Damn Senators: My Grandfather and the Story of Washington¿s Only World Series Championship

by Mark Judge

Overview

Mark Judge has written a book that is at once a touching memoir of his grandfather, star first baseman for the Old Washington Senators; a history of baseball in its golden age and an exciting account of the Senators' 1924 World Series victory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781893554702
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	04/01/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.44(w) x 9.24(h) x (d)

About the Author

Judge's work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard and other publications.

Read an Excerpt

Damn Senators

My Grandfather and the Story of Washington's Only World Series Championship

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By Mark Gauvreau Judge

ENCOUNTER BOOKS

Copyright © 2003 Mark Gauvreau Judge
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1893554708

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Chapter One

Baseball had been a feature of Washington's civic life for more than fifty years before my grandfather arrived on the scene to play for the Senators. That was in 1915.

The game first came to the city in the summer of 1859, when a group of government clerks formed a team named the Potomacs. Later that year another local team, the Nationals, was organized. In the spring of 1860 the Potomacs challenged the Nationals to a game, which was played on a field behind the White House called the White Lot-the site of today's Ellipse. The Potomacs won the game, scoring 35 runs. (Accounts differ on how many runs the Nationals scored.) A newspaper reported that after the game, the teams "partook of rich entertainment prepared for them ... at the order of the Potomac Club"-in other words, they celebrated at a bar. The Potomac Club was then at the Ebbit Hotel, one block from the White House. And it's still there.

This vignette is a reminder that baseball was a middle-class recreation before farmers and immigrants (and their sons, in my grandfather's case) took over the game. Baseball had its origins in the British game of rounders and took shape in the 1840s, mainly in America's growing cities. It was played by men of middle-class professional standing-after all, laborers couldn't take the afternoons off. The game grew in popularity, and in 1860 the Excelsior Club of Brooklyn went on the first baseball tour, traveling through Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, to play, as baseball historian John P. Ross tells us, "before large crowds that were already deeply informed about baseball." He notes that the new game "perfectly fit the contours of the country-it was fast, dynamic and uniquely American."

In the years after that first game between the Potomacs and the Nationals, baseball quickly caught on in Washington. By 1865, six thousand fans, including President Andrew Johnson, watched the Nationals play the Brooklyn Atlantics and the Philadelphia Athletics. (Until the 1950s the true name of the team was the Washington Nationals; "Senators" was a nickname used by so many people that almost everyone assumed it was official.)

On July 11, 1867, the Nationals went on the first western tour in baseball history. (The frontier was then still expanding, so most of the territory they covered was actually what we know today as the Midwest.) The team paid its own way and was joined by Henry Chadwick, an English immigrant and one of the first sportswriters in America. A few years earlier, in addition to his other contributions to our national sport, he had come up with an ingenious system for organizing on paper the events of a baseball game: the box score.

The Nationals dominated the tour, blasting Cincinnati 53 to 10, then beating local teams from St. Louis, Indianapolis and Louisville. In Chicago, they lost their first game to a 17-year-old pitcher named Albert Goodwill Spalding. At the time, Spalding was earning five dollars a week as a grocery clerk in Rockford, Illinois. His showing against Washington was so impressive that he was recruited by a man named Harry Wright who was putting together a team in Boston. A. G. Spalding would be the sole pitcher on Boston's roster in 1871, and gain a record of 20-10. In 1875 it would be 56-4. He would also go on to form his own sporting goods company, becoming one of the most successful sports entrepreneurs in American history.

The day after their defeat at the hand of Spalding, the Nationals trounced the Chicago Excelsiors, inducing the Chicago Tribune to accuse Washington of having thrown the game against Spalding so they could get better odds and clean up against Chicago. After a visit from Nationals president Frank Toner and player Arthur Gorman, the paper printed a retraction. Gorman would go on to become a U.S. senator; according to some, he was responsible for the "Senators" nickname.

Within three years, another Washington team had been formed, the Olympics. It was organized by Nicholas H. Young, who would later be credited with forming the National League of Professional Ballplayers. Young, who had learned to play baseball while fighting in the Civil War, was an outfielder for the Nationals, and ran a school for umpires in D.C. Along with the Olympics came other D.C. teams: the Capitals, the Empires, the Unions, the Jeffersons.

Baseball was rapidly developing a more organized structure. In 1869 the first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed. The payroll added up to $9,300, and the fact that they were paid at all meant that players would be chosen for their skills, not whether they could get afternoons off. The game itself was also evolving: batters were learning to change their stances to avoid hitting fly balls, which had become easy outs thanks to improved fielding strategies; and while pitchers had previously tossed the ball underarm, merely trying to put it into play, by now they were throwing with vastly more force and cunning, eager to engage in aggressive duels with hitters in order to strong-arm outs at all costs.

In Washington, the Nationals had a new man leading the organization. Mike Scanlon had played baseball since joining the Union Army at age fifteen. At the war's end, he arrived in Washington nearly broke; by 1866 he was already able to buy a poolroom on Ninth and S Streets, just a few blocks north of the White House. But Scanlon was crazy for baseball, and his energy soon attracted the attention of the city's other enthusiasts: Frank Jones, president of the Nationals; Arthur Gorman, former player and future senator from Maryland; wealthy businessman Robert Hewit; and Nicholas Young, head of the Olympic Club. Scanlon began organizing games on the White Lot behind the White House, and by 1869 crowds averaged four thousand people. President Johnson had the Marine Band play at the Saturday games. His successor, Ulysses S. Grant, watched from the South Lawn of the White House.

While Scanlon was boosting baseball in D.C., in New York the game's owners, managers and players were also organizing professionally. At a 1871 meeting, the National Association of Baseball Players decided to form themselves into a league. The National League would have teams in nine cities: New York; Philadelphia; Boston; Troy, New York; Chicago; Cleveland; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Rockford, Illinois; and Washington, which would be represented by the short-lived Olympics (the Nationals not joining the league until the following year).

In 1886 the Nationals acquired a catcher named Cornelius McGillicuddy, who would later become famous as Connie Mack, a name he came up with to fit in a box score. The Nationals were now playing at the Swampoodle Grounds, a field near what is now Washington's Union Station. An 1888 photograph shows the team facing the Chicago White Stockings, and Mack is unmistakable behind the plate. He had an Icabod Crane body, and even in a picture taken from a distance he stands out like a flamingo among starlings. Mack made his major league debut for Washington on October 7, 1886, hitting a single and a triple in a 12-3 win over Kansas City. Mack would go on to own and manage the Philadelphia Athletics for half a century. Always a distinctive figure, emerging from the dugout in a business suit, not a uniform, he won championships in 1902, 1905, 1910 and 1911, and did not retire until 1950.

Cornelius McGillicuddy's destiny was emblematic of a new chapter in American sports: the rise of the Irish. Historian John Ross has noted that the first two sports heroes in America in the 1880s, boxer John L. Sullivan and Mike "King" Kelly of the Chicago White Sox, were both Irish. Ross adds that the anti-Irish and anti-immigrant American Protective Society was at its peak at this time, and "sport served to ease the path to acceptance of an outside group by the larger society."

While visiting Washington, players in the 1880s often stayed at the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just down the street from the Capitol. Because of the intense Washington heat, they kept chairs on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and lounged on them after or between games. Pedestrians would walk by and strike up conversations, even offering players cigars or plugs of tobacco. The players took to calling the street the "Boulevard of Base Ball." One of the visiting players was "King" Kelly.

Kelly was one of the smartest and most flamboyant baseball players of the early era, playing every position (but mostly outfield or catcher). He was an early version of Babe Ruth, dressing in finely tailored clothes, spending lavishly and cutting a charismatic figure on the town at night. Kelly once told his manager he had to miss practice because he was taking a Turkish bath, only to have it revealed later that he had been at the racetrack. Chicago manager Cap Anson once said that Kelly "had one enemy, that being himself." At a time when the game had only one umpire, Kelly was apt to cut corners when he ran the bases. And in one famous episode he leapt from the bench yelling "Kelly now substituting!" and ran out onto the field to catch a fly ball. A popular song, "Slide, Kelly, Slide!" was written for him.

When Kelly was lounging in front of the Willard Hotel one night, a passing fan asked why Washington could not win a pennant. Kelly pointed to the Treasury building across the street. "Because you are so damned busy making money in that place across the street that you don't give enough to the honest occupation of playing baseball right."

In 1891, when the roster of teams in the National League was still shifting, with some coming and others going, Washington entered what would become known as the Wagner era. A new Washington Nationals team was formed and owned by two cutthroat Philadelphia businessmen, the brothers George and J. Earl Wagner. As the legendary Washington sportswriter Shirley Povich put it, "For the next eight years the city's fans found themselves in the cold clutch of a pair of baseball brokers who talked big, spent little, pocketed nice profits, and pulled out before they were kicked out." By the eighth year of the Wagners' reign, no Washington team finished better than a tie for sixth place. To make matters worse, a depression hit the country after farm prices collapsed in the South and Midwest. The number of fans attending baseball games in the United States dropped 40 percent from 1889 to 1894.

In order to boost attendance, owners sought to make changes in the game. In 1893 they strengthened offense by increasing the distance from the plate to the pitcher's mound from 50 feet to 60 feet 6 inches, the standard today, thus giving batters more time to see the ball. But nothing was going to help the Nationals under the aegis of the Wagner brothers. They hired and fired managers at will, inevitably turning Washington fans against them. In 1893 they announced that three games against the Philadelphia Athletics scheduled for Washington would instead be played in Philadelphia, for the insulting reason that fans there would turn out in greater numbers. A Sporting Life magazine headline justifiably bellowed that this was "An Outrage on the Washington Public." The Wagners were fined $1,000 by baseball authorities.

On another occasion the owners had their manager doing double duty: he had to lead the team and simultaneously oversee the production of "The Texas Steer Show," a theatrical extravaganza the brothers were financing. Yet another cockamamie farce was having Tuesdays and Fridays, when the handsome player Win Mercer was scheduled to pitch, billed as "Ladies' Days." Unfortunately for the Wagners, Mercer suffered from bouts of depression and a lethal gambling addiction, and when he ran up a debt of $8,000 and had a disastrous day at the horse track in Oakland, California, he took his own life. The suicide note he left behind read, "A word to friends: beware of women and a game of chance."

Even if the Wagners had been more serious about the team, the players may not have been always ready to take the field. "What's the matter with the Washington Baseball Club?" the Washington Post demanded in 1896, and then proposed a euphemistic answer: team members were "indulging in the flowing bowl." Whatever the case, the Wagners went through four managers in 1898, and an epitaph for the dismal team was offered by the Post when the Nationals returned home from a western trip in which they went 1-11. "The Senators," the Post reported, "passed through their home town unmolested on their way to Boston."

In 1899 the team ended the season in ninth place. It was generally a season of poor performances and the league directors were talking of shrinking from twelve teams to eight. J. Earl Wagner began entertaining offers for the Nationals, even while insisting publicly that "Washington will be in the major leagues when Baltimore and Brooklyn are in the minors." At the winter meetings of the National League Board of Directors, his brother George was voted off the board. At a subsequent meeting on January 25, 1900, it was decided that Washington, Cleveland, Louisville and Baltimore would all be dropped from the league. The Wagners sold the team for approximately $40,000.

Washington did not have to wait long for another baseball team. In September 1900 in a Chicago bar there was a meeting between Clark Griffith, a pitcher for the Chicago Colts; Charles Comiskey, owner of the Colts; and businessman Byron Bancroft ("Ban") Johnson. Johnson was a 300-pound, implacable cigar smoker who, as one reporter claimed, looked as though he had been "weaned on an icicle." Icicle or not, he had a passion for baseball, which he had played in college; but his real gifts were as a businessman. In 1894 he had taken over a struggling enterprise called the Western League and turned it into a success.

Ban Johnson found himself under pressure to abide by an agreement that his expanding Western League-now called the American League-could not raid players from the established National League, which was allowed to raid players from his own teams merely by plunking down $500 for any one of them. Johnson balked at such an inequitable deal, demanding that at least raids be kept down to two players per team and that the American League could expand into cities vacated by the National League.

National League officials retorted that Ban Johnson could "wait until hell freezes over" before they would agree to such a proposal. Johnson, whose hero was the poet laureate of the self-made man, Horatio Alger, took matters into his own hands and arranged a summit meeting with Charles Comiskey and Clark Griffith, who was not only a great pitcher but also the vice-president of the Ball Players Protective Association.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Damn Senators by Mark Gauvreau Judge Copyright © 2003 by Mark Gauvreau Judge. Excerpted by permission.
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