Washington Gleams for NL Baseball Brass

The sound of Washington baseball fans’ dreams was heard Monday above RFK Stadium. It was the pop-pop-popping and the grinding roar of three helicopters carrying the National League Expansion Committee, which could recommend that major league baseball be brought back to the city. Sun broke through the scudding clouds as the choppers fluttered down to where hope had supplanted the sadness of Sept. 30, 1971, the night of the Senators’ last game.

That American League season closer was the last time RFK looked the way it did Monday morning -- like a baseball park with 335-foot foul lines and grass sweeping across the entire outfield. In fact, fresh paint made the place look better, and the feeling created was just what baseball officials claim they’ve come full circle to wanting, a compact, cozy, under-50,000-seat stadium open to the sky. The four expansion committeemen took in the sights and reacted like happy tourists.

They came, they saw and they at least said they liked just about everything that would give this city a National League expansion team in 1993 -- a “next season” that would come 21 years late. They sat in the orange seats behind what would be the first base dugout, they saw flowers and monuments on a bus ride along East Capitol Street and Pennsylvania Avenue to their downtown noontime news conference, they dipped into the subway system for a look at Metro Center and the Red and Blue lines on the roll.

The financial capabilities of Washington’s franchise seekers, headed by John Akridge? “Quite frankly, they look quite strong,” said Douglas Danforth, Pittsburgh Pirates’ chairman and the spokesman for the committee of four. “The club looks to be well capitalized, and we really found no strong negatives.”

Enough fans? “It’s pretty hard to ignore the demographics of the D.C. area,” Danforth said. “You have a strong population density -- between four and five million.”

The stadium? Bill Giles, Philadelphia Phillies’ president, piped up with unexpected enthusiasm: “I think RFK is fine. It’s older than the ones in two of the Florida cities we saw, but I think the sightlines are good, and the size of the stadium I think is great. I think some stadiums, including Philadelphia’s, are too large. The last time I attended a baseball game here I think was the All-Star Game in 1969. I found it to be a fine stadium then, and they’ve done a lot of work on the facility that makes it a better place than I think it was a few years ago.”

The question that nagged was a major one, of Baltimore’s proximity and the fact that the Orioles draw about 25 percent of their attendance from the Washington area. A team here could hurt the one there, but, again, Giles surprised.

The man who once said, “I’m partial to putting teams in areas where there’s not a close proximity” to existing franchises, said, “I’ve kind of changed my mind. ... There are some good arguments that can be made that two teams in the marketplace would do better than one.”

To which Danforth added, the matter will be among those discussed with the other owners before the National League decides which two of the competing six locations will get baseball. The announcement could come at the owners’ meetings June 12-13 in Los Angeles.

Miami and St. Petersburg-Tampa are seen as Washington’s toughest rivals, possibly even the front-runners. When a reporter directed a question to Danforth about Orlando’s chances, expansion committeeman Bill White, National League president, checked his watch; while many believe the clock is ticking on Orlando’s chances, White more than likely was thinking of the charter flight the group had to catch to Buffalo, where the search for promised land continued Monday afternoon only to find Danforth concluding there may not be enough people in Buffalo and environs for the big leagues. The search would end Tuesday in Denver.

“Just Say Yes,” read the sign held by Gerald Pressman of Arlington, Va., as he stood outside the stadium during the committee’s visit. “I’ve been chasing this around for 19 years,” he said. “I’m getting tired. Today’s the day.” Jimmy Bryant of Washington hoped too. He walked all the way from Union Station because “I wanted to come down, I just had to come.” Fittingly, he waited next to the scrubbed monument to onetime Senators’ owner Clark Griffith, of whom it was etched in stone, “The Old Fox.” (Clark is not to be confused with Calvin Griffith, who took the first Senators team to Minnesota to spawn nicknames of another kind).

About everything in sight was scrubbed, and debris was nowhere to be found, mysteriously not even in the bottoms of spotless waste containers. A man raked up the last leaves on the grassy bank above Parking Lot 5, while inside another with a broom swept and reswept the aisle steps that the baseball group would descend toward the field. The esplanade in front of the Stadium and Armory, where the helicopters had landed, looked as if it didn’t have a piece of crab grass in it.

The issue of safety in the stadium area was included among numerous messages touting Washington that flashed on the big scoreboard. One said: “Only one violent crime at Stadium-Armory in 6 years.” The subway stop was billed as “second safest” on the system.

Assorted ballplayers from the Washington Metro Men’s Senior Baseball League dotted the field, as if to show it was playable. They wore shirts and caps of National League teams. One, in an Astros outfit, had a name on his back, Kilroy. So -- along with Danforth, Giles, White and New York Mets president Fred Wilpon -- Kilroy was there.

So were Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon and investors in the Akridge group such as Ronald H. Brown, Democratic National Committee chairman, who said: “I’ve come away very encouraged. ... It certainly appears that the demographics are right, the stadium is right, the ownership group is right. We don’t see any negatives at all. ... I’d say we have a very good chance of being selected.”

The euphoria was enough to prompt a vision of another kind of aircraft above RFK -- not merely helicopter, but blimp.