Bob Wolff has the date circled on his calendar: April 14, the first home game for the Washington Nationals at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. He'd love to participate in the festivities, but he also wonders whether anyone still remembers that he was the original television voice of the Senators back in 1947, doing radio and TV broadcasts for the team until the franchise moved to Minnesota in 1960.
Wolff, 85, who still works as a broadcaster for News 12 on Long Island and on the Madison Square Garden cable network, loves opening day, which comes for the Nats Monday at Philadelphia.
"If we won the opener, which didn't happen very often, I could scream, 'The Senators are in first place! The Senators are in first place!'" Wolff said. "Of course, then it always plummeted downward pretty quickly."
Wolff remembers those days at the old Griffith Stadium and all around the American League with fondness. When he started announcing games on the old DuMont Network on WTTG-TV (Channel 5), his wife, Jane, had to go downtown to an appliance store to watch her husband's work. Like many Americans, they didn't own a television set.
The Senators were a hapless, often hopeless, team. In nine of Wolff's 14 years as their broadcaster, the team finished last or next to last. Their only winning season was in 1952.
When he wasn't calling baseball, Wolff covered the Washington Capitols basketball team and the Washington Lions hockey club, usually averaging 250 play-by-play games a year.
"My days in Washington really helped me as a broadcaster later on because I knew that half the people, if not more, were from out of town," he said. "So I could do the games right down the middle without being too much of a homer."
Wolff also supplemented his baseball work with national radio and television gigs. He called the broadcast of New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen's perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series. He also was the radio voice for arguably the greatest game in National Football League history -- the 1958 championship won by the Baltimore Colts over the New York Giants, a contest some say paved the way for the league's current popularity.
Wolff "speaks in sentences and full paragraphs," said Curt Smith, author of "Voices of the Game," in a 1995 interview in The Post. "His voice is erudite but not unapproachable. He has a sense of humor -- with the old Senators, he had to -- and he was always honest. There was no phony baloney with Bob Wolff."
And Wolff honestly believes the Nationals will be a big-time hit here.
"They're bringing in a Montreal team that really was pretty good," he said. "I read where they already have 20,000 season tickets sold. If the old Senators had 3,000, 4,000, even 5,000 season tickets, they considered it a major success."
Wolff provided all manner of entertainment for Senators fans. He did the game broadcasts solo -- without a color analyst -- and he handled the pre- and post-game shows. Dead air during rain delays was filled with interviews and his own anecdotal memory. In the late 1940s, he formed "The Singing Senators," a choral group of ballplayers who actually auditioned to make that musical crew. It began when Wolff started bringing along his ukulele on road trips.
"We'd be on the train singing, and I'd do some harmony groups," Wolff said. "Over time, because guys got traded or retired, I had three different groups, and the last one actually went on 'The Today Show.' "
Wolff kept all of his pregame TV footage, including more than 100 interviews with Senators and other players. He donated the film to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where he's enshrined in the broadcasters wing, but several years ago borrowed it back and created a show he called "Bob Wolff's Baseball Scrapbook."
"They weren't interviews so much as they were just conversations," Wolff said. "I've got a classic one with [legendary former Yankees manager] Casey Stengel. It was just a different time. I was part of the team. Heck, I used to pitch batting practice.
"I knew someday they'd have an afterlife, and if someone down there [in Washington] wanted to use it, that would be great."
Now, as the city prepares to write a new chapter in its baseball history, Wolff says he'd love to be involved in the Nats' home opener next week.
"I've gotten some embarrassing calls from people asking me if I was going to throw out the first ball," he said. "I'd love to be there, but no one has called. Chances are, the guy who makes those kind of decisions probably never even heard of me."
