An Honor Bestowed Upon a Legendary Writer

If there was a perfect day in the storied career of the late Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich, it likely would have been Oct. 8, 1956. Of the day, Povich would later write: "I shifted my stare to the empty white sheet of paper in my typewriter until snow-blindness threatened to set in. Then my fingers began moving across the keyboard of my portable and I was writing scared as the words began to come out."

And what came out were these words:

"The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.

"On the mound at Yankee Stadium, the same guy who was knocked out in two innings by the Dodgers on Friday came up today with one for the record books, posting it there in solo grandeur as the only Perfect Game in World Series history."

And on Sept. 22, 1971, one of the worst days in the 76-year career at The Washington Post of Shirley Povich, he wrote:

"They won't hear it in Washington next spring when the cry throughout the rest of the land is the joy sound of 'Play Ball,' the command that remobilizes a million dreams of pennant, however fanciful. After 71 years, the vacuum and the stillness, the Washington Senators are no more."

Povich, who will be honored today at Nationals Park when the team dedicates its media center to him, was 65 years old when he wrote the Senators' epitaph. The American League owners had just voted to permit the Senators to move to Arlington, Tex., leaving Washington -- one of the original eight AL clubs dating from 1901 -- without a major league team.

For the next 27 years, Povich doggedly lobbied and wrote columns in hopes of helping to return baseball to the city he moved to in 1922 and lived in until his death in 1998. If any ballclub had attendance or financial problems, Povich was quick to nudge this editor to have a reporter make a call to see if Washington was a viable alternative. The call usually resulted in the city in question getting a new stadium, or a financial break from its own threatened government. If expansion loomed, Povich confidently predicted D.C. would be first in line.

"How can the national pastime ignore the national capital?" he asked repeatedly, an edge in his clipped New England cadence.

But they did. The owners had bad memories of Washington. And many poobahs believed Washington already had a team: the Baltimore Orioles. To which Povich scoffed: "We're not an occupied city. We're not Chattanooga; a [barnstorming] stop on the way home from spring training.

"You're not a big league city without a big league baseball team."

Shirley Povich died 10 years ago without seeing MLB move the Expos from Montreal to Washington for the 2005 season; without seeing the opening of the impressive, 41,888-seat Nationals Park this spring; without exchanging baseball stories with Frank Robinson; meeting Manny Acta; writing about Alfonso Soriano, Dmitri Young and the potential of Ryan Zimmerman; or lecturing Chad Cordero and Jon Rauch about how the first "relief pitcher" ever in the majors was his friend, a Senator from 1923 to 1932 named Firpo Marberry.