Tag Archives: RFK Stadium

Goodbye, RFK. (Stadium, that is . . . )

Posted on by
Reply
Olaf Hall

Olaf Hall, RFK Stadium worker, painting white an outfield  seat struck by one of Senators legend Frank Howard’s mammoth home runs. 

Time was when I worked shy of a year at a Washington, D.C. think tank, lived just outside Washington in Capitol Heights (Maryland), and walked the five miles to work every day on behalf of saving what little money I earned. The route from my little hideaway to my job included walking past RFK Stadium.

Perhaps providentially, I had no choice but to walk past the old tub. Not unless I wanted to take the Metrorail, which had a station that was a short walk from my little hideaway. But the baseball maven in me would have had me flogged for even thinking about avoiding RFK.

My days began, after all, with spending time and my breakfast with Shirley Povich, the founding father of the Washington Post‘s sports section. He founded it more or less when the ancient Washington Senators (as in, Washington–First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League) won their only World Series in (count ’em) two tries before they absconded to Minneapolis.

When those days didn’t begin with Povich, they began with Thomas Boswell, now the freshly-inducted Hall of Fame baseball writer, also of the Post. (I refuse to say the official award name until the Baseball Writers Association of America gives it a name far more properly fitting than “Career Excellence Award.” Like maybe the Shirley Povich, Roger Angell, or Wendell Smith Award.)

I’d then tuck the paper into my briefcase and make the aforesaid five-mile walk. Passing RFK Stadium. With only one apology, that I’d never gotten to see a baseball game there and that I’d forgotten to buy myself a Washington Senators hat while I worked in and lived next to D.C. And while I tended to walk with a certain vigour, on behalf of losing physical weight and as much mental and spiritual baggage as I could lose (I was separated from my first wife and en route a divorce), I didn’t mind slowing down to take a slow stroll around the Washington Hall of Stars—if I could talk an early-arriving stadium staffer into letting me in.

Frank Howard

Howard only looked as though he was going send a pitcher’s head and not a baseball into the seats. No gentler giant ever played baseball in RFK Stadium—or anywhere.

Up in the mezzanine were Hall of Stars Panels 6 through 8. Honouring such Old Nats as owner Clark Griffith, Hall of Famers Joe Cronin, Goose Goslin, Bucky Harris, Walter Johnson, Harmon Killebrew, and Early Wynn. Honouring such Negro Leagues legends as Hall of Famers Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard. Honouring such not-quite-Hall of Fame Old Nats as Ossie Bluege, George Case, Joe Judge, Roy Sievers, Cecil Travis, Mickey Vernon, and Eddie (The Walking Man) Yost. Honouring Vernon’s fellow Second manager Gil Hodges. Honouring such Second Nats as Chuck Hinton and Frank Howard.

It was easy to take in such history and all its pleasantries and calamities alike. It was tough to look at the field below and see, aside from the football markings for the Redskins (oops! today we call them the Commanders), the inevitable ghosts of the saddest day in RFK Stadium history: the day heartsick fans broke the joint over the hijacking of the Second Nats to Texas.

“Right where . . . the Senators played their final game in 1971 and the Nationals brought baseball back in 2005—that’s where the crews from Smoot Construction are separating concrete from metal so they can be hauled away separately,” writes the Post‘s Barry Svrluga. “Whatever can be repurposed will be . . . ”

Anyone who has driven or walked by RFK Stadium over the past decade or so knew it would come down, knew it had to come down eventually. Long ago it devolved into an ugly relic that served no one. This was inevitable.

But I have to admit that as I watched the process over that morning last week, I got a little emotional . . . I was at that first game when baseball came back. I saw the stands along the third-base line bounce. I watched Ryan Zimmerman drill his first walk-off home run to beat the New York Yankees on Father’s Day in 2006. I watched Nationals owner Ted Lerner and then-manager Manny Acta dig out home plate from the ground after the final game in 2007.

. . . Do yourself a favor, though. Take some time over the coming weeks and months to drive west on East Capitol Street from Interstate 295 or east on Independence Avenue from downtown. Do a loop around RFK before it vanishes completely. This is athletic history. It’s D.C. history. And piece by piece, it’s finally being torn down.

Ryan Zimmerman

Ryan Zimmerman mobbed and hoisted after his Father’s Day game-winner in RFK, 2006.

Well, I took my slow strolling loops around the joint 35 years ago. When baseball’s return to the nation’s capital was still a fantasy. “Pardon my French: le baseball est revene á Washington,” wrote Radio America founder James C. Roberts, in Hardball on the Hill, in 2001. “In Montreal, that’s how they would say, ‘Baseball is back in Washington.’ They are words I long to hear—in any language.”

Baseball might appear now and then in the old tub until 2005, never more transcendantally than when they cooked up the Cracker Jack Old-Timers Game in 1982 . . . and Hall of Fame shortstop Luke Appling, leading off for the American League’s alumni at age 75, caught hold of a second-pitch meatball from Hall of Famer Warren Spahn, age 61, and sent it behind the specially-shortened left field fence, but traveling a likely 320 feet—a major league home run no matter how you slashed it.

“It was a good pitch, it was right there, and I just swung away,” Old Aches and Pains  deadpanned after the game.

Machinations of dubious ethics to one side, including baseball government taking temporary ownership, Montreal (her city fathers, not her baseball fans) then didn’t seem to want its Expos that much anymore. Washington was only too happy to welcome them. Even the President of the United States donned a team jacket of the newly-rechristened Nationals and threw a ceremonial first pitch. Actual major league pitchers would kill puppies to have the kind of slider Mr. Bush threw—with a ball bearing a unique if sad survival story.

Senators relief pitcher Joe Grzenda had only to rid himself of Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke to secure a Second Nats win on that heartsickening farewell day in 1971. Grzenda never got the chance because all hell that spent much of the game threatening finally broke loose. Fans poured onto the field in a perfect if grotesque impersonation of hot lava soaring over and down a volcano’s side. The umpires forfeited the game to the Yankees. When the mayhem ended, RFK Stadium resembled the net result of a bombing raid.

Perhaps miraculously, Grzenda saved the ball. He presented it to Mr. Bush on Opening Day 2005. It took about 12,000+ days for that ball to travel from the RFK mound to the RFK plate by way of its detour in Grzenda’s custody.

The old structure, built as D.C. Stadium to open in 1962, renamed for an assassinated presidential candidate in 1969, has been the site of assorted joys and jolts. It closed officially in 2019; its final official baseball game was in 2007. “Without RFK, who knows where we would be?” said Chad Cordero, relief pitcher, and the first man to hold the official closer’s job as a Nat, upon that closing. “We might still be in Montreal. We could be somewhere else. This place has treated us well. We have some great memories here.”

And, despite the circumstances that brought me there, so do I. Even if they have to be one part a Hall of Stars display and 99 parts my imaginings.

Most of those stars didn’t play in RFK Stadium, but it was quiet fun to think about Early Wynn, traded away long before, but showing up for the White Sox trying to keep Chuck Hinton from hitting one out. (On the 1962 Second Nats, Hinton tied for the team home run lead with . . . Harry Bright, the man who’d be remembered best, if at all, as the strikeout victim securing Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s breaking of the single-game World Series strikeout record a year later.)

It was even more fun remembering the occasional Senators game televised to New York on a Game of the Week offering and watching gentle giant Frank Howard carve his initials into some poor pitcher’s head as he hit one into orbit. Howard, the Senator above all the rest who didn’t quite enjoy the team being hijacked to Texas. Howard, who brought that heartsick RFK crowd to its feet when he hit one into the left field bullpen midway through the game to start the Second Nats comeback that turned into a win that turned into a forfeit.

“What can a guy do to top this?” he asked after it was all over. “A guy like me has maybe five big thrills in his lifetime. Well, this was my biggest tonight. I’ll take it to the grave with me. This was Utopia. I can’t do anything else like it. It’s all downhill the rest of the way.” That from the man who also once said, “The trouble with baseball is that, by the time you learn to play it properly, you can’t play anymore.”

They’re demolishing RFK Stadium slowly, on behalf of environmental concerns, so the Post says. The seats are long gone. The rest has been going one portion at a time. It wasn’t the most handsome of the old (and mostly discredited) cookie-cutter stadiums. But something seems as off about the piecemeal disassembly as the big dent in the rooftop that made the joint resemble a stock pot left on the stove too long.

Note: This essay was published originally by Sports Central.

Joe Grzenda, RIP: Holding a riot ball

Posted on by
Reply
2019-07-17 GeorgeWBushJoeGrzenda

Joe Grzenda (right) with President George W. Bush, handing Bush the baseball Grzenda saved since the final, ill-fated Washington Senators game in 1971.

It took almost 34 years for a certain baseball to be pitched to home plate in RFK Stadium, Washington. And when it finally was thrown to the plate, it didn’t sail out of the hand of the pitcher who’d kept the ball all those years, despite having been invited to throw it.

The ball would have been thrown on 30 September 1971, by Washington Senators lefthanded pitcher Joe Grzenda, with two out in the top of the ninth and the Senators about to bank a season and Washington life-ending 7-5 win, assuming Grzenda could erase Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke.

Despite the invitation to throw it up to the plate when Washington re-entered the majors by way of the Montreal Expos moving to become the Nationals, Grzenda handed the honour instead to President George W. Bush, clad in a Nats jacket, who threw an admirable breaking ball to Nats catcher Brian Schneider.

Grzenda, who died 12 July at 82, two days after his 60th wedding anniversary, never got the chance to throw the ball on that surreal September 1971 afternoon. He ended up keeping the ball in a drawer in his Pennsylvania home, in an envelope marked, “Last baseball ever thrown as a Washington Senator, baseball club. Sept. 30, 1971. Murcer grounded out to me.”

That would be Bobby Murcer, Yankee outfielder, who grounded out to Grzenda for the second out of a save attempt that never got consummated thanks to a fan riot that kept Grzenda from pitching to Clarke. All those years later, Schneider—a self-confessed memorabilia collector—returned the ball to Grzenda after the Bush pitch.

Nicknamed Shaky Joe because of a few nervous habits he had on the mound, Grzenda became a Senator in 1970 after a trade from the Minnesota Twins, who’d been the original Senators until moving for 1961, which prompted the expansion birth of the second Senators in the first place.

Shaky Joe finished 1971 with a magnificent 1.92 earned run average, a 2.00 fielding-independent pitching rate, and a 1.01 walks/hits per inning pitched rate. He was a sharp middle-to-late relief pitcher finishing 46 games in 1971 and credited with five saves every one of which was two innings or more. In his next-to-last major league season, he averaged two innings per gig and was, arguably, the Senators’ most reliable relief pitcher.

Several hours before he erased Felipe Alou and Murcer on back-to-back ground outs, Grzenda sat in the RFK Stadium stands well before game time and reflected. “I don’t want to leave this place,” he said. “This year has been the best I’ve had. It’s been like a beginning for me.”

Major league baseball was leaving the capital again because Senators owner Bob Short decided he couldn’t make it work in D.C. any longer—after he’d done just about everything within his power to guarantee it wouldn’t work.

Short wouldn’t sell the team to local interests or at least to buyers willing to camp in Washington, either—unless they were willing to pony up a minimum of $12 million, that is. The Washington Post‘s almost mythological sportswriter, Shirley Povich, compared that to the guy who buys a $9000 car, abuses it, spends $3,000 to repair it, then claims he has a car worth $12,000. Is that so Washington, or what?

“His fellow club owners let go unrecognised Short’s continual mistakes that got him into the mess that, he says, threatened to bankrupt him,” Povich wrote 23 September 1971.

They paid scant heed to the fact that Short foolishly overborrowed to buy the team and then pleaded poverty, and to the stubborn refusal of this novice club owner to hire a general manager, and his record of wrecking the club with absurd deals . . . [T]he impoverished Senators were the only team in the league billed for the owner’s private jet, with co-pilots. The owners had ears only for his complaint that he couldn’t operate profitably in Washington.

Publicly and to his fellow American League owners, Short promised he hadn’t bought the Senators on shaky financial standing in order to move them. According to Tom Deveaux’s The Washington Senators, 1901-1971, Short indulged the nation’s other national pastime: litigation, threatening just that against his fellow owners unless they let him leave.

After authorising then president Joe Cronin to find a solution, the American League owners were stunned at Short’s admission he’d been talking to Texas and other areas. Short was also in hot water with the Armory Board, which owned RFK Stadium and to which the Senators owed six figures worth of back rent. That’s rather Washington, too.

When the Armory Board threatened to turn off the stadium lights, Short relished the feud. At first the board seemed to cave a bit, offering Short free rent for the first million admissions per season and the revenues from stadium billboard advertising. What the board wouldn’t do, however, was forgive the $178,000 back rent. Along came Washington’s city council to sue the Senators and the Armory Board, for failing to pay and collect rent.

That swung into action commissioner Bowie Kuhn, whose boyhood included working as a scoreboard operator at old Griffith Stadium. Kuhn ordered Short “to keep his yap shut,” Deveaux wrote, while hitting the road soliciting potential buyers for the Senators. It proved to be only slightly less futile a road trip than many taken by the Senators themselves.

The American League owners took a 21 September 1971 vote on whether to allow the Senators to move. They now feared the National League might move to town if the Senators moved out, giving the nearby Orioles heavier competition than the usually hapless Nats. Short needed 75 percent of the votes to get his wish.

At first, three clubs abstained while the Orioles and the White Sox voted no. World Airways magnate Ed Daly told Kuhn and Athletics owner Charlie Finley—one of the abstentions—he was willing to buy the Senators. The problem was Finley telling Daly the eleventh hour was upon them, and Daly telling Finley he couldn’t decide that fast. That’s so Washington, too.

Thus did Finley and Angels owner Gene Autry (originally a “no” vote, and acting through a representative since he was undergoing eye surgery) change to “yes” votes. Thus would the Senators begin 1972 as the Texas Rangers. And thus would the Senators meet the Yankees at RFK Stadium on 30 September 1971,  an almost 20,000 strong crowd filling the joint, hoisting placards and banners zapping Short up one side and down the other—particularly those displaying his initials.

Grzenda wasn’t the only Senator who wasn’t anxious to leave Washington. The idea didn’t exactly thrill Frank Howard, their power hitting behemoth and star, either. Which didn’t stop the 6’8″ giant known as Capital Punishment for his glandular home runs from giving those heartsick fans one final thrill, when he checked in at the plate to lead off the bottom of the sixth.

With the Senators down 5-1 and Howard being 0-for-1 with a walk thus far, he caught hold of a Mike Kekich fastball and drove it to the rear end of the left field bullpen, and the crowd went nuclear in its momentary joy. Nudged out of the dugout for a curtain call, Howard tipped his helmet to the crowd for the first time in his baseball life, blew them a couple of kisses, then wept, as much for sorrow as joy.

The blast started a four-run inning to tie the game at five, a tie broken in the bottom of the eight thanks to an RBI single (Tom McCraw) and a sacrifice fly. (Elliott Maddox.) Then Grzenda went out to try saving it for Paul Lindblad, whose two spotless relief innings put him in line to get credit for a win.

After Grzenda erased Alou and Murcer in the top of the ninth, fans began jumping on and off the field down the foul lines. It looked menacing enough for Senators manager Ted Williams (yes, children, that Ted Williams) to order his bullpen pitchers to beat it post haste. Except that the Splinter forgot to urge them to take the safe path to the clubhouse, under the RFK Stadium stands.

As Grzenda got ready to pitch to Clarke, the relievers left the bullpen and headed down the field toward the dugout. Oops. “That’s when all hell broke loose,” Deveaux wrote. “The fans stormed back onto the field en masse, yanking up clumps of dirt and grass which might be kept as souvenirs of Washington Senators baseball.”

Howard playing first base had three fans climbing his back, which must have been something like three mice climbing a tree. Grzenda saw a rather large man heading his way appearing at first to have ideas about tackling the pitcher, which Grzenda eventually admitted gave him ideas about throwing his glove—which still had the ball in it—at the guy. But all Grzenda got for that was a pat on his shoulder.

Finally, as fans continued pillaging what they could, including bases, plus letters and numbers from the scoreboard, umpire Jim Honochick ruled the forfeit to the Yankees. By the time the fans got through with the place, RFK Stadium looked as though it was  tattered and torched in a terrorist attack.

Grzenda drove home from the park with his wife, Ruth, and their two children, including his then-ten year old son Joe, Jr., who wept all the way home. The Grzendas met in 1956, when the lefthander was a Tigers prospect and the Birmingham Barons’s (AA) best pitcher, and she was sitting in the stands at Birmingham.

He had a look at the comely brunette and handed the bat boy a note to give her. “I had come to the game with a girlfriend of mine who I worked with at the First National Bank, and her dad,” Mrs. Grzenda revealed after her husband was inducted into the Barons’ Hall of Fame five years ago. “The bat boy brought a note over to me that said, ‘How would you like to meet Joe Grzenda?’ My girlfriend kept hitting me on my leg, saying you’ve got to meet him and her dad said that Joe was the star of the team,” she continued. “I didn’t know anything about baseball.”

They first met in Birmingham, he taking her out for hamburgers and shakes after the Barons bat boy handed her his note. They married a year later and stayed that way happily for sixty years and two days. For two thirds of their marriage, they lived and loved with the husband part of capital lore. Maybe it wasn’t quite the way Grzenda would have preferred becoming such lore. But that, too, is so Washington.