Tag Archives: Washington Senators

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

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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.

Frank Howard, RIP: The gentlest giant

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Frank Howard

“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.”

The Nats extend an Opening Day first-pitch invite

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President-elect Joe Biden and his wife Jill, in Phillies gear, watching a game at Citzens Bank Park.

When Donald Trump first took the job he will vacate in January, the Washington Nationals hastened to invite him to throw out a ceremonial Opening Day first pitch. At least, the team and the White House were in “talks” toward arranging it. The then-new president seemingly hastened not to accept the invitation thanks to a “scheduling conflict.”

That was then, this is now. Trump is on the threshold of departing office as only the second sitting American president not to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at any major league baseball game since William Howard Taft introduced the practise in the first place. Who would have thought Trump shared common ground with Jimmy Carter?

President-elect Joe Biden is known to be a longtime Philadelphia Phillies fan but not otherwise sinister on a personal level. (He likes to joke that being a Phillies fan allows him to sleep with his wife.) That didn’t stop the Nationals from extending him a post-victory invitation to come to Nationals Park, just about any old time he chooses, Opening Day preferably, and throw out a ceremonial first pitch.

Spotting the invitation on Twitter myself during a Saturday visit, I couldn’t resist replying to the Nats as I’d replied to Jesse Dougherty, the Washington Post‘s Nationals beat writer: Biden should do well throwing out such a first pitch. He won at last by standing on the mound with the bases loaded, two out, and a full count in the bottom of the ninth, and freezing Trump with a called strike three on the low outside corner.

“[Biden] was up by 4 million+ runs, so not a save situation,” tweeted one respondent. No, but I probably should have made clear that Biden and Trump dueled in a complete game that went to extra innings before Biden finally delivered the game-ending strikeout.

Complete games have become baseball outliers over a longer period of time than stubborn baseball “traditionalists” want to admit or care to research. (The last time half or more of a season’s games were complete games: 1922; the last time forty percent or more were such games: 1946; the last time thirty percent of more were such games: 1959.) So don’t fault the respondent for not knowing one when he saw one.

Biden/Trump wasn’t quite analogous to the most fabled extra-innings complete game, between Harvey Haddix and Lew Burdette in 1959, but the Biden/Trump game in presidential politics is even more of an outlier than was Haddix taking a perfect game to the bottom of the thirteenth.

Trump, of course, pitched the extra innings under protest. No few of his arguments compared to the kind a frustrated 1960 Yankee fan might have made, when he or she noticed the Yankees out-scored the Pittsburgh Pirates (55-27) in the World Series the Pirates won and proclaimed thus that those Yankees were the true Series winners. Well, no, they weren’t.

Those Yankees weren’t exactly outliers, either. Eighteen other teams in World Series history have out-scored the opposition while losing the Series. The Yankees themselves had three other such Series, in 1957 (they out-scored the Braves by two), 1964 (they out-scored the Cardinals by one), and 2003. (They out-scored the Marlins by four.) They’ve also been outscored in three Series (1962, 1977, 1996) they won.

But I digress. Give Trump credit where due: he may have performed the most unusual first-pitch ceremony of all time in September 2004. Invited to throw out the first pitch for the Somerset (NJ) Patriots, Trump audaciously landed his corporate helicopter in center field, then strode to the mound to wind up and throw. For the record, he threw something arriving just under the floor of the strike zone that might have meant a swinging strikeout in actual competition. Might.

Trump did interrupt a coronavirus briefing from the White House in July to say he’d be throwing a first pitch out at Yankee Stadium come 15 August, before a game between the Empire Emeritus and the Boston Red Sox. The president spoke about an hour and a half before Dr. Anthony Fauci threw one out at Nationals Park on baseball’s pandemically-delayed Opening Day. (We do mean “out”: Fauci’s pitch would have been a strike . . . if the low outside corner was more adjacent to the on-deck circle than the plate.)

It proved to be news to the Yankees, more or less; they told reporters the president hadn’t actually been given an invitation for that date. Trump countered that he’d gotten the invite straight from the Yankees’ team president Randy Levine, who’d once been rumoured to be on Trump’s list of candidates for his White House chief of staff.

Levine didn’t affirm or deny, but another Yankee official said subsequently that the invite was on. The invite may have been on but that Trump first pitch ended up not happening.

Biden has said since his win that he’d like to work in a bipartisan spirit as best as possible in (speaking politely) contentious Washington. I have a suggestion for the president-elect and the Nats that might show he means business when Opening Day arrives next April.

He could do as then-president George W. Bush did when major league baseball returned to Washington in 2005. Bush was presented a unique baseball to throw for the ceremonial first pitch, owned by the late Washington Senators relief pitcher Joe Grzenda, who’d saved it from the final Senators game, ever.

Grzenda intended to throw that ball to Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke at the plate, with two out and the Senators looking to say farewell with a 7-5 win on 30 September 1971. Thanks to heartsick Senators fans bursting the fences, swarming the field, leaving the RFK Stadium field and scoreboard resembling the remains of a terrorist attack, and forcing the umpires to forfeit the game to the Yankees, Grzenda never got to pitch to Clarke.

But he kept the ball and, at long enough last, got the invite to throw it as a first pitch in RFK in 2005 before the freshly transplanted (from Montreal) Nationals opened for new business. Instead, he handed the ball to Bush, likewise clad in a Nationals jacket, and Bush—ironically, a former co-owner of the Texas Rangers that the Senators became—threw a neat breaking ball up to the plate.

Nats catcher Brian Schneider caught the Bush pitch. He had ideas about keeping the ball until Grzenda asked to have it back and the memorabilia-happy catcher obliged.

Grzenda died in July 2019. (Clarke passed away three months ago.) Assuming his family still possesses the ball—which Grzenda pitched to get Bobby Murcer on a grounder for the second out before being unable to pitch to Clarke—Biden’s people might think to ask them for the honour of throwing that ball out for the Opening Day first pitch.

The Nats might also think about making that particular ball an annual Opening Day first pitch tradition. They don’t have to worry about weird mojo attaching to the ball. Their 2019 World Series triumph took plenty of care of that.

If Biden jinxes or fouls his own presidency, it won’t be because he throws the last ball of Washington Senators baseball. Just be sure he doesn’t get any bright ideas about arriving at Nationals Park to do it by way of landing Marine One in center field.

Long suffering? Washington overqualifies.

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2019-10-12 WashingtonNationals

Their host city hasn’t had a World Series title since before Calvin Coolidge earned his only elected term to the White House.

It seems a few people of my acquaintance were less than thrilled over my defense of Clayton Kershaw. Not that they disagreed with defending him but they disagreed with my assessment of Joe and Jane Dodger fan running Kershaw jerseys over in the parking lot after division series Game Five’s demolition.

As one replied to me elsewhere, those jerseys were their property and if they want to deface or damage them, that’s their right. And she was right. It’s also their and anyone else’s right to make asses of themselves if they choose. Fair is fair. But since fair is fair, not every Dodger fan made such asses of themselves Wednesday night. That, I could have made more clear.

And for not doing so, I offer Dodger fans a sincere apology. Nobody likes seeing their heroes go yet another year with nothing to show for a splendid season. The Dodgers didn’t expect to win seven straight National League Wests with nothing to show for them, and neither did their fans.

I’m not thrilled that the Mets of whom I’ve been a fan since the day they were born didn’t quite stay the season’s distance. But who the hell am I to complain?

I’ve seen the Mets win five pennants and two World Series in my lifetime. Dodger fans of my age can point to eleven pennants and five World Series conquests since I was hatched. I’d say twelve pennants and six World Series, but I was a month away from my hatching when the Boys of Summer finally made next year happen in 1955.

The Dodgers have a measly 31 years since their last World Series win. I don’t want to make Dodger fans feel any worse than they’ve felt this week, and even Dem Bums winning all those Brooklyn pennants from 1941 to 1953 only to get slapped back down by the Yankees didn’t hurt that badly.

But it probably hurt worse that it took until 1955 for the Dodgers to bring a World Series title to Brooklyn at all, the only one Brooklyn ever knew, when the Dodgers were in the National League since the presidency of Benjamin Harrison.

Nothing personal, Los Angeles Dodger fans, but you really haven’t suffered that long even if you have taken it on the chin, in the belly, and anyplace else you can think of for seven straight years. And you’ve only been barred from the Promised Land since the last year of the Reagan Administration. I can name you fans beyond the Brooklyn fans New York’s politicians forced the Dodgers to abandon who took it a lot longer.

You think the Dodgers got destroyed when Howie Kendrick hit the grand slam Wednesday night? Try the litany Peter Gammons, then of the Boston Globe, ran down after the Red Sox went from one strike away from the Promised Land to disaster in Game Six of the 1986 World Series:

[W]hen the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs, 41 years of Red Sox baseball flashed in front of my eyes. In that one moment, Johnny Pesky held the ball, Joe McCarthy lifted Ellis Kinder in Yankee Stadium, Luis Aparicio fell down rounding third, Bill Lee delivered his Leephus pitch to Tony Perez, Darrell Johnson hit for Jim Willoughby, Don Zimmer chose Bobby Sprowl over Luis Tiant, and Bucky (Bleeping) Dent hit the home run.

And there’d be fourteen more years to come, right up to the moments Grady Little read Pedro Martinez’s heart while ignoring his tank and Aaron Boone hit the home run that had the 2003 pennant attached.

Red Sox fans, among whom I’ve also been one since the 1967 pennant race, waited longer to get back to the Promised Land than Dem Bums waited to get there in the first place. They waited 86 years between Babe Ruth’s last World Series victory with them and the 2004 Idiots; they’ve had four World Series rings to celebrate this century. Red Sox Nation has no real reason to complain again. Yet.

Cub fans waited from the Roosevelt Administration (Theodore’s) to the last days of the Obama Administration for another return to the Promised Land. And from the day I was hatched until 2016, many were the Opening Days in Wrigley Field when the first pitch of the season was accompanied by a Cub fan holding up a sign saying one of two things: “Wait ’till next year!” Or, “This Year is Next Year.” (With or without “Alas” at the end.)

Thomas Boswell reminds us that since the turn of this century the Angels, the Cubs, the Red Sox, the White Sox, the Giants, and the Astros ended World Series droughts that add up to (wait for it) 434 years. America herself isn’t even close to that old yet. And the Angels and the Astros brought themselves their first trips to the Promised Land ever. Think about that.

Think, too, about the Indians, who’ve gone 72 years without another claim on the Promised Land and got their last one around the Berlin Airlift. Not to mention how close they got in 2016. Good to the last minute, practically. Think, further, about the Rangers, who haven’t reached the Promised Land in their entire franchise existence (59 years). Or the Padres, who haven’t reached it in fifty years.

Brave fans? They had eleven straight division championships and fourteen out of fifteen. They have five pennants and one World Series ring to show for it. They’ve had three division titles, four NLDS losses, and a wild card game loss since. That ain’t easy, Clyde. (Thank you, Phil Harris.) Neither was the ten-run beating they took in the first inning of the fifth game of their just-ended division series, either.

Ten straight divisions without seeing the Promised Land trumps seven straight most of the time. Those Braves won their World Series a year before. In franchise terms, they went 43 years between the Miracle Braves’ conquerors in 1914 and the Warren Spahn-Henry Aaron Braves in Milwaukee taking the Promised Land in 1957. I’ll leave it to Brave fan and Dodger fan to slug that one out for now.

But there’s a team that just won Game One of the National League Championship Series and hasn’t gotten to the Promised Land in their entire 49-year franchise history, either. Representing since 2005 a city that hasn’t seen the Promised Land since Calvin Coolidge was a month from winning his only elected term as an American president.

Oops. Better not lean on that too hard. The Nationals got to this NLCS by breaking the Dodgers’ backs. And if they overthrow the Cardinals for a date with either the St. Elsewhere Yankees or the Gray’s Anatomy Astros in the World Series and then overthrow one or the other of those bloodied-but-unbowed behemoths . . .

C’mon. There are and have been real baseball fans in Washington for eons, and only a nano-fraction of them carry government identification. And they’ve put up with at least as much crapola as any Cub, Red Sox, Phillie, White Sox, or Brooklyn Dodger fan in creation ever had to bear.

I don’t remember any Cub, Red Sox, Phillie, White Sox, or Bum fan hearing their heroes’ owners tell the world, “The fans like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff that is certain to please them.” Old Senators owner Clark Griffith is said to have come up with that in the 1940s.

I can’t think of any out-of-town observer hanging the Cubs, the Red Sox, or the old Brooks with a comparable observation that became a lifetime (and not even close to always accurate) watchword: “Washington—First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”

Brooklyn was abandoned only once. Boston proved too much the seat of Red Sox Nation for the Braves to stay. St. Louis proved too much Cardinal Country’s capital for the decrepit Browns to even think about staying. The Mack family was too tapped to hold onto the Athletics before their successor owner moved them to Kansas City. (And, made them practically a 1950s Yankee finishing school while they were at it.)

But at least the City of Boo-therly Love (Those people would boo at a funeral—Bo Belinsky) still had the Phillies. (Who went 28 years between World Series titles, by the way, not to mention 97 years in the National League before winning their first.)

Do you remember how long Kansas City had to wait between their abandonment by the A’s and the birth of the Royals? Try two years. Do you remember how long Seattle had to wait between the Pilots’ heist to Milwaukee and the birth of the Mariners? (Who also haven’t seen, never mind won a World Series in half a century.) Seven.

Washington had it happen twice, when the original Senators moved to Minnesota for 1961 and the Second Nats’s own owner kidnapped them to Texas for 1972. Washington fans waited 33 years for the national pastime to return to the nation’s capital. Settling for rooting for the somewhat adjacent Orioles—who, by the way, haven’t seen the Promised Land since the first Reagan Administration.

Fine thing to happen to one of the American League’s charter cities.

But no Washington fan—ever—turned an outfield wall deodorant soap ad into a classic insult. That bright idea is said to have happened in Philadelphia: “The Phillies use Lifebuoy . . . and they STILL stink!”

And no Washington fan ever painted an addendum on either Griffith Stadium’s or RFK Stadium’s occupancy advisory: “Occupancy by more than 35,000 unlawful. AND UNLIKELY.” A Dodger fan in Ebbets Field thought of that during the 1930s.

And no matter how they got it, no matter the shenanigans that brought the Montreal Expos to the Beltway, no matter the shenanigans of the nation’s largest organised crime family headquartered there, guess what happened when they returned.

Former Senator Joe Grzenda handed President George W. Bush a ball to throw for the ceremonial first pitch. The ball Grzenda wasn’t able to pitch to Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke at the Second Nats’ final home game ever, because heartsick fans lost it and stormed the field, forcing a forfeit.

And from there, “in that decrepit, rodent-infested RFK Stadium, the team drew 2,731,993 fans” (Boswell) in 2005. “Do you know the first year that the New York Yankees ever drew that many people? Try 1998.” It took them a mere seven years to get good. They’ve stayed that way ever since for the most part.

The Nats finished eleventh in National League attendance this season but they still drew 2,259,781 to Nationals Park. And they weren’t even close to being all or mostly bureaucrats, Congressmanpersons, or White House crawlers, either. Stephen Strasburg might have been just the most vocal Nat lamenting for more home game support, but the Nats aren’t bereft for love.

They’re just bereft of even one year’s lease for the Promised Land. Their home city’s been bereft of it for almost three times as long. And if you think Nationals Park will be devoid of a red, white, and blue racket audible from coast to coast when the NLCS moves there for Game Three, think again.

Washington’s put up with enough from its largest business. So has the country. It’s long past time that Washington and the country caught even a temporary break. Washington hasn’t seen the Promised Land in 95 years. That’s not as long as the Phillies and the Cubs were deprived. But for a baseball town, Bugs Bunny was wrong: 95 years does seem like forever.

Nothing personal, Yankees and Astros. You’ve been wonderfully deep and gutsy teams this year. You’ve earned the chance to determine which of you is going to win not just the American League championship trophy but possibly the Nobel Prize for Medicine. You’re fun to watch, you’re as admirable as the week is long, and you’re an example to us all of survival under attrition.

But you, Yankees, with your forty pennants and 27 World Series trophies. You don’t know the meaning of the word “suffering,” you and your fan base who seem to continue thinking you’re entitled to play in, never mind win, every World Series.

You, Astros? You’ve owned the American League West for a third year running and had a whale of a World Series win at the end of the first of those seasons. You’re too good and too smart to be deprived again any time soon.

Whichever one of you gets to the World Series, if the Nats get there (you, Cardinals, can just hurry up and wait, too, with your 23 pennants and eleven World Series triumphs), it will not be the end of life as you or we know it if they push, shove, nudge, bump, or bomb you to one side and themselves to the Promised Land. I promise.

Joe Grzenda, RIP: Holding a riot ball

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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.