2008 Woodie Awards
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Baseball's unique history in the District
By Elliot Smilowitz on 4/4/05
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On Sunday, Washington, D.C., baseball fans were able to root, root, root for the home team for the first time in 30 years with the debut of the Washington Nationals at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Though the 4-3 loss to the Mets was an exhibition game and will not count in the standings, it was the debut of Washington's first baseball team in decades.
The last time District baseball fans came to RFK, it was not the Nationals they were watching, but the Washington Senators. It was Sept. 30, 1971, and D.C. fans were not only losing the Senators, but also making the Senators lose.
According to a Washington Post article dated Oct. 1, 1971, several hundred fans stormed the field in the ninth inning of the last game of that year's season, which was to be the last Senators game before they moved to Texas to become the Rangers. The game, which the Sens were winning, was forfeited when the police couldn't clear the field of the fans.
The Post called the game "one of the rowdiest wakes ever." It was the end of a 71-year run of baseball in the nation's capital and the start of a dry spell that has finally ended in 2005.
The lasting legacy of the Senators may be the way they left the city, not once but twice.
First, in 1960, owner Calvin Griffith took the original Senators and moved them to Minnesota, where they became the modern-day Minnesota Twins. The very next year, though, a new Washington Senators franchise owned by Robert Short was installed.
"There was a great deal of nervousness about not having a team in Washington," said SOC professor Lenny Steinhorn, a lifelong baseball fan, about the replacement Sens franchise.
"There was some sense that Griffith had not left with all the best intentions at the time," he said.
In the move, all historical claims to the Senators' past were lost, as they now belonged to Griffith's Minnesota organization. Short's Sens were a blank slate.
With no history, the Senators stumbled through 11 seasons and only once posted a winning record. Though they were managed for stretches by famous ex-players like Ted Williams, Gil Hodges and Eddie Yost, they produced few notable players, and game attendance suffered as a result.