"[Detroit Manager] Billy Martin says, 'Frank, grab a bat.' . . . I'm up with runners at first and second and nobody out. I hit what I thought was a BB inside the bag at third. And I'm thinking, Jesus Christ, a double and a couple RBIs."
As Howard broke out of the batter's box, he took a peek figuring the ball was rattling around the left-field corner. "Here's that great third baseman, Brooks Robinson, and he backhands me on the line and goes bing, bing and bing. Three outs. Triple play. That's when I knew it was over."
At 68, former Senators slugger Frank Howard still looks like he could power one into the upper deck at RFK Stadium, where he plans to attend the Nationals' opening day.
(Tracy A. Woodward -- The Washington Post)
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Spring in His Step
Donna Howard says she has watched her husband of 14 years get psyched about spring training season after season -- including this one. "About a week before, you see that antsiness," she says. "And he gets excited again."
Howard has been a coach and instructor for five major league organizations -- the Brewers, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, Tampa Bay Devil Rays and New York Yankees. He managed two last-place teams: the San Diego Padres in '81 and the Mets in '83.
The past five years he has worked as a player development instructor for the Yankees. This spring, he worked with the major leaguers for two weeks and now is with the minor-league players. In the regular season, he will roam from one Yankees minor-league club to the next. Yankees boss George Steinbrenner recently extended his contract another two years.
"Isn't that amazing, a guy my age?" Howard says.
Howard is proud of the fact that he hasn't stopped working year-round in 50 years. Though he was near the top of the pay scale in the bigs, earning $150,000 annually over five of his years in Washington, he has always supplemented his income: selling paper for a paper mill, developing real estate, owning bars in Wisconsin. For 20 years, he has been a consultant to Future Brands, a liquor distributor.
People ask him if he's jealous of today's ballplayers and their multimillion-dollar salaries, Howard says. "It just wasn't there for us," he says. "But today's guys, I think they are operating under so much more pressure than we ever did. There's so much more pressure to justify these big contracts. You know, you could butcher a fly ball 40 years ago, it's in the paper the next day and two days later it's forgotten. But now your media coverage with ESPN, CNN, Fox, whoever else, it's run and rerun and rerun. I could see where that might wear on a player's nerves a little bit."
Talk of performance pressure ends abruptly at the mention of baseball's steroid scandal. "I don't know anything about it," he says, then adds: In the late '50s and '60s, drinking was the problem in baseball, "but that got cleaned up. In the mid-'70s and '80s, it was dope and it got cleaned up. Now this, but they'll get it cleaned up."
Root, Root, Root for . . .
Frank Howard never saw the Senators' move to Texas coming until the last series that season, when word spread that the franchise was a goner.
"I was stunned," Howard says. "Hell, I had my best years here. I loved Washington, loved the fans. I always said, 'The greatest fans in the world -- we just didn't have enough of 'em.' "
When Major League Baseball decided last fall to return to the nation's capital, one longtime Senators fan, Shaun Payne, proposed that the new team erect statues at its new stadium of Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson and Frank Howard.
Nah, Howard says. "I really think this new ballclub coming in should form its own identity."
But he was excited early this month when the Nationals asked him to participate in the April 14 opening-day ceremonies.
Ask about coming home to Washington if the Nationals were to offer him a job and Howard stops any speculation cold. "Mr. Steinbrenner's been great to me," he says. "I'm under contract."
But isn't it always nice to come home?
"Damn right," Hondo says.
