Baseball Returns to the Capital : After 15-Year Hiatus, RFK to Host Exhibition

Major league baseball will return to the District of Columbia for one brief shining moment when the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies play an exhibition game Sunday afternoon at RFK Stadium--a carnival affair that effectively ends a 15-year baseball hiatus here.

The stadium has been gussied up for an occasion that will be a sellout of 45,614. Such a showing will represent a single-game baseball record for Washington, shy only of the more than 48,000 who attended a Senators doubleheader in 1962.

Pitchers and baseball purists might rue the day, however. The stadium will remain in the same configuration that is used for Redskins football games and, as such, will become a plywood-and-gravel launching pad for right-handed hitters.

The left-field wall will lie just 265 feet away, the same distance as is used for the Old-Timers Classic each summer. Dead center will be 385 feet away and the right-field line will be a major-league 325 feet from the plate.

A 23-foot plywood wall, supported by metal scaffolding, has been erected in left field. Hardly a Fenway Park Green Monster, it’s more a blue-eyed temptation for players such as New York’s Gary Carter and Philadelphia’s Mike Schmidt. Consider: the left-field wall that is so regularly victimized by power hitters in Boston stands 50 feet deeper (315 feet) than the RFK wall and is 14 feet higher (37 feet).

The left fielders will have plenty of advance notice that home-run danger lurks: a 30-foot rendition of a gravel warning track will run across left-center field. The gravel track will begin about 235 feet from home plate and will extend to the wall.

Jim Dalrymple, general manager of the D.C. Armory Board, said this week he expects left fielders to station themselves with their backs nearly brushing against the wall before nearly every pitch.

“And I don’t expect them to dive for line drives because, if they do, they’ll get a mouth full of gravel,” said Dalrymple. He said he considered placing AstroTurf over the gravel area, but feared players would trip on the seams. The infield will have dirt sliding areas and grass basepaths.

Dalrymple said signs will be posted down the left-field line “to remind fans to protect themselves.” He added, “The line drives will be coming hard over there.”

Grounds-crew members have been tossing baseballs against the wall all week, Dalrymple said, “at least until their arms got tired,” to see what type of ricochets can be expected.

“It will have the same give as the wall in Boston. You won’t see any wild ricochets here Sunday,” he said.

Dalrymple said he expects right-handed hitters to “hit two out of every five batting-practice pitches for home runs” and estimated that if former Senators slugger Frank Howard had played with such a wall, “he would have hit about 120 to 125 home runs a season.”

Dalrymple said he expects a high score in Sunday’s game, “maybe 15-12. But that’s okay, because our scoreboards are used to football games, anyway. I told (Phillies President) Bill Giles to bring a lot of left-handed hitters.”

Both the Mets and Phillies have been guaranteed $40,000, although with a sellout, each teams could take home about $52,000, Dalrymple said.

“The only thing that we are unable to do at major-league standard is (the distance of) left field,” Dalrymple said. “I would have preferred a wall that is 39 or 40 feet high. But, as far as the grass field, I’ll put ours up against any major-league field, including Baltimore’s on opening day.”

D.C. Baseball Commission members hope the sellout will serve as another indicator that the city deserves consideration for an expansion franchise.

Frank Smith, member of the D.C. City Council and chairman of the commission, said, “(The sellout) proves what we’ve been saying all along. We’ve got a bunch of baseball-hungry fans here who want a team.

“If this game hadn’t sold out, we’d have had a lot of people around the country saying terrible things about us. But it’s the hottest ticket in town this week. This region has pulled together to get a baseball team.”

Smith said steps will be taken in the near future to correct the awkward left-field dimensions. He noted that, in the District of Columbia’s already approved 1988 budget, $13.7 million will be directed toward making improvements at RFK Stadium, including upgrading the left-field dimensions.

“We’ll start work in January,” Smith said, “and when it’s done it will allow us to have an eight-hour turnaround from baseball to football.”

Buffalo and Denver, two other cities vying for a major-league franchise, also are scheduled to host exhibition games this weekend.

The Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres will play a two-game series in Denver’s Mile High Stadium and, as of Wednesday, a total of 25,000 tickets had been sold for the two games, according to a Denver Baseball Commission official. The official said a total of 40,000 fans are expected to attend the two-game set.

The Cleveland Indians and Toronto Blue Jays are scheduled to play in Buffalo’s 39,000-seat War Memorial Stadium Saturday. More than seven inches of snow fell in Buffalo on Tuesday, however, and Bob Rich Jr., president of the Class AAA Buffalo Bison, admitted, “The forecast for the weekend is not real encouraging. We feel like if we get more than 20,000 with all of this bad weather, then we’d be pleased.”