The Washington Senators: A Monument to Bad Management

"The Washington Senators: A Monument to Bad Management"

And there's a baseball team of that name, too.

-dlj.

I love the imagery of Dick Nixon talking with Mayor Walter Washington. So many non-readers have this ersatz conception of Nixon but he was far too complex to reduce to a one-liner. Walter Washington did all he could for his city.

I was 11 years old when the Senators left DC, and that had to be one of the saddest years of my life. Yes, they never made it into the playoffs while they were here, but I always loved going to DC (later RFK) stadium to see them play. When the Expos came to DC in 2005 and became the Nats, my life as a baseball fan was complete. No more having to pretend to like the Orioles, or having to drive 40 miles north to get my live game fix.

We loved our Nats as they were called by the radio announcers.
Hondo(Frank Howard) would boom one every now and then, Eddie Brinkman who ran around the bases backwards after a home run, Satchel Paige who pitched here in his 60's.
Ted Williams must have been so frustrated here.
100 loss seasons were not unusual.

The subhead is just inaccurate. In the 10 years from 1924 to 1933, the Nationals won 92 or more games six times, three pennants and a World Series. The winning percentage during that stretch was .601, so obviously after 1924, there was a good run. And while there were minority stockholders in the team in the '20s until his death, Clark Griffith had no "co-owner" -- he ran things by himself. His teams finished 2nd in '43 and '45, so it wasn't all futility.

Very good article and well written. But, the worst team in baseball was certainly the St. Louis Browns rather than Washington. A close second maybe.

If only Joe Hardy had come back for another season with the Senators!

I think the St Louis Browns were a worse AL team than even the Senators.

Actually, the Washington Senators broke the color barrier long before the Brooklyn Dodgers did with Jackie Robinson, by, for example, playing the mixed-race Bobby Estalella, who played for them off-and-on from 1935-1942. But while the Dodgers followed up their first-mover advantage by signing more African-American stars like Roy Campanella, Joe Black, Don Newcombe, and Junior Gilliam, thus winning 6 pennants in Robinson's 10 years, the Senators could never commit wholeheartedly to their clever but furtive strategy of playing Cubans who weren't quite white, so they didn't get much benefit from it.

Michael Beschloss may know his presidents but when it comes to Washington baseball he's caught off base. Although he is correct that Griffith did not have "deep pockets" to invest in the club, he errs on many other accounts. First of all, as my new book about DC baseball in the war years ("The Nats and the Grays How Baseball in the Nation's Capital Survived WWII and Changed the Game Forever," from Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) shows, from 1905 to 1956 the team was actually nicknamed the Nationals. When the team finished last in 1944, it was their first last-place finish since 1909, and that 44 finish was wrapped around two years of second-place finishes. Also Griffith was not a racist; there were many reasons (one being he was making money from the Homestead Grays who shared his stadium) to explain his reluctance to sign an African American, although his wartime teams includes several Cuban players. Griffith Stadium was not segregated in the traditional sense; black leaders had asked for a section and Griffith gave it to them but they were not restricted to it. Beschloss should have read my book before writing this article; to base it solely on Frederick Frommer's earlier (and to my mind, inferior) volume is the equivalent of writing about Richard Nixon without reading about Watergate.
David E. Hubler

The tradition of the Senators rotten losing hung on long after the franchise moved to Texas. They were mostly terrible until finally playing in the World Series 2010 and 2011 (losing both times, naturally). Even that success proved to be an aberration, because the Rangers in 2015 are once again the worst team in the MLB, and won't be getting better anytime soon.

As a native Washingtonian, I attended several Senators game as a kid in the 50s. Contrary to what Mr. Beschloss seems to be saying, the stands were integrated by then; I don't know when the seating segregation of fans had stopped. But the Griffiths were awful owners, exceeded in stupidity only by Bob Short. I'm still trying to make up for all the games I couldn't attend in DC from 1971 to 2005.

No discussion of this topic is complete without mentioning Short's disastrous trade of the entire infield for Denny MacLean, without even consulting Williams. I disagree that the Senators were the worst team in baseball, but this trade should be regarded as the worst in baseball history.

I'm a little confused; the article makes it sound like the Twins were a whole new franchise that happened to have the same ownership, front office, staff and players as the previous year's Senators, and the Senators that ended up in Texas were the same old Senators but with all-new personnel. This makes less sense than the idea that the old Baltimore Orioles were a separate team from the New York Highlanders, which seems to be the official story now.
I also remember reading that Cal Griffith appealed to the Minneapolis fans by praising how white they were. There have been some nasty people in this game.

I grew up with the Senators, oblivious to their ever having been the Nationals, and swallowed whole the (assumed) abbreviation of "Senators" to "Nats", thinking it only slightly odd (I mean -- "Sens"? Naaahhh.....).

I attended that last game and I can tell you there were many more than three minutes of chaos leading to the forfeiture

Bob Short's purchase of the Washington Senators was his attempt to replicate his financial success when he sold the Los Angeles Lakers to an investment group led by Jack Kent Cooke and included William Shea, namesake of the Mets' former ballpark. Short ended up with a huge loss by the time he sold the franchise to Brad Corbett in the mid-1970s. The umpire crew chief who declared the forfeit in the Senators II's final game in 1971 was Jim Honochick who later became noted for his "Hey! You're Boog Powell!" catchphrase in a few Miller Lite commercials later that decade.

The National Bohemian ads at Griffith Stadium was the result of Jerold Hoffberger's brewery sponsoring the Senators I in exchange for Clark Griffith casting the deciding vote to allow the St. Louis Browns to move to Baltimore. The ads consisted of a solitary billboard behind the left-field bleachers and a smaller one with the bottle atop the main scoreboard which was part of the right-field wall. Both featured the one-eyed mustachioed Natty Boh and his famous slogan "Oh, boy! What a beer!" Hoffberger's Charm City-based brewery eventually became the primary owner of the Baltimore Orioles by 1965.

The team should be called The Washington Delegates, since Congress won't allow D.C. to have a voting Senator or Representative. And like the only House Delegate, in the end the team doesn't count. But thanks for the great article.

And the score of a forfeited game: 9-0.
As a fan of the SF Giants, we watched as Short tried to buy into that team, which most assuredly would have meant 'The City' losing our team.

The article is just not complete without that memorable slogan:

Washington - first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.

It's tempting to think that the Senators (and the Browns, and occasionally the A's) would have done better under modern rules, even just an amateur draft, let alone the luxury tax. It wasn't just the inept Griffith, though, far from it.

From 1934-1960, AL pennants...

Boston - 1 (1946)
Chicago - 1 (1959)
Cleveland - 2 (1948, 1954)
Detroit - 4 (1934-35, 1940, 1945)
Philadelphia/KC - 0
St. Louis - 1 (1944)
Washington - 0

So, in 27 seasons, seven of the eight AL teams combined to win 9 pennants. Only Detroit won more than two(!). Not much excitement for those fanbases, though if you wish you can extend the era to include the last A's run from 1929-31. Four of the seven won at most one from 1934-60. Who was the eighth team again? They were vaguely memorable...

Compare that to the NL:

Boston/Mil - 3 (1948, 1957-58)
Brooklyn/LA - 8 (1941, 1947, 1949, 1952-53, 1955-56, 1959)
Cincinnati - 2 (1939-40)
Chicago - 3 (1935, 1938, 1945)
New York - 4 (1936-37, 1951, 1954)
Philadelphia - 1 (1950)
Pittsburgh - 1 (1960)
St. Louis - 5 (1934, 1942-44, 1946)

Five of the eight in the senior circuit managed to win at least three pennants. It's also tempting to say the Yankees feasted on weak AL competition and that they would not have won 18/27 in the NL had you switched them with the median team (Chicago or Boston/Mil) from that era. Well, until you examine NYY's WS record...

W - 1936-39, 1941, 1943, 1947, 1949-53, 1956, 1958
L - 1942, 1955, 1957, 1960

OK, maybe only 16/27 then...

Great story! There were some great players on those teams. I don't think Griffith was too different from some of the other owners,especially in small markets. As a kid in the late 50s and early 60s, I didn't keep many of the Senators' baseball cards. I couldn't even trade them to friends. I think they ended up on bicycle spokes.