THIS IS THE WEEK THAT Major League Baseball begins its new season. And, as everyone must know, Washington will have its own team for the first time in 34 years.
As a native of the Washington area, I ought to be transfixed with joy: After decades of valiant efforts, and more than a few heartbreaking near-misses, the city fathers managed to lure a team to the nation’s capital. Or, more precisely, succeeded in persuading the commissioner to send the moribund Montreal Expos to Washington instead of killing them off.
Let there be no mistake: I am gratified that baseball is back in my hometown. I will attend a handful of games this season, linger momentarily over the sports pages, perhaps even purchase a souvenir or two. But, for whatever reason, I am not as ecstatic as I am supposed to be–or might have been, at some indeterminate point in the past.
Why? One reason may be politics. The last team to play in Washington was called the Senators, and Washingtonians always prayed for the Senators to return. But the mayor of the District of Columbia, one Anthony Williams, publicly complained that because Washington, D.C., does not have two senators in Congress, he was determined to prevent any Senators from playing in his stadium. So the new team will be called the Nationals, not the Senators. In truth, the Nationals is a historic name for the Washington team–headline writers used to abbreviate the Senators to the Nats–and things could have been worse. But I confess to a certain measure of disappointment, and resentment as well: Up until three years before his election as mayor, Anthony Williams was a resident of St. Louis, not Washington, and probably unaware of the Senators’ existence.
Then, too, there is the minor irritation that the team has gone to excessive lengths to emphasize that it is a Washington club, not some gruesome suburban contrivance. Of course, the fact that the overwhelming majority of people buying tickets and attending games will come from Virginia or Maryland has not spoiled this particular angle. Not least, the uniforms feature “DC” on the players’ hats and jerseys and, as any Cliff Dweller will tell you, DC is to Washington as Frisco is to San Francisco: a nickname designed to shatter a native’s nerves.
For me, I should say, there is one beacon of hope. For the next three years, the Nationals will play in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, which is currently being refurbished for baseball. No modern restoration is complete, of course, without the sale of corporate naming rights, and sponsors are competitively bidding as I write. The Kennedy name, we are assured, will be retained and combined with the new moniker. As disheartened as I claim to be about the Nationals, I take some comfort in the hope that they will play for three seasons in the Robert F. Kennedy-Preparation H Stadium.
Which leads me, I suppose, to the fundamental reason for my troubling agnosticism. It is often forgotten that the Senators did not abandon Washington once, in their history, but twice. The club that departed for Texas in 1971 had, in fact, been a replacement team for the Senators who moved to Minnesota in 1961. Those old, original Washington Senators–the bumbling Nats of the ’50s, first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League–were my team, for good or ill.
From the age of five or six, I followed their exploits with childish devotion. I closely read the box scores and accumulated cards and carefully monitored my favorite players. There were the outfielders, Jim Lemon and Roy Sievers and Bob Allison, third baseman Eddie Yost, catcher Clint (Scrap Iron) Courtney, pitchers Dick Hyde and Jimmy Constable and Camilio Pascual, and five-foot-five Albie Pearson, “the smallest man in baseball.” Above all, there was the third baseman, and future Hall of Famer, Harmon Killebrew, the team’s preeminent slugger. I have no idea what appealed to me about him–his unusual name might have had something to do with it–but I kept a color picture of him, cut from the pages of the Washington Evening Star, pasted on my closet door, and sought to imitate his swing when I stepped up to bat.
And then suddenly, at the end of the 1960 season, the Washington Senators became the Minnesota Twins. I wouldn’t say that I was devastated by the news, but I was shocked and aggrieved, and found it difficult to transfer my allegiance to the new, expansion Senators. Let this be a lesson to owners who skip town, and trifle with the loyalty of small boys: On the day the old Senators abandoned Griffith Stadium, love died between me and Major League baseball.
— Philip Terzian
