September 30, 1971, 50 years ago: The last Washington Senators game is played, against the Yankees at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium.
Team owner Bob Short, having already moved the NBA's Minneapolis Lakers to Los Angeles in 1960, has announced he's moving the Senators to the Dallas area, to become the Texas Rangers. He complains about the low attendance, despite having the highest ticket prices in the American League, and no subway access to RFK Stadium. (Washington's Metro would not open until 1976.)
A rare vertical sports fan banner, reading "SHORT STINKS."
It was still considered bad form to say that someone "sucks."
But he can't, through no fault of his own. Angry fans from the "crowd" of 14,461 people storm the field. The umpires cannot restore order, and they forfeit the game to the Yankees.
There are 18 players from this game still alive. From the Yankees: Torres, Roy White, John Ellis, Ron Hansen, Frank Baker, Mike Kekich, Jack Aker and Felipe Alou. From the Senators: Howard, Bosman, Elliott Maddox, Toby Harrah, Jack Billings, Jeff Burroughs, Del Unser, Tom Ragland, Horacio Piña and Tom McCraw.
The next April, Bosman also starts the team's 1st game as the Rangers. Major League Baseball will not return to the Nation's Capital, except for the occasional preseason exhibition game, until the 2005 season.
While RFK Stadium would host exhibition games, there would not be another Major League Baseball game played in Washington, D.C. until April 14, 2005. Formerly the Montreal Expos, the Washington Nationals beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-3. In addition to George W. Bush upholding the tradition of the President of the United States throwing out a ceremonial first ball, Frank Howard was also invited to do so.
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Moving the Senators was a bad thing to do, right? And if it was, then Short is the one mainly to blame for it, right?
Top 5 Reasons You Can’t Blame Bob Short
for Moving the Washington Senators to Texas
5. His Move of the Lakers. In 1960, Short owned the Minneapolis Lakers, and moved them to Los Angeles. Nobody tried to stop him then. And, given the other MLB moves of the last few years, he thought no one would stop him this time, either. And he was right.
4. Dallas. If you were going to move an MLB team, the Dallas-Forth Worth "Metroplex" was a good choice. Charlie Finley already thought so in 1962, when he wanted to move the Kansas City Athletics there. The city didn't have a proper ballpark at the time, and he wasn't willing to play in the Cotton Bowl with Polo Grounds-like or L.A. Coliseum-like dimensions until a new ballpark was ready.
According to the 1970 Census, Dallas had 844,401 people, a 24 percent jump over 1960. This has since grown to 1.3 million, with a metropolitan area of a whopping 7.6 million, trailing only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston.
Dallas, circa 1980, around the time J.R. Ewing got shot
And, as seen in the TV show Dallas, the city was rich, and getting richer. It wasn't just the oil industry. It was banking. It was insurance. It was transportation: Both Greyhound buses and American Airlines were headquartered in Dallas. Their airport covers more land than the island of Manhattan, and is a major hub.
The Cowboys were already showing that Dallas worked for the NFL. It would take some time for basketball and hockey to work there. But if the NFL would work there, so could MLB. As it turned out, it took a while for the Metroplex to take to the Rangers. The loyalty was deep among those who had it, but not especially wide.
3. The Baltimore Orioles. When the St. Louis Browns arrived as the Orioles in 1954, they were a minor threat to the Senators. They took Baltimore and its suburbs away from the Senators' "market." But when they got good in the early 1960s, they began to siphon off those areas of Maryland closer to Washington. The 1971 season was the 3rd straight, and the 4th in the last 6, in which the Orioles won the Pennant. For many Maryland fans, it wasn't much more difficult to go a little further to see a winning team than to stay close to see a losing team.
It eventually worked the other way around: In the 1990s, Orioles owner Peter Angelos consistently opposed D.C. getting a new team, saying that it would cost the Orioles a quarter of their fan base. Was he right? Maybe.
This map certainly suggests so.
On the other hand, the Orioles were due to lose fans anyway, since a lot of them weren't really Oriole fans, just Cal Ripken fans. And the team began losing. Their Playoff berths in 2012 and 2014, years in which the Nationals also made it, helped.
It's been Angelos' mismanagement more than the arrival of the Nationals that has cost the O's fans. The 1960s O's hurt the Senators much more than the 2010s Nats have hurt the O's.
2. The District of Columbia. Unlike Dallas, Washington, at the time, was a one-industry town. The federal government. Many of the people living there had come from other places, and kept their old loyalties. So even when they did go to Griffith Stadium, and later to RFK Stadium, they were rooting for their original home teams.
The only ones who were converted to Senators fans were the ones whose closest MLB team was a long way away -- and if they were fans of one of the storied minor-league teams (say, the Birmingham Barons or the San Antonio Missions), they still kept their old loyalties.
And the people who did live there? They weren't exactly well-enough-off to buy season tickets. Both Griffith Stadium (which was replaced by the hospital of Howard University) and RFK Stadium were in poor black neighborhoods. It was the same problem that the Dodgers face with the neighborhoods around Ebbets Field: The locals couldn't afford to get in on a regular basis.
In addition, access was bad. It wasn't until 1976 that a subway system, the Metro, opened, providing easy access to RFK Stadium. So unless you had a car, getting there wasn't easy.
All of which managed to, however inadvertently, turn away lots of...
1. Washington Fans. It was another case of loyalty being deep where it was, but not very wide. The few who showed up for that last game cared a lot. But most fans didn't.
In the 60 years of the "Old Senators," 1901 to 1960, after which they became the Minnesota Twins, only once did they draw more than 1 million fans. It was 1946, the 1st full year after the end of World War II, when the soldiers came back. It was also a year after the Senators had their last real Pennant race, falling just short of the Detroit Tigers for the 1945 American League Pennant. They drew 1,027,216.
But they went 76-78 in 1946, and fell to 64-90 in 1947, dropping to 850,758 fans. They never even topped that many again until their 1st season in Minnesota.
And when the "New Senators" arrived in 1961, they didn't have good attendance, either, even with the novelty of a new stadium starting in 1962. Their only winning season was in 1969, 86-76. As a result, 1970 was their peak attendance year, 824,789, the 3rd-highest in Washington baseball history to that point. But the team fell 70-92, and 63-96 in 1971, collapsing in attendance to 655,156.
Even afterward, President Richard Nixon, a big baseball fan but a bigger football fan, who had worked in the city since beginning his 1st term in Congress in 1947, understood that the Senators would never be the biggest team in town: "All anybody cares about in Washington is the Redskins. Nobody gives a damn about the Kennedy Center or the National Gallery of Art."
As Horace Stoneham put it in 1957, when asked what the move of the New York Giants to San Francisco would do to kids in New York, "I feel bad about the kids, but I haven't seen too many of their fathers lately." In 1971, Bob Short could have said the same thing.
VERDICT: Not Guilty. The success of the Nationals at the box office since their arrival in 2005, and their success on the field since their 1st trip to the postseason in 2012, doesn't change things. Short may have played his hand badly, but he played the hand he was dealt. Washington, D.C. was not a city capable of supporting Major League Baseball in 1971.
As for who is to blame for D.C. taking until 2005 to get a replacement team, that's a separate debate.
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