Given History, Rivalry Should Come Naturally

Much has been made of the baseball rivalry that is about to be born, or rather reborn, between Washington and Baltimore. Nationals Manager Frank Robinson has been asked about it constantly in spring training. His answers often seem a bit peculiar. The Orioles legend can’t seem to get the word “rivalry” out of his mouth. Not with a straight face anyway. No matter how he tries, his answers always return to the same theme.

“You can’t really have a rivalry unless the teams are competitive,” says Robinson. “If one team is bad and the other is playing very well, you don’t pay much attention to the team that’s losing.”

Since the Nats and Orioles don’t play in the same league and will not face each other in interleague play this season, it seems like an odd point to emphasize. Especially since the Expos lost 95 games last year -- a total that is entirely too reminiscent of a typical Senators season. Can’t the Nats be competitive with the Orioles -- act as a rival -- based on entertainment value, novelty or promise for the future? Do they have to match the rich Orioles in wins immediately?

“Oh, there’ll be a rivalry, no doubt about it,” Robinson amends. But then he backslides, saying that “the Clippers never approached the level of the Lakers” in the NBA so, “there has never been a rivalry.”

You just can’t get over it, can you, Frank? After 33 seasons, you keep sticking the dagger in one more time. You’ve got to keep dragging back our bitter Orioles memories, reopening the Senators wounds, don’t you? You smug, supercilious Oriole.

OK, just kidding. Robinson hasn’t played as a member of the Orioles since 1971 or managed the team since 1991. He’s changed his orange-and-black colors -- well, to some degree -- and gotten with the Nationals’ red-white-and-blue program.

“In the future, the Orioles could take the place of the Blue Jays as the regional team we play at least six games every year” in interleague play, Robinson said this month. “The Yankees and the Mets compete for the [tabloid] back page in New York. It could be a battle for the sports pages here too.”

Still, the Nats manager can’t completely help himself. The old days are deep in him. One night this summer when the Nationals don’t play, Robinson says, “I’ll go over and watch an Orioles game and have dinner.”

In Baltimore? The Nationals manager? Careful, Frank. Some of us haven’t completely forgiven and forgotten.

What the Nats and Orioles will resume this season is not really a rivalry, so much as it is a history of oppression and subjugation bordering on a baseball mugging.

What the Orioles did to the old Senators from ’54 to ‘71, when both were in the American League and played as many as 22 times a season, was cruel and unusual punishment. And few Orioles did more damage than Robinson. So, any revenge that Washington extracts now, at the gate or in the standings, is decades overdue.

Any rivalry worth the name, whether it is the Red Sox and Yankees, the Giants and Dodgers or the Redskins and Cowboys, must be rooted in a genuine dislike, a grudge, a grievance or a culture clash. On all of that, the Nationals and the Orioles have a first-class head start. That’s why Robinson -- caught in the middle -- always chooses his words gingerly. He knows the history, both far in the past and as fresh as this spring’s TV-rights extortion attempts by Orioles owner Peter Angelos.

For the Orioles’ part, all of their animosity toward the Nationals is rooted in the present. The ex-Expos franchise is taking back a hugely profitable territory that Baltimore ownership thought it had surreptitiously annexed through 34 years of attrition. However, Washington has plenty of reasons to be hot under the collar, too, and not just because of the fierce self-interestedness of Angelos as he has tried to block any franchise from relocating to Washington in recent years.

If Washington wants to enjoy the pleasures of a cultivated hostility, all the city has to do is revisit its painful Orioles past. And what a rotten past it was. When the Orioles first moved to Baltimore from St. Louis in ‘54, they were so atrocious that they lost 100 games and finished a dozen games behind the Senators. For Washington fans like me, that was the first and only time the Senators ever finished ahead of the Orioles in the modern history of the franchises. (No, the 1902 season doesn’t count.) Between ’54 and ‘71, the Senators periodically escaped from last place. Sometimes, they briefly nosed ahead of famous franchises, including the Red Sox and (one season) even the Yankees. But never Baltimore. After that brief Washington superiority in ‘54, the Orioles finished 366 games ahead of the Senators over their remaining 17 years together in the AL. That era of abject humiliation began when I was 7, continued until I was 23 and, no doubt, explains many ugly character flaws.

Such dominance, combined with such proximity, can have lethal effects.

To a degree, those elite Orioles may have killed interest in the sad-sack expansion Senators who endured on shoestring budgets, inept ownership (Bob Short) and highlights like Pantyhose Night. Ironically, the Orioles’ great era began in 1961 with 95 wins, exactly the same season the expansion Senators (100 losses) replaced the original Senators, who’d absconded to Minnesota just as they were about to blossom into a contender.

In the 11 seasons that the expansion Senators played here, they finished within 23 games of the Orioles only twice. In Washington’s best expansion year, with 86 wins under Manager Ted Williams in ‘69, the Orioles won 109 games. Talk about overshadowed. In fact, in the last three years that Washington had a team -- and Short was deciding whether to flee to Texas -- the Orioles won the pennant every season and finished a staggering total of 99 1/2 games ahead of Washington.

To what degree did Short want to get to Texas? And how much did he just want to get away from the Orioles?

Unless you lived through those last 11 years when the imperial Orioles feasted on the pathetic Senators (who lost between 92 to 106 games eight times), you can’t really appreciate the scarring effect it had on Washington baseball. As the original Senators, reborn as the Twins, were capturing the ’65 pennant and winning more than 90 games six times, their expansion replacements made a mockery of Washington’s long baseball tradition. To be a Senators fan then was to despise and resent the Orioles. Far worse, to be a Washington fan was to know that the Orioles considered your team to be a swarm of 25 insignificant gnats.

Although I didn’t keep all the programs, I am fairly sure that the score of every Senators-Orioles game ever played in RFK Stadium was Baltimore 3, Washington 0 at the end of the first inning. Usually because of a three-run homer by someone named Robinson. I recall this vividly because unreserved lower-deck seats cost $2.75 and my ticket was, for all practical purposes, worthless by the time Washington came to bat in the bottom of the first inning.

Eventually, I refused to go to any game involving the Orioles. They epitomized everything we all wanted the Senators to be, but knew they had not approached since their last pennant in 1933. Why attend a weekend series if you knew the pitching matchups would always be Jim Palmer, Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar against Dick Bosman, Joe Coleman and Jim Hannan?

Now, we get to start again. Some say that the proper path for the Nationals and Orioles to follow is one of mutual respect and, when it is deserved, even admiration.

With a team in both leagues, why not root for both? That may, in fact, be how this relationship evolves. After all, many San Franciscans enjoy following the Oakland Athletics across the bay. The ’89 World Series, before the earthquake, had almost no rivalry feeling whatsoever. The towns just giggled that they were both in the Series.

However, San Francisco didn’t have the kind of history with the A’s that Washington has with the Orioles. Baltimore beat up Senators teams for 17 straight seasons until, one day, Washington had no team at all while Baltimore had back-to-back-to-back pennant winners. ‘Frisco never had to swallow anything like that.

Then, after Washington had been without baseball for 33 seasons, the Orioles owner still used every ploy and threat to prevent the Expos from moving to Washington.

And, finally, after being voted down 29-1 by his fellow owners, Angelos continued to do everything in his power to extract territorial “indemnification” -- all at the expense of the Nationals.

Most great baseball rivalries take decades, if not generations to build. The Cardinals and Cubs have been glaring at each other across the Midwest since the 19th century. You need a vast accumulation of lore and anecdote between two teams, and perhaps a few brawls, too, before you can call it a rivalry.

Still, the Nationals and Orioles have a huge head start on a genuine territorial tiff. Already, the thought may be forming, like cattlemen and sheepherders eyeing the same open range: Is this 33-mile parkway between RFK Stadium and Camden Yards big enough for the both of us?