Monday marks the 75th birthday of one Mr. Frank Oliver Howard, known to one and all as “Hondo.” For those too young to have seen Hondo play for the Washington Senators between 1965 and 1971, listen closely to your elders about his prodigious ability to hit baseballs a very long distance. There’s no hyperbole necessary; he really was Paul Bunyan in a baseball uniform.
I was in my teens when Frank was traded by the Dodgers to the Senators at the 1964 Winter Meetings. It was a huge transaction: Frank, along with third baseman Ken McMullen, first baseman Dick Nen and pitchers Phil Ortega and Pete Richert came east in exchange for pitcher Claude Osteen (Washington’s staff ace who had just won 15 games for a ninth-place team), infielder John Kennedy and $100,000. The left-hander Osteen ended up in the ’65 World Series, and all five ex-Dodgers were contributors to a 70-win ballclub in D.C. Hondo led the team with 21 home runs, but the best was yet to come.
Howard’s power numbers actually dipped in 1966. He managed only 18 home runs, but that total still led the team. It was the years 1967 through 1970 that really opened some eyes around the game. Hondo hit 36, 44, 48 and 44 home runs those seasons, leading the AL in both 1968 and 1970 while finishing second behind Harmon Killebrew in 1969.
His incredible week in 1968 when he homered 10 times in 20 at-bats was the stuff legends are made of. He began with a pair of shots off Tigers southpaw Mickey Lolich on Sunday, May 12, at D.C. Stadium, and ended with two more off of Lolich the following Saturday in Detroit. He owned most of the league’s better lefties and Frank Howard’s name was suddenly on the lips of every baseball fan in America.
Fans from those days will tell you about the home run off Tommy John of the White Sox in 1967 that went through a ramp in the upper deck at D.C. Stadium. Or the one against the Tigers in Washington that shortstop Ray Oyler leaped for and missed by inches that smacked against the back wall behind the fence in left-center and rolled almost all the way back to the infield. Or the one in the 1969 All-Star Game played at the newly renamed RFK Stadium. Or the last homer — September 30, 1971 — when the old ballclub said goodbye.
Every time I see Howard — a resident of Northern Virginia for many years now — and ask him how he’s doing, he always says the same thing: “As long as I’m on this side of the grass, everything’s fine.”
Here’s hoping he stays up here a long, long time, and those of us he thrilled so often 40-plus years ago will never run out of Hondo stories to tell younger fans.
Examiner columnist Phil Wood is a baseball historian and contributor to MASN’s Nats Xtra. Contact him at [email protected].
