In 1960 the District of Columbia voted to build a new state of the art multi-sport stadium that could accommodate baseball and football. It was the first of many “concrete donut” stadiums. Here’s how to worked: The lower deck of seats on the 3rd base side would slide around to field for the football configuration, then slide back for the baseball configuration. There were 7 of them and all but one were used by National League teams (Phillies, Pirates, Reds, Cardinals, Braves, Mets). Most had fake fields with just small dirt cutouts where the bases would be. The only one in the American League was DC Stadium – with real grass. It was financed and built by the District of Columbia. This was a problem – but only for Calvin Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators. His team had played at family-owned Griffith Stadium since 1911 and at the new stadium he would lose out on concession money and parking money. Plus he’d have to pay rent. Calvin had a better plan: move the team to Minneapolis. And he did. The American League responded by immediately awarding Washington a new expansion franchise – also called the Washington Senators – starting with the 1961 season.
DC Stadium was renamed RFK Memorial Stadium after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Four years later the new Senators moved to Arlington, Texas and RFK was football only until the Redskins left in 1997. It was used only for concerts and soccer until 2005 when the Montreal Expos relocated to Washington DC and became the Nationals.
First game: December 11,1988. It wasn’t a baseball game. It was a Redskins–Cowboys game. Packed house. Redskins tickets were so hard to get then you practically had to have some relative bequeath them to you. They had a sign being the visitors bench that said “Baseball in DC.” That actually happened 17 years later. Dallas won 24-17.
Later I went with my father who had been stationed in DC at the beginning of WWII. We decided to look at the stadium and just walked in. No one stopped us. The steel frame of the old backstop was still there even though at that point it hadn’t been used for 16 years. You could see where the football seats in left field would slide to the left and become a lower deck grandstand one the 3rd base side to accommodate baseball. They were rusted in place. It was kind of depressing.
In September 1989 we saw The Rolling Stones in concert at RFK. They opened with Start Me Up, played Satisfaction before the encore pause and closed with Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The opening act was Living Colour.
First baseball game: Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005: Flash forward to 2005, when the Montreal Expos moved to DC and became the Washington Nationals. I was in Baltimore for an Arbitron visit and was invited to a Nationals-Dodgers game by Charlie Sislen of the the Research Director, Inc. Charlie, his son Everett, jis business partner Marc Greenspan and I all went. The field looked great, but the seats, concourses and scoreboards were clearly dated. The design also kept the DC humidity hanging over us. It was my first look at the Nationals and my first ballgame in DC 47 years. Yikes! That was in 1958 when I saw the original Washington Senators host the Red Sox on Opening Day at old Griffith Stadium. This was the third Washington team I had seen live: the original Senators, the replacement Senators, and now the Nationals.
The Nationals won, 3-1. Milton Bradley homered for LA, and both Nick Johnson and Preston Wilson went deep for DC. Tony Armas Jr., son of the former Red Sox center fielder, was the winning pitcher. Not having any traditions of their own, they attempted a Sweet Caroline sing-along. That only works at Fenway. The did do a President’s race in the 7th inning stretch. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. One tradition that seems to have stuck is that Teddy never wins.
Second game: Thursday, August 2, 2007: August 2007. Nationals-Reds. Playing RF for the Reds was Junior Griffey, who I’d seen playing in Pittsburg in 2001. Picture-perfect swing. His father Ken Griffey Sr. was a Reds coach in that game. Also in the lineup was Mark Bellhorn from the 2004 Red Sox championship team, David Ross from the 2013 Red Sox championship team and the Cubs 2016 championship team and epic home run hitter and bat flipper Edwin Encarnacion. Playing 3rd for Washington was, of course, Ryan Zimmerman. The Nats won, 7-3.
For several years I’ve been rooting for the Nationals to win the World Series. If you think about market droughts, Cleveland has gone 72 years, Boston went 86 years, Chicago went 88 years. But until 2019, DC went 95 years between World Series championships. And 86 years without a World Series appearance. True, they went 33 seasons with no team at all, but having nothing after 40 years of horrible last place teams is definitely worse than coming close a bunch of times. So it was really nice when DC finally had a championship in 2019.
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