In the 1930\u2019s two adolescent boys worked the score board at old Griffith Stadium: Bowie Kuhn and Ted Lerner.\u00a0 Both grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs and both came up watching the slow demise of the old Washington Nationals as they went from perennial contender to the goats of baseball for thirty years.\u00a0 Kuhn became a successful lawyer and the Commissioner of Baseball.\u00a0 As such, he presided over the vote by the American League ownership in September of 1971 that sent the expansion Washington Senators to Arlington, Texas.\u00a0 In the run-up to that vote, Bob Short created a conventional wisdom that Washington, DC was not a baseball town.\u00a0 The idea stuck for more than three decades.<\/p>\n
The person at the other end of that old Griffith Stadium score board was Ted Lerner and he had the temerity to tackle the conventional wisdom and wrestle it to the ground.\u00a0 He convinced Bud Selig to give Washington another chance and the 2016 Washington Nationals are living proof that Bowie Kuhn and Bob Short were wrong.\u00a0 There are two Districts of Columbia, two perceptions of the same city, the one with which Bowie Kuhn lost faith and the one that Ted Lerner redeemed.<\/p>\n
Next Saturday Ted Lerner will be 91 years old.\u00a0 He has born on October 15th<\/sup>, 1925, the very date that the Washington Nationals lost the Seventh Game of the 1925 World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates.\u00a0 He was eight when they lost again in 1933 to the New York Giants in five games.\u00a0 Despite the many years of frustration, he has watched over the signing of Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg and Anthony Rendon, all cornerstones of a successful Washington Nationals franchise that has now won three National League East Division titles in five years.\u00a0 Washington has returned to the winner\u2019s circle under the watch of the Lerner family.<\/p>\n In Lerner\u2019s lifetime no Washington baseball franchise has been able to push the ball over the goal line.\u00a0 They have gotten into the red zone numerous times, but never won it all.\u00a0 He deserves better.\u00a0 No doubt there is still great hope that next Saturday, the Lerner family will be celebrating more than just a birthday and will be toasting the possibility of a return to the World Series. \u00a0That hope is still alive, but the skies have been dark almost none stop since the team clinched the NL East several weeks ago.<\/p>\n There has been almost endless rain and the team has not played well beneath the gray skies.\u00a0 It is like that day almost 91 years ago when Kennesaw Mountain Landis leaned over to Clark Griffith at old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. \u00a0It was the Seventh Game of the World Series and the Nationals were up by a score of 6-4. \u00a0The rain had been falling all day. \u00a0Puddles stood everywhere and the field was an unplayable mess.\u00a0 Landis wanted to call the game in the seventh inning with the Nationals ahead.\u00a0 Griffith could have nodded and history would have been so very different, but instead the Old Fox told Landis he did not want to win that way.\u00a0 Play it out, he said.<\/p>\n And that is what we will do today.\u00a0 We will play it out.\u00a0 The Dodgers lead and the Nationals are without their best clutch hitter in Wilson Ramos.\u00a0 His career hangs by a precarious thread after his second ACL tear and it was inspirational to all National\u2019s fans to see him throw out the first pitch for Friday\u2019s first game.\u00a0 But it would have so much better to see him stroke a single to right field with runners on base in the late innings, because none of his team mates could manage to do it without him.\u00a0 In the bottom of the third inning with two men on base and two outs, Ramos might have plated both runners to tie the score.<\/p>\n There is no Ramos, just the same lineup that failed for ten innings in 2014 to push across a single run to beat the San Francisco Giants in the Second Game of the 2014 playoffs.\u00a0 The frustration is palpable.\u00a0 It is almost a taste in the mouth.<\/p>\n I share a birthday with Ted Lerner but next Saturday I will not be 91 and I have not known the many decades of vexing baseball history. \u00a0I can attest to the difficulty of it all, however, and reflecting on my own lack of patience, it is difficult to imagine how very annoying it must be to Lerner to watch his Nationals squander the many chances they have had to succeed over the past five years. \u00a0Ultimately we–the players and fans–must answer the question for Lerner. \u00a0Which city is it going to be? \u00a0The bottom line is impossible to see, but there has been one answer already. \u00a0These are most certainly the best of times and it is great fun to live in them. \u00a0Happy Birthday Ted and “Go Nats!!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the 1930\u2019s two adolescent boys worked the score board at old Griffith Stadium: Bowie Kuhn and Ted Lerner.\u00a0 Both grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs and both came up watching the slow demise of the old Washington Nationals as they went from perennial contender to the goats of baseball for thirty years.\u00a0 Kuhn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4235],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-top-stories"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}