Last Time the Stars Came Out in Washington D.C.

NOW A DECAYING HULK, the ballpark was then just eight years old. It's summer residents, the Washington Senators, were winning at last. Two days earlier, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had walked on the moon. It was party time in the nation's capital and Major League Baseball's best and brightest were coming.

You gotta have balls to play in the nation's capital

The date: July 23, 1969. The event: MLB's 40th All Star Game.  It would be Washington's fourth such affair and its last for nearly half a century. And it couldn't have come at a worse time for the host American League.

It was a time of National League dominance, the likes of which the mid-summer classic had never known. The so-called senior circuit had won each of the last six contests, 12 of the previous 15 and held an overall 21-17-1 advantage since the event's inception in 1933.

This sides for this outing at recently rechristened Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium were decidedly lop. Thirteen NL players were destined for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, five were in the starting lineup including pitcher Steve Carlton and catcher Johnny Bench. The AL squad had just six, battery not included.

Rain had postponed the match for a day. Now, with Richard Nixon off to welcome the astronauts home from Tranquility Base, Vice President Spiro Agnew thew out the first ball. Maybe they should have left him in.

The New York Yankees' Mel Stottlemyre started for the Americans. He immediately yielded a single to the Pittsburgh Pirates' Matty Alou, who'd bat .331 that year. Alou moved to second on ground out by the Chicago Cubs' Don Kessinger. He went to third on a wild pitch, then scored when hometown hero Frank Howard misplayed Hank Aaron's shot to left.

One hot dog and two Franks

The bottom of the first saw the AL send up a gold-plated trio: Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson. Hall of Famers all. Carlton set them down in order.

Cleon Jones of the New York Mets led off the second with a single. Bench's two-run belt brought him home. In the bottom of the frame, the 6'7" Howard -- aka the Washington Monument, aka The Capital Punisher -- took Lefty deep for shot of redemption. NL 3, AL 1 after two.

Any good feeling in the home dugout quickly dissipated.

Aaron started the third with a hit off the Oakland A's Blue Moon Odom. Then Cooperstown-bound Willie McCovey homered. An out, an error, a single and two doubles later, the National League had three more runs. Though Detroit Tigers catcher Bill Freehan replied with a solo shot, McCovey cracked his second round-tripper an inning later, this one served up by the Tigers' Denny McLain.

When Freehan's single -- off the peerless Bob Gibson -- drove in pinch runner Reggie Smith in the 4th, the game still had the look of slugfest. The Nationals had three homers and nine runs. The Americans had two taters and three runs. And the game wasn't half over.

Except that it was.

Both sides combined for just three hits the rest of the way, no more than one in any single frame. The Cleveland Indian's Sam McDowell, aka Sudden Sam, fanned four in two innings of work. He was one of three AL hurlers to hold the NL at bay.

Baseball and a tax break

The game ended with that same 4th inning score, 9-3. Knucksie Phil Niekro, he of 318 career wins, got the save.

Some of the senior circuit's gaudiest stars were relegated to just bit parts. Willie Mays pinch hit and skied to right. Ernie Banks pinch hit and lined out. In his lone plate appearance, Roberto Clemente fanned. Pete Rose, destined to be baseball's all-time hits leader and then a Hall of Fame pariah, popped out.

Tom Seaver, in the midst of a 25-win Cy Young Award season, never pitched.

Each of the junior circuit's future Hall inductees, including Carl Yastrzemski, Harmon Killebrew and Brooks Robinson, went hitless.

McCovey, with his two homers and three runs batted in, was the game's most valuable player. By season's end, with a .320 average, 45 homers and 126 RBIs was the league's MVP too.

Cleon Jones hit .340 -- third best in the NL behind Rose, .348 and Clemente, .345 -- and caught the final out as the Miracle Mets won the World Series, 5 games to 1, over the Baltimore Orioles. It was their first winning season since their birth in 1962.

Bench and McCovey - two for the Hall

In between the mid-summer classic and the miracle, there would be "Vietnamization" of the war in southeast Asia, the Manson Family murders, Hurricane Camille and Woodstock.

The host Senators, managed by Ted Williams -- aka the Splendid Splinter, Teddy Ballgame and Ted Fucking Williams -- were never better, posting an 86-76 record. It would be their only winning season in 11 Washington campaigns.

By 1972, they were gone, relocated to Arlington, Texas, as the Rangers.

Having previously lost the original Senators franchise (sometimes confusingly called the Nationals) to Minnesota, the District of Columbia was left pining for a team to call it's own for 34 years.

In 2005 it got one, the Montreal Expos. They called RFK Stadium their home for three years before moving into the brand new Nationals Park. There the stars will come out again on Tuesday night.

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Washington's 70 Years of Mostly Bad Senators*

"FIRST IN WAR, FIRST IN PEACE and last in the American League."

A playful take -- if there is such a thing -- on a eulogy for the first U.S. president, the phrase is credited to baseball writer and humorist Charles Dryden.

His dig was directed at cellar-dwelling Washington Senators of 1904, also known -- if less well remembered -- as the Washington Nationals, not to be confused with the latter-day Washington Senators or with the current Nationals formerly known as the Montreal Expos.

A new team but the same old story.

Dryden's remark wasn't uncalled for. But for a notable 10-year stretch, the original Washington Senators were bad. Really bad. Historically bad. Mythically bad.  Six-hundred and forty-one games under .500 bad.

They finished last in 1904, last again in 1907 and yet again in 1909. In fact, they finished no better than seventh in the eight-team American League until 1912.

During their six decades in D.C., the Senators landed in the A.L. basement 10 times, finish next to last 14 times and in sixth place nine times.

Their 18 non-losing seasons included just three first place finishes and none after 1933.

Their brief run to respectability, if not consistency, started in 1924 with their lone championship led by legendary pitcher Walter Johnson, outfielder Goose Goslin and a boy genius, 27-year-old player-manager Bucky Harris, Hall of Famers all. They took a back seat to the powerhouse New York Yankee teams of the late 1920s, then rallied for one last shot of glory in 1933, led by two more future Hall members, shortstop Joe Cronin and an outfielder named Heinie Manush.

And that was it for championship caliber Washington baseball, until now.

In 1955, the original Senators went a woeful 53 and 101, inspiring Damn Yankees, a Broadway musical -- and later a movie -- about a Senators fan who made a pact with the devil to deliver a pennant. It was, of course, fiction. Even the uplifting dittyYou've Got to Have Heart couldn't alter the reality: another spate of awfulness during which they'd bring up the American rear four more times in six years.

The born-again Senators claimed
the mantle of their predecessors

And then, after the 1960 season, they left for the land of 10,000 lakes, where they exorcised their demons and were born anew as the Minnesota Twins.

Bereft, the nation's capital received an immediate replacement Senators squad. If the objective was continuity, they were a smashing success.

The Mark II Senators lost at an even faster clip than their forerunners, rolling up a 292-game win-loss deficit in only 11 seasons. They cobbled together just one winning year before being whisked off to Arlington, Texas, and rechristened the Rangers.

Their brief stay, a year shy of two U.S. Senate terms, wasn't without legacies.

Though they began life in the same notch-cornered Griffith Stadium from which the old Senators absconded, in 1962 the neo-Senators moved into the brand-new District of Columbia Stadium.

The first of the multi-use municipal stadiums now ruefully recalled as "cookie-cutter," DC stadium was a bull ring of a ballpark with more than half it's seats located in the upper tiers, distancing fans from the team's dismal performance.

Built in line of sight with the Capitol and the Washington Monument, it featured low-profile stadium lights affixed to a curvy roof over a wavy grandstand. President John F. Kennedy threw out the ceremonial first ball at its inaugural home opener. Seven years later, the ballpark would be renamed for his slain brother, United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

The stadium's first star was 6'7", 255-lbs slugger Frank Howard, a/k/a The Capital Punisher, who slammed 237 homers and drive in 670 runs over seven seasons in the capital, twice finishing among the top five vote-getters for A.L. Most Valuable Player.

The Capital Punisher, aka The Washington Monument

If the ad content of a mid-term Senators scorecard is any indication, Washington of that era was town of serious men, having serious discussions, dressed in sharp-brimmed hats and Botany 500 suits. At least some drank hard liquor.

One of those men, attorney and Senators board chairman James Johnston, died of cancer in 1967, a month after the team traded manager Gil Hodges to the New York Mets, whom he skippered to a world championship two years later.

While Hodges was performing miracles, the Senators were being acquired by trucking magnate Robert Short who hired Hall of Fame slugger Ted Williams as field boss.

Teddy Ballgame, as he was known -- along with another more colorful nickname -- led the Washingtonians to their only winning campaign, 86-76 in 1969. The next season, they reverted to form, losing 92 games and then 96 in their last D.C. campaign before just over 655,000 paying customers.

The new Senators at the new D.C. Stadium

Low attendance and a resultant lack of revenue prompted Short to sell. When he couldn't find a buyer to meet his reported $12 million asking price, he resolved to relocate to Arlington.

Their final home game, on Sept. 30, 1971 against the no-longer particularly damned Yankees, ended in forfeiture and fiasco as angry diehards from an announced crowd of less than 15,000 stormed the field, preventing the contest's completion.

And that was it for D.C. baseball for the next 34 years.

In 2005, the star-crossed and effectively homeless Montreal Expos settled at DC Stadium as the Washington Nationals, now an entry in the National League's Eastern Division.

In a nod to those erstwhile Senators of the sixties, these new Nats adopted the Frank Howard-era Curly W as their logo, made it their own and took it along to a new ballpark built just for them in 2008.

On Oct. 15, for the first time in their franchise history, and for the first time for Washington since 1933, the capital baseball team won a pennant.

Neither last, nor in the American League, they've rendered Dryden's statement fully inoperative. On Tuesday night, Oct. 22, they'll represent the N.L. in World Series game 1 in Houston.
_________________________________

* First published in July of 2016, this article has since been substantially revised and updated.

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You Bettor, You Bettor, You Bet

IT WAS A perfectly reasonable idea.

Take Major League Baseball's first 30-game winner since 1934, team him with the reigning National League batting champion, and have them author a handbook on the fundamentals of the game.

The result, published in 1969, was "How to Play Better Baseball," by Denny McLain and Pete Rose, a pocket-sized 64-page treatise on the art of pitching, hitting and fielding like a big leaguer.

The cover story

The pairing was serendipitous and star-crossed.

McLain, 25, was a bona fide star. In 1968, he'd gone a wondrous 31-6 in helping the Detroit Tigers to a championship while winning the American League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards. For an encore, he went 24-9 in 1969, sharing top AL pitching honors with the Baltimore Orioles' Mike Cuellar.

It was the third and last time McLain would top 20 victories in a season. He'd tally just 22 more over the next three years before arm problems and off-the-field troubles wrecked his career. He was out of baseball by age 29.

Rose, the NL's top rookie in 1963,  immediately blossomed into a perennial .300 hitter and all-star. The Cincinnati Reds' spark plug collected 218 hits in 1969 -- his second highest single-season total -- while winning the second of three batting titles he'd earn over his 24-year career.

They were, arguably, baseball's best pitcher and hitter: two players who would never be better. But, trouble had already found McLain, later it would come for Rose. Their shared demon: gambling.

Innocence Falls

Get a good grip...

In 1969, however, they were idols of a sepia-toned era: a time of day games and flannel uniforms. Divisional play was in its infancy. The New York Yankees' fallen star, Jim Bouton, was writing -- but had not yet published -- his tell-all memoir "Ball Four," in which he'd reveal ballplayers were ordinary beer drinking, skirt-chasing men, not gods.

The Rose/McLain handbook and its cocksure earnestness could only have happened before Bouton's best seller stripped away the sport's wholesome veneer.

The pitcher's portion was divided into four parts: Sizing Up the Batters; That Extra Pitch; Playing a Ball Game and Exercise and Equipment.

"There will be spots -- when you have a fat lead and everybody on your side is hitting -- when you may not need to bear down,'' McLain said. "I have even heard tell of a pitcher's feeding a fat pitch to Mickey Mantle once, when the game was not in danger. But you can never get careless."

"To succeed at pitching, you need the four C's: Control, Condition, Concentration and CONFIDENCE," he said.

... follow through, and...

Pete Rose radiated confidence and courted controversy while playing more games, 3,562, and accumulating more hits, 4,256, than anyone ever.

He ran over the Cleveland Indians' Ray Fosse, separating the catcher's shoulder to win the 1970 All Star game and slugged the New York Mets' Bud Harrelson in the middle of a 1973 playoff game to avenge a comment the shortstop made to the press.

In 1988, Rose was suspended for 30 days by National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti for shoving umpire Dave Pallone.

Foreshadowing.

"Learning to hit and developing your skill as a hitter is not just a lark," he wrote, telling those who aspired to greatness that it came only with "dreary" effort. "Actually, you will get more fun out of it if you can do it well. Where is the fun of hitting if you can't hit?"

Later chapters addressed fielding at all four infield positions and the outfield, oddly prescient for a player who began as a second-baseman,  but would go on to play right field, left field, third base and finally first.

Ballgame Over

McLain was already in trouble by the winter of 1970 when Sports Illustrated published an expose titled "Baseball's Big Scandal: Denny McLain and the Mob." According to the magazine, the Tigers' ace was involved in bookmaking.

He would later file for bankruptcy and be suspended for half the season by then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who'd absolve the McLain of being a bookie but found him the victim of "a confidence game," according to a SABR.org article. By year's end he'd be traded to the Washington Senators, lead the AL in losses, be dealt to the Oakland A's, then to the Atlanta Braves and finally released.

... be ready for what comes at you.

The last big league batter he'd face: co-author Rose.

Subsequent years would see the hurler indicted, tried, convicted, imprisoned, acquitted and later tried, convicted and imprisoned again, according to SABR.

Rose returned to the Reds as player-manager in 1984, following his five-year sojourn in Philadelphia and Montreal. He'd retire as player two years later.

In 1989, the winter after the Pallone incident, Major League Baseball opened an investigation into allegations he'd been betting on the game -- MLB's capital crime -- with Sports Illustrated breaking the news in March 1989.

Though he'd initially deny the allegations, that summer Rose accepted a permanent ban from the baseball from Giamatti, now elevated to commissioner. The former Yale University and NL president died of a heart attack eight days later.

In 1991, Rose would be declared permanently ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, record number of hits notwithstanding.

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