Baseball’s Future Meets Up With Its Historic Past

Our nation’s capital is Comeback City.

First it was Michael Jordan.

Then Joe Gibbs.

Now, gloriously, baseball.

Who’s next, William Howard Taft?

On a happy day in the fall of 2004, exactly 33 years after his beloved Senators last played in his town, here’s Baseball Bill going to the store. He pulls up alongside a car, rolls down a window and shouts to a stranger in the car next to him, “Ain’t it great to have baseball back!” What Baseball Bill remembers: “Opening day of the new stadium, 1962.

“Senators and Tigers. I’m 11 years old. My brother and I go to the ticket seller and ask for standing-room tickets. A man hears us and says, ‘Boys, here are two tickets.’ So we take ‘em and sit in the upper deck, even with third base. Jake Wood gets the first hit, Bob Johnson the first home run.”

What he remembers: a Frank Howard home run over the second baseman’s head. “They played the infield in a shift, so the second baseman was directly behind second. Literally, he jumped for Howard’s line drive, missed it by about three feet, and the thing just took off, rising, like a rocket, and landed in the center field upper deck.”

What he remembers: “I was an usher, just a little nothing, pushing a basket of dirty laundry into the locker room. And here comes Frank Howard. And he says, ‘Hey, hot enough for you?’ It was one of those Washington summer days. Here I am, a kid with dirty laundry, and the great Frank Howard talks to me like I’m on his level. Wow.”

What he remembers: “My three years as an usher were the best three years of my life.” He became a bartender at the Hawk and Dove on Pennsylvania Avenue, only a Frank Howard rocket away from the Capitol. Because Bill Holdforth knew everything about the Washington Senators, he became Baseball Bill. If you asked him a Senators question, you finished six beers before he finished the answer.

They were answers worth the wait, especially during those 33 years when questions dealt with the Senators being taken from the capital of the free world and set up in baseball’s version of the Witness Protection Program. Suddenly, they were Twins? And Rangers? No longer standing proudly on the Lincoln Memorial/Washington Monument/Capitol axis, the mortified Senators lived in outposts touching the Canadian and Mexican borders.

It was Calvin Griffith, the son of fabled Senators owner Clark Griffith, who saw the pale skins of Minnesotans and declared them too beautiful to resist. Contemptible as Griffith’s move was in 1960, Baseball Bill was then 9 years old and not yet a passionate devotee; besides, new Senators immediately replaced those departed. By 1971, though, he fully understood the evil intent of Bob Short, the Senators owner who decided to move the franchise to Texas, a move that would poison minds against Washington as a baseball town.

So Baseball Bill decided to build an effigy of Bob Short.

In his closet, he found some old shirts and pants. He stuffed them with yellowing issues of the Sporting News.

He hung the effigy on a stick with its neck in a noose. And he attached to its chest a sign that declared, with no uncertain eloquence, “SHORT STINKS.” Baseball Bill carried the effigy through the bleachers at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, which was not a good business move, for he was then in his third season as a Senators usher.

“The next day,” he says, “I was told that my services were no longer required.” That was 33 years ago. Now baseball finally has decided the game belongs in Washington -- with the whispered reminders that the deal is not 100 percent done. MLB needs peace with Orioles Owner Peter Angelos, who wants to be indemnified against market loss to a franchise maybe 40 miles from Baltimore. And some Washington city council members don’t like Mayor Anthony Williams’ pledge of public tax money for a $440 million stadium project.

“They’ve got a lot of work to do,” baseball Commissioner Bud Selig says of Washington’s politicos. “But I feel confident. They really believe they can get this done.” Now retired, Baseball Bill plans to be at RFK for the 2005 opener. For 33 years, he has been a fan by television only. He set foot in Baltimore only once, then to carry in his “SHORT STINKS” effigy because Bob Short was there in 1972 with his (alas) Rangers. “I took the effigy down to his box, too,” Baseball Bill says. “But I didn’t pour the beer on him.” Say what?

“People believe I did that, but I didn’t. I’d gone to the men’s room and came out and saw all the commotion. Some woman did it.” Come on.

“Naw, I wouldn’t waste a beer that way. And for sure not on him.” What Baseball Bill remembers about the Senators, about Frank Howard, about the greatest three years of his life, are one man’s memories. And he’s only one of hundreds of millions who believe baseball has enriched their lives.

So what if it costs $440 million to build a ballpark in Washington?

It’s a bargain at twice the price.