We Were Eyeball To Eyeball With Victory

Something fine in American sport was preserved when Calvin Griffith moved his Washington Senators to the wheat belt and renamed them the Minnesota Twins. Few people outside Washington understand this.

In towns like New York and San Francisco the Washingtonian is greeted with misplaced sympathy. "It's too bad," these well-meaning people say, trying to be nice, "too bad that the year the Senators finally won the pennant they were disguised as the Minnesota Twins."

The Washingtonian, being a gentleman about his baseball, will not disillusion the New Yorker or San Franciscan. He knows that towns like New York and San Francisco tend to breed baseball "fans," a coarse genus that aspires to the shabby distinction of winning pennants.

Winning has no place in the Washingtonian's thinking about baseball. The idea that people might go to the ball park in the expectation of seeing their team win strikes him as childish, for the Washingtonian is not a "fan" but a connoisseur of baseball. What the tea ceremony is to the Japanese and cricket at Lord's is to the Englishman, what Wagner at Bayreuth is to the opera lover and Swan Lake at the Bolshoi is to the Muscovite, baseball at D.C. Stadium is to the Washingtonian.

For him, living with a bunch of bums has been elevated to high art. When he goes to the ball park, it is not for the sweaty satisfaction of seeing a contest. He knows that the Senators will lose, just as the Wagner devotee knows that Tristan and Isolde will die in the last act. What interests both are style and quality of performance.

How will the Senators do it? Will they blow a five-run lead in the ninth while outfielders collide head to head? Or will the pitcher simply yield hit after hit? Should the Senators win, as they occasionally do, he comforts himself with the assurance that art will be redressed by a six-game losing streak. Deep in his subconscious lies the proud awareness that he is the flower of a unique American heritage. The Senators' 30-year record of total ineptitude is unequaled in the annals of modern sport, and the Washington baseball connoisseur is its finest by-product.

Any team, after all, can win a pennant. Even the St. Louis Browns did it in 1944. But to outwit the law of averages for 32 years, to finish with unparalleled consistency in the cellar, to lose 100 games year after year without letdown—that is distinction.

All this explains why Washingtonians began to worry a few years back when ugly portents of professionalism began to break out on the team. Calvin Griffith had hired a number of men who betrayed unmistakable signs of competence. Among them were Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison, Camilo Pascual, Zoilo Versalles, Jim Kaat, Don Mincher and Earl Battey.

Killebrew played third base in those days and you went to the park—then the old Griffith Stadium—to see Harmon field hot grounders with his chin. This, of course, was in the best Senator tradition, but the trouble was that Killebrew could also hit the ball all the way to Baltimore. On top of that, Allison was holding on to fly balls, Pascual and Kaat were both throwing strikes and Battey was catching them. When this team finished fifth one year—it was still an eight-team league and fifth place was the second division—several of the most influential men in town asked for a conference with Griffith.

"Not that we're concerned or anything, Cal," they said, "but we'd like to know when you're going to start trading off Killebrew, Pascual, Battey and Versalles for some real bush leaguers, the way you always do."