Saying Goodbye To A Baseball Team

I am, admittedly, not a huge fan of sports of any kind, but I do keep track of the scores and "follow" certain teams, more to have something to talk about rather than actually being interested in the game itself. And, of course, I love all things related to history.

I do like to keep up with the Nationals, as a native of Washington, D.C. and often miss the team's predecessor, Washington Senators.

A decent-sized crowd came out to say goodbye to baseball in Washington on a mild September night in 1971, including 74-year-old Bucky Harris. As the Senators’ “Boy Wonder” player-manager, Harris had led the city to its first World Series title about a half-century earlier, when Washington succeeded the New York Yankees as baseball's champion.

Now Harris - and the Yankees - were back for one last game.

“I still can’t believe it’s happening,” he said, “and I never thought I’d see the day when they would leave Washington without a franchise.”

It was a sentiment shared by many of the 14,460 fans - nearly double the average home crowd that season - who came to RFK Stadium for the Senators’ wake on September 30, 1971. It would turn into one of the most chaotic nights in baseball history.

The District’s fate had been sealed nine days earlier when American League owners voted, 10-2, to let owner Bob Short move the Senators to Texas, where they would become the Rangers. It was the second time in just over a decade that Washington lost its team; the original Senators had moved to Minnesota in 1960 and became the Twins, replaced by the “expansion” Senators in 1961, and this time two of the key figures in baseball leadership had Washington roots.

American League president, Joe Cronin, had been player-manager of the city’s last pennant-winning team in 1933. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was a D.C.-area native who got the baseball bug that season and went on to operate the old manual scoreboard at Griffith Stadium for $1 a day as a teenager in the 1940s.

The night of the owners’ vote in 1971 was the only time Kuhn cried as commissioner, he said in 2005. “I did everything I could to save it,” he said. “I held it up for months. Finally, we had the American League meeting. I couldn’t make an argument against it. I stood there with tears down my face.”

But the Senators’ owner had nothing but contempt for Kuhn and his efforts to save Washington baseball. Former Senators broadcaster Shelby Whitfield recalled in his book, Kiss it Goodbye, that every time Kuhn’s name came up in conversation, Short would refer to the commissioner as “that idiot.”

Many of the fans who showed up for the final game felt the same way about Short.

Short’s move would end seven decades of baseball in the nation’s capital, dating from the formation of American League. And the final game would come against those hated Yankees, who were in fourth place in the AL East - 16½ games ahead of the fifth-place Senators.

Fans brought signs to RFK Stadium that night reading “How Dare You Sell Us Short” and “We’ve Been Short-Changed.” Later, they unfurled two long, skinny signs from the left field stands, with vertical letters spelling out “Short” and “Stinks” - which won a standing ovation from the crowd.

That morning, Senators radio play-by-play announcer Ron Menchine woke up to see rain coming down his bedroom window and he hoped the rain would cancel the game. Alas, those hopes were dashed.

The Yankees jumped Bosman for a pair of runs in the first inning and two more in the second to take a 4-0 lead.

Short, wisely, was not at the game, but he did call the radio station to complain about the commentary on the broadcast.

Menchine was unmoved by Short’s criticism.

When fan favorite Frank Howard led off the sixth with the Yankees leading 5-1, he got a standing ovation for the third time and fans threw confetti on the field. Howard had topped the Senators in homers in each of his seven seasons in Washington - including a thunderous three-year period when he hit 44, 48 and 44 home runs - so fans were hoping for one final thrill. He obliged them, with a little help from friendly Yankees.

Until that point, as one spectator recalled, the crowd was pretty subdued.

As Howard’s 26th homer soared into the back of the Yankees’ bullpen, the crowd erupted. Their cheers intermingled with the “Charge” song blaring from the stadium speaker.

Howard, known as “The Capital Punisher,” waved his batting helmet in the air, blew kisses to the fans and tossed his cap into the stands.

The Senators rallied for three more runs in the sixth inning to tie the score and went ahead in the eighth, but the crowd’s mood soon darkened. Around this time, some fans came onto the field, but order was restored and the game continued.

“ ’We want Bob Short!’ ” was the cry that picked up in loud and angry chorus,” wrote Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich, “and it was the baying-fury sound of a lynch mob.”

Sensing danger, Washington Manager Ted Williams lifted Howard from the game after the eighth inning. Joe Grzenda, who was having a career year (finishing with a 1.92 ERA), came in to pitch the ninth, protecting a 7-5 lead. The dugout gave him instructions to hesitate after the second out so the bullpens would have a chance to empty.

After Bobby Murcer grounded out to Grzenda for the second out, Horace Clarke came up to bat. “I wasted some time, kicking dirt around, and Horace stood in that batting circle taking those practice swings,” Grzenda recalled. “And I yelled, ‘Come on, let’s go!’ I looked around, and it was over. They came over the fence, and there was actually dust flying. There were hundreds that came over the fence. It looked like a herd of cattle coming in those old movies, when they stampede.”

The Senators never got that last out that night. The umpires declared the game a forfeit to the Yankees - by the traditional forfeit score of 9-0 - the first in the majors since 1954.

“All of a sudden you had this bull rush,” said Tony Roberts, Menchine’s radio broadcast partner. “And that was the end of baseball in Washington.”

The finale looked like a classic 1970s stadium scene when fans rush the field after a championship - except this time it was anything but a celebration. Hundreds of mostly young fans pulled up bases, grass, pieces of the scoreboard and even dirt.

One of the fans on the field was Ken Whitaker, at the time a 25-year-old University of Maryland student. He said that when his friends got down from their upper-deck seats, they saw police chasing a guy who had grabbed a “335” outfield sign. The man dropped the sign in the middle of the outfield. Whitaker still has the sign in his Springfield, Virginia home.

Whitaker recalled how some “old fans” who had stayed in their seats - looking back now, they were probably middle-aged, he said - scolded him and his fellow fans on the field.

Matthew Daly recalled that he and his twin brother, Brendan, 9 years old, were dropped off by a family member to watch the game and were upset when fans stormed the field.

“Our reaction was, ‘They’re destroying our stadium,’ ” Matthew Daly said. “That wasn’t our thing.” He added that giving up a win to the hated Yankees made it even worse.

Indeed, the Yankees had manhandled the Senators for the better part of 40 years. Ironically, though, the Senators beat the Yankees 11 of 17 times that last season before the forfeit - only the second time in their 11 seasons that the expansion Senators had taken the season series from New York.

The forfeit enabled the Yankees to eke out a winning record (82-80), while the Senators finished 63-96, a .396 winning percentage, their worst record since 1964.

(In a twist, the same Senators team, now playing as Texas Rangers, would be involved in MLB’s next forfeit just three years later, but this time as the winning team. On June 4, 1974, the Cleveland Indians’ "Ten-Cent Beer Night"got out of control with fans streaking on the field and setting off firecrackers in the stands. A riot on the field in the ninth inning led to a Cleveland forfeit.)

President Richard Nixon, a big Senators fan, said it was “heartbreaking” that the team was moving, and a couple of weeks after the last game he strategized on a secretly recorded tape with Washington Mayor-Commissioner Walter E. Washington to identify teams that could take the Senators’ place, including the Indians and Chicago White Sox. He predicted baseball would be back by the time of the 1976 bicentennial.

On the same call, Nixon slammed Short, who had been a chief fundraiser for Nixon’s 1968 opponent, Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey: “Short is a jerk."

Nixon’s timetable was off by nearly three decades; it would take D.C. 33 years to land a new team. When President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch at the Nationals’ first home game, at RFK in 2005, Grzenda presented him the ball he had on the mound when the fans stormed the field, after keeping it in his home in Pennsylvania for more than three decades.

Grzenda, who died in 2019, had stored the ball in a manila envelope labeled “Last baseball ever thrown as a Washington Senator, Baseball Club. Sept. 30, 1971, Murcer grounded out to me.”