The Expos are moving! Wait, they’re really moving? This time they’re serious?
That’s right! Yesterday Major League Baseball announced that Washington D.C. and RFK Memorial Stadium will be the new home of the Montreal Expos.
What this means is that the D.C. area will have a professional baseball team for the first time since the end of the 1971 season, 33 long years ago.
The history of baseball in Washington goes like this:
The Washington Senators were one of the original eight teams in the newly formed American League.
They played their games at Griffith Park, the park that Mickey Mantle once hit a ball completely out of.
In their inaugural season, the Senators finished in sixth place in the AL with a record of 61-72. They went on to win three American League pennants (’24, ’25, ’33) and one World Series (’24) in D.C.
They were pretty mediocre in terms of record and team accomplishments for the rest of their tenure in the nation’s capital but had some great individual feats.
There were two no-hitters pitched by both the legendary Walter “Big Train” Johnson back in 1921, and Bobby Burke in 1931.
Four men have hit for the cycle while a member of the Senators (Otis Clymer in ’08, Goose Goslin in ’24, Joe Cronin in ’29, Mickey Vernon in ’46). Other individual accomplishments included five batting champions (Ed Delahanty in ’02, Goose Goslin in ’28, Buddy Myer in ’35, Mickey Vernon in ’46 and ’53) and seven ERA champions (Walter Johnson in ’12, ’13, ’18, ’19, and ’24 as well as Stan Coveleski in ’25 and Garland Braxton in ’28).
Johnson also led the league in strikeouts 12 times in a 15-year span, including eight years in a row from 1912 to 1919.
On the hitting end, both Roy Sievers (’57) and Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew (’59) won the home run title only a few seasons before the team left D.C.
The original Washington Senators played in the capital city from 1901 to 1960.
In 1961 they moved to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and became the Minnesota Twins.
However, during the big expansion boom of the 1960s, a new team, who were also named the Senators, were given to the city of Washington, D.C. The “new” Senators would play at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium.
This team, though one of their managers was Hall of Fame slugger Ted Williams, was quickly dismissed and thought of as forgettable.
The team, which began play in 1961, lost 100 games in each of their first four seasons and were fundamentally inept at most, if not all aspects, of the game until 1972 when they were moved to Arlington, Texas and Turnpike Stadium (which would eventually be renamed “Arlington Stadium”).
The Senators actually did have one winning season in 1969, going 86-76, but did not have success in any other of their other 11 seasons in Washington D.C.
The Expos played their last game in Montreal’s Le Stade Olympique (French for “Olympic Stadium”) last night against former owner Jeffrey Loria and the Florida Marlins.
Last night’s home contest came the day before the 33rd anniversary of the last professional baseball game played in the Greater Washington D.C. area.
As for the city of Montreal, they’ve had their moments. They won one division title back in 1981.
They’ve been the home for some of the greatest players in baseball history such as Andre Dawson, Rusty Staub, and Hall of Famer Gary Carter.
Also, they had by far the best record in baseball in 1994, but the strike did away with that and the fans of Montreal could only fathom what might have been.
That Expos team had the likes of Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom, John Wetteland, Ken Hill, and of course Pedro Martinez, who would go on to win his first Cy Young in 1997.
Well, now it’s D.C.’s turn.
It’s team #3 if you’re keeping count. The first was around for a while and did a descent bit of damage.
The second did absolutely no damage.
The team they will field next year currently has the worst record in the National League coming into the final weekend of the season. Will a new address (hopefully permanent) save this squad? See you at RFK!
