A losing start for a charter franchise When the
American League declared itself a major league in , the new league moved the previous minor
Western League's
Kansas City Blues franchise to Washington, a city that had been abandoned by the older
National League a year earlier. The new Washington club, like the old one, was called the "Senators" (the second of three franchises to hold the name).
Jim Manning moved with the Kansas City club to
manage the first Senators team. The Senators began their history as a consistently losing team, at times so inept that
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charley Dryden famously joked, "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League," a play on the famous line in
Henry Lee III's eulogy for President
George Washington as "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen". The
1904 Senators lost 113 games, and the next season the team's owners, trying for a fresh start, changed the team's name to the "Nationals" (and occasionally nicknamed the "Nats"). However, the "Senators" name remained widely used by fans and journalists — in fact, the two names were used interchangeably — although "Nats" remained the team's nickname. The Senators name was officially restored in .
A new era The club continued to lose, despite the addition of a talented 19-year-old pitcher named
Walter Johnson in . Raised in rural
Kansas, Johnson was a tall, lanky man with long arms who, using a leisurely windup and unusual sidearm delivery, threw the ball faster than anyone had ever seen. Johnson's breakout year was , when he struck out 313 batters, posted an
earned-run average of 1.36 and won 25 games for a losing ball club. Over his 21-year Hall of Fame career, Johnson, nicknamed the "Big Train", won 417 games and struck out 3,508 batters, a major-league record that stood for more than 50 years. In , the Senators' wooden ballpark burned to the ground, and they replaced it with a modern concrete-and-steel structure on the same location. First called National Park, it later was renamed
Griffith Stadium, after the man who was named Washington manager in and whose name became almost synonymous with the ball club:
Clark Griffith. A star pitcher with the National League's
Chicago Colts in the 1890s, Griffith jumped to the AL in 1901 and became a successful manager with the
Chicago White Sox and
New York Highlanders. Walter Johnson blossomed in
1911 with 25 victories, although the Senators still finished the season in seventh place. In
1912, the Senators improved dramatically, as their pitching staff led the league in team
earned run average and in
strikeouts. Johnson won 33 games while teammate
Bob Groom added another 24 wins to help the Senators finish the season in second place behind the
Boston Red Sox. The Senators continued to perform respectably in
1913 with Johnson posting a career-high 35 victories, as the team once again finished in second place, this time to the
Philadelphia Athletics. Starting in
1916, the Senators settled back into mediocrity. Griffith, frustrated with the owners' penny-pinching, bought a controlling interest in the team in and stepped down as field manager a year later to focus on his duties as team president. The minority interest was owned by William Richardson, who was content to remain in the background. The shares passed to his twin brother George on his death in 1942, and then to George's son William Richardson II in 1948. William Richardson II sold his shares to an unrelated party in 1949.
1924: World champions scores on his home run in the fourth inning of Game 7 of the 1924 World Series. In
1924, Griffith named 27-year-old second baseman
Bucky Harris player-manager. Led by the hitting of
Goose Goslin and
Sam Rice, and a solid pitching staff headlined by the 36-year-old Johnson, the Senators captured their first American League pennant, two games ahead of
Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees. The Senators faced
John McGraw's heavily favored
New York Giants in the
1924 World Series. Despite Johnson losing both of his starts, the Senators kept pace to tie the Series at three games apiece and force Game 7. The Senators trailed the Giants 3–1 in the eighth inning of Game 7, when Bucky Harris hit a routine ground ball to third which hit a pebble and took a bad hop over Giants third baseman
Freddie Lindstrom. Two runners scored on the play, tying the score at three. In the ninth inning with the game tied, 3–3, Harris brought in an aging Johnson to pitch on just one day of rest – he had been the losing pitcher in Game 5. Johnson held the Giants scoreless into extra innings. In the bottom of the 12th inning,
Muddy Ruel hit a high
foul ball near
home plate. The Giants' catcher,
Hank Gowdy, dropped his protective face mask to field the ball but, failing to toss the mask aside, stumbled over it and dropped the ball, thus giving Ruel another chance to bat. For his new manager in , Griffith returned to the formula that worked for him in 1924, and 26-year-old shortstop
Joe Cronin became player-manager. The change worked, as Washington posted a 99–53 record and swept to the pennant seven games ahead of the Yankees. But the Senators lost the
World Series to the Giants in five games, and after that, the city would not host another World Series until , when the
Washington Nationals, its current National League team, defeated the
Houston Astros.
Fading fortunes The Senators sank all the way to seventh in . Attendance plunged as well, and after the season Griffith traded Cronin to the Red Sox for journeyman shortstop
Lyn Lary and $225,000 in cash (even though Cronin was married to Griffith's niece, Mildred). Despite the return of Harris as manager in 1935–42 and 1950–54, Washington remained mostly a losing ball club for the next 25 years, contending for the pennant only in the talent-thin war years of and . In the fall of , the second major baseball franchise shift of the mid-20th century took place (after the
Boston Braves moved to
Milwaukee in 1952), with long suffering
Baltimore civic and business interests purchasing the perennially cellar-dwelling
St. Louis Browns from controversial but enterprising owner
Bill Veeck and moving them northeast of Washington to the
Chesapeake Bay port city. In the spring of , the Browns moved to a newly renovated and modernized
Memorial Stadium on the site of their former northeastern city collegiate football bowl, and replacing the earlier
minor league level "Triple A" "Orioles" (also sometimes nicknamed the "Birds") of the
International League where they had been consistent champions since the 1910s. The additional competition in the same League for
Maryland and
Virginia area baseball fans added to the complexion around the nation's capital for the rest of the 1950s as the new "
Baltimore Orioles" swiftly built their team prospects with astute trades and farm system output during the rest of the decade, finally becoming pennant contenders by . They continued their winning ways as one of the most dominant teams in professional baseball for the next two decades overpowering even the hapless third Senators franchise in 1961–1971. The Senators were also the butt of many nationwide jokes during the 1950s, with the debut and running of a
Broadway musical play in 1955 in
New York City called
"Damn Yankees" (based on an earlier best-selling novel and later movie in 1958), which followed a hapless elderly D.C. fan being given a "Faustian" or "devil's bargain," selling his soul to transform the team by becoming a young powerful new Senators player (played in the movie version by heart-throb leading-man actor
Tab Hunter) and lead the lowly team to a pennant versus the Yankees. In 1954, Senators farm system director
Ossie Bluege signed a 17-year-old
Harmon Killebrew. Because of his $30,000 signing bonus, an enormous amount for that time, baseball rules required Killebrew to spend the rest of 1954 with the Senators as a "bonus baby." Killebrew bounced between the Senators and the minor leagues for the next few years. He became the Senators' regular third baseman in , leading the League with 42 home runs and earning a starting spot on the American League
All-Star team.
Relocation Clark Griffith died in , and his nephew and adopted son
Calvin took over the team presidency. He sold Griffith Stadium to the city of Washington and leased it back, leading to speculation that the team was planning to move, as the
Boston Braves,
St. Louis Browns and
Philadelphia Athletics had done in the early 1950s, and the
New York Giants and
Brooklyn Dodgers would do later in the decade. After an early flirtation with San Francisco (with a "Triple A"
Pacific Coast League team, the
San Francisco Seals), by Griffith was courting
Minneapolis–St. Paul in the
Upper Midwest state of
Minnesota, a prolonged process that resulted in his rejecting the Twin Cities' first offer before agreeing to relocate. The American League opposed the move at first, but in , in the face of the
Continental League's proposed Minnesota franchise, a deal was reached. The Senators moved and were replaced with an expansion
Washington Senators team for . The old Washington Senators became the new
Minnesota Twins; the expansion Senators would become the
Texas Rangers in , and baseball would not return to the city until , when the former
Montreal Expos became the
Washington Nationals. ==Achievements==