The Old Ballgame in a New City

John Folan, who brought his four children to the Senators' last game, shows off the foul ball he caught that night. (Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

Comfort and Fear

Dwight Cropp, 65, a District native and associate professor of public policy at George Washington University, left for Prince George's County about that time. But two years later he moved his family back, to Crestwood, off 16th Street NW. "We missed the city," he said.

Indeed, for plenty of people, the city was still a special place.

"When we were little kids, going to Washington was a big, big, big deal," recalled Anne Folan, who was 10 when she traveled to the last game with her father and three brothers from Fredericksburg. "We would come once a year to the downtown department stores. We were country kids. It was a different era."

But to many suburbanites, the city had a dangerous reputation, fueled by a high rate of violence linked to heroin addiction and by a description of the city by 1968 presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon as "one of the crime capitals of the nation." Get a flat tire, they feared, and you could be in trouble.

But McCall, who worked for the federal government for 35 years and has lived in the same house just north of the stadium for longer than that, said his community of brick rowhouses was quiet and safe.

"The Kingman Park neighborhood was designed and built for the black middle class and upper class," he said. "The house that I am living in now, I am only the second person who has lived in this house. You had lawyers, doctors, you had businesspeople."

On that night when baseball left Washington, the place that wasn't safe was the field at RFK. The crowd at the last game was only about 14,000, and many fans stampeded onto the field before the game ended, causing a Senators forfeit.

Washington already had lost the Senators once. In 1960, owner Calvin Griffith had moved them to Minnesota, in search, he said later, of white fans. But a replacement version had been quickly formed the next year. Now, owner Robert Short was moving the new team to Arlington, Tex., where they would become the Rangers.

Many fans believed that Washington again would get another team quickly.

"We bid goodbye to Mr. Short with hardly a tear," The Post said in an editorial the week before the final game. "As for organized baseball, we say goodbye sadly and, we hope, only temporarily."

Few imagined the wait would be three decades.

Wealthy and Growing

The city to which baseball returns tonight has a population of less than 560,000, which ranks it a pale 25th nationally -- easily surpassed by Phoenix, San Diego and San Jose. But it sits in the middle of a burgeoning region that has a population of nearly 6 million and stretches from Southern Maryland to West Virginia.

Now, according to Census Bureau estimates, only one in 10 people in the region lives in the city. Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince George's counties all are larger.

Metro, which opened in 1976, somewhat countered the Beltway's go-around effect with a new transportation network that converged downtown. Buildings like Union Station and the Old Post Office were returned to magnificence. Fine restaurants proliferated. MCI Center, the new Convention Center and a booming population of well-paid office workers stoked new downtown wealth.