 1965 World Series.

Howard settled for becoming a marquee attraction in the nation’s capital. His old Dodger teammate Gil Hodges managed the Senators, convinced Howard to try a slight uppercut in his swing that might stop him hitting hard grounders, and turned him loose to become one of the American League’s power kings after shaking off two initial Washington seasons disrupted by injuries here and inconsistency there.

Then came the Year of the Pitcher (1968)—and Howard’s leading the entire Show with 44 home runs and a .550 slugging percentage, not to mention 330 total bases. He’d hit 48 out in 1969 (with another Show-leading 340 total bases) and 44 out in 1970. A new Senators manager finally convinced him to stop swinging at pitches that didn’t look hittable, which hiked his walk totals and gave him the plate discipline he wished aloud he’d learned a decade earlier. A manager named Ted Williams.

(“Somebody’s getting him out,” snorted Seattle Pilots manager Joe [Ol’ Shitfuck] Schultz during a meeting to discuss how to pitch Howard. “The bastard’s only hitting .306.”)

Howard also moved from the outfield to first base as often as not, and while he was no defensive virtuoso his bat continued to thrill fans and terrorise pitchers. When Alvin Dark managed the Indians, he had a habit of switching his bullet-throwing lefthander Sudden Sam McDowell and an infielder during Howard’s plate appearances (Howard tended to kill McDowell) and then back after Howard was done.

Later, as a minor league manager, Howard was legendary for his generosity with the kids he managed whom he knew barely earned peanuts. Stories abounded of Howard stopping the team bus out of nowhere and ducking into a truck stop or a package store, whipping out his money clip, and buying cases of brewskis. (He made a considerable fortune owning a few choice Wisconsin shopping centers.)

Profiling him while managing the Spokane Indians (then a Brewers farm team) in 1976, Thomas Boswell quoted one of his talks to his minor league charges:

Boys, in this game you never play as long as you want to or as well as you want to. And sooner than any of you thinks, your day will come to get that pink slip that says, “Released.” When they pull those shades, they pull ’em for a lifetime. When it’s over, no one can bring it back for you. It’s a short road we run in this business, so run hard.

That from the man who lamented near the end of his own playing career, “By the time you learn to play this game properly, you can’t play anymore.” (“We lead the league,” Spokane third baseman Tom Bianco told Boswell, “in hustle, rules, and meetings. We even had a meeting after a rainout to go over the rain.”)

He left the Spokane bridge for a shot at major league managing. He had the Padres for two years; he had the Mets for one. “The players took advantage of him,” then-Padres general manager Jack McKeon said when they fired him. “Frank just couldn’t stop being nice.”

A man like that becomes a Washington institution even after his playing career ends and he relocates to northern Virginia and keeps in touch with the city that embraced him like a son and brother. He becomes one of three men to be cast in bronze outside Nationals Park, even though he never played for this franchise of Nats, joining Hall of Famers Walter Johnson (representing the ancient Senators) and Josh Gibson (representing the Homestead Grays who played much of their time in D.C.).

He might even leave Washington with a memory they’d never forget amidst a small closet full of Hondo hammers. With Bob Short shamelessly hijacking the team to Texas after the 1971 season, Howard came up to hit in the sixth inning of the Senators’ final game, against the Yankees. Leading off against Mike Kekich in the bottom of the sixth, Howard swung on 2-1 and planted one to the back of the bullpen behind the left field fence.

“I just wish the owners of the American League could see this, the ones who voted 10 to 2 to move this club out of Washington,” said Senators radio broadcaster Ron Menchine as Howard came down the line to cross the plate.

He comes out again. . . Hondo threw his helmet into the stands, a souvenir of the big guy’s finest hour in Washington . . . The crowd screaming for Howard to come out again . . . and here he comes again!! . . .  A tremendous display of the enthusiasm of Washington fans for Frank Howard . . . Hondo loves Washington as much as the fans love him. It’s 5-2 . . .

The Senators took a lead to the top of the ninth and asked Joe Grzenda to close it out. He got two quick ground outs right back to himself. Then the heartsick RFK Stadium crowd that was restless all day long finally burst. They poured onto the field with Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke at the plate and rioted. The umpires finally called a forfeit to the Yankees. The stadium resembled the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

Howard hit the final Senators home run and the first Rangers home park home run, which also happened to be the first major league hit to be nailed in old Arlington Stadium. But he had no illusions. “A guy just does the best he can,” he told SI. “We’re aware you can’t peddle a poor product to the public. It’s nice to think that these people’s first memory of major league baseball might be my home run, but I really hope that their memory is the win.”

He never lost his baseball introspection even as he never lost his love affair with fans who sought him out long after his last swing, his last shot to the Delta Quadrant. “When people look back on their careers, they say they wouldn’t change a thing. I would have,” he once said. “I would have made the adjustments. I would have given myself the chance to put up big numbers.”

Divorced from his first wife, he remarried happily in 1991. Howard left more than long ball memories. He had family and friends to love and remember. He left behind memories of a man who was so personable, gentle, and generous, that one of his Spokane players could and did say, “Sometimes I think he’s too good for this game.”

More than “sometimes.”