Many people have a word for this aspect of baseball, and that word is "boring." But the Nats don't need everybody. They should be able to build a contender on something close to 3 million tickets a year.
Last year, the 30 teams that make up major league baseball averaged approximately 30,000 fannies in the seats at each of 81 home games, a record. Tavares is confident Washington will at least match that average and possibly exceed it, and just in case, he is pricing tickets at RFK on the low side.
(Tom Kurry)
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"If you look at the statistics from last season, more people went to major league baseball games than at any time in the history of the game," Tavares says. "More people watched baseball on television than ever before. We've had our trouble -- it took us years to claw our way back from the damage done by the 1994 work stoppage. But I think we can now say that baseball has come through this rather nicely."
As for the Nats: "I promise we're going to be competitive. And then we'll get better next year and better the next, so that by the time we get to our new stadium, we will be a team of championship caliber."
A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, A PROFESSOR OF RENAISSANCE POETRY who became commissioner of Major League Baseball, once wrote of his beloved game: "It is designed to break your heart."
And he wasn't even a Senators fan.
He continued: "The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."
As we prepare for the return of Washington baseball, maybe we can all learn from the Renaissance poets. Go ahead and raise those hopes -- let them soar! It's so exquisitely romantic when they're dashed.
Or, more prosaically, we might say: Let your hopes creep up, but be sure you hope for the right things. Baseball ain't art. It's not a religion or a philosophy. It solves no problems and cures no diseases. Baseball takes money from people who have less -- average fans -- and gives it to people who have more -- players and owners. If the team can persuade taxpayers to foot the cost of building a stadium, then the rich get even richer at public expense. (Now there's a sport in which Washington has always led the league.)
The reasonable hope, from a well-run sports franchise, is some entertainment and a happy feeling around town. Enough wins to soothe the city's perpetual inferiority complex. Now and then, a shot at a championship. That should not be too much to ask; the Redskins have entertained and unified the Washington area for generations.
Once upon a time, we had a baseball team like that: well-run, entertaining, pride-inducing. The team was the Homestead Grays, one of the best clubs in the history of segregated, black baseball. Founded in a steel-mill suburb of Pittsburgh, the Grays were owned and managed with flair and efficiency by an impresario named Cumberland Posey Jr. Posey realized that Washington had a large and prosperous black population, and he began scheduling more and more of his team's games at Griffith Stadium. By the 1930s and '40s, the Grays were more Washington than Homestead.
Most of the best players ever to sit in the home dugout at Griffith were members of the Grays. There was Oscar Charleston, widely regarded as the finest of the Negro League players. On offense, Charleston hit for power and average and commanded the base paths. On defense, the baseball Hall of Fame credits him with "revolutionizing defensive play in center field." Legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw, who saw the likes of Speaker and Cobb and Hornsby and Ruth, rated Charleston the best he ever saw.
And catcher Josh Gibson, a home run hitter equal to any in history. Walter Johnson of the Senators saw Gibson play in Washington and summed him up succinctly: "He hits the ball a mile. Throws like a rifle."
And Buck Leonard at first base. Judy Johnson at third. Cool Papa Bell, the speed-demon who took up Charleston's post in center. All Hall of Famers.
From 1937 to 1945, the Grays won nine consecutive pennants and three Negro World Series. Then baseball integrated, and by 1950, the Grays were just a memory.
There's nothing left of weird old Griffith Stadium. But back in the day, you could get there by promenading down U Street past the theaters and nightclubs where Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway -- everyone, really -- played to packed houses. At the end of the U Street rialto loomed the double-decked ballpark. Inside, you could marvel at the almost limitless expanse of left field, wonder at the strange notch in center, where the fence jogged inward to avoid an old building, and enjoy the familiar sight of the National Bohemia beer bottle towering over right.
Howard University Hospital now occupies the site. Nearby one recent winter morning, Granson Williams, a Howard groundskeeper, finishes a bit of late-winter planting, then pauses by his truck to point to the very spot where the stadium stood.
"I was a little kid, 9 or 10 years old, when they tore it down," Williams says. Growing up in the neighborhood, the old park was a landmark, but the Senators held no appeal. Williams never went inside.
But this is a springlike morning, and Williams finds himself in a hopeful mood. He's going to give the Nationals a try. He will see what comes of the club's promises to reach out to the entire community and whether black Washingtonians -- the working class as well as the rich -- reap benefits.
"It all depends on how it's structured," Williams says. "I took my daughter to the MCI Center for a Wizards game. We spent $250, what with tickets and parking and a meal at the nearby eateries. And it was worth every penny to do that with my kid. You can't put a price on that."
I guess I'll give the Nats a try as well. Because no matter how many times baseball is ruined, it can still be a swell thing to watch. It looks, feels and smells like summertime, languorous and indolent. Baseball unfolds. It has that unhurried, all-the-time-in-the-world feeling that is an essence of childhood.
Perhaps this is why, as Tony Tavares notes, so many people cite memories of Dad and Mom, Grandpa and Grandma, when they talk about their baseball dreams. Players aren't the only ones for whom baseball means never growing up. Fans enter a ballpark with the lightened spirit, the unburdened relief, of a kid freshly sprung from school.
Football is gladiatorial. Basketball is urgent. Baseball appeals to the story lovers and storytellers in us. It's a series of set-piece dramas: protagonists versus antagonists, pitchers versus hitters, catchers versus base runners, fielders versus real estate. The fastball thrown in the fifth inning can set up the slider that strikes out the last batter in the ninth. The tiny drama of each pitch distills the slightly larger drama of an inning, and the inning condenses the yet larger drama of an entire game. Games add up to streaks and slumps and pennant races, and all these, woven together, make the story of a season.
Like any good serial novel or soap opera, you can turn away for a week or a month or half a lifetime and easily pick up the thread when you return.
Best of all, every now and then a season culminates in something like last October. The slow unfurling of the summer and early fall snapped taut. Night after night through the playoffs and World Series, cliffhangers alternated with pyrotechnics. Baseball is Bonds and Canseco and Selig, but it's also Boston blazing through that marvelous post-season, wounded heroes coming through in the clutch and feckless princelings redeemed when it counted. When power was subverted, a curse was broken and -- that favorite tale of nearly every child -- the underdog finally won.
So . . . let's hope. Here's to the Nationals, and to a new and better Washington baseball story.
David Von Drehle is a staff writer for the Magazine. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
