Bring Baseball Back to DC

Washington is beginning to buzz with baseball hopes. There have been regular stories in The Washington Post all but proclaiming that DC will get either the Minnesota Twins or the Montreal Expos as soon as 2003. Even baseball commissioner Bud Selig said Washington is the "prime candidate" for a new team.

It's about time. My grandfather, Joe Judge, was once a star player for the Washington Senators. I would welcome a new team. But only under one condition, which I am sure will not be met: they have to play real baseball. To do this, they must build a real stadium.

By real baseball, I mean the kind that was played by my grandfather during his years, 1915 to 1932. The kind with bunts, base stealing, excitement and?most important of all?few home runs. The home run in baseball has become like the sex joke in a sitcom?so brazenly, relentlessly prevalent that it has lost all of its punch. It is, to use another metaphor, what pornography is to making love.

This could be easily fixed, if the owners of any new team simply built stadiums with dimensions that discouraged the long ball. When my grandfather played the Senators' home was Griffith Stadium, which was notorious for its sheer size (his entire life my grandfather would marvel in remembering the first time he walked into the park?"It was just so huge"). The dimensions of Griffith were 407-421-320. The rightfield fence was topped by a 30-foot wall (Joe Judge, a left-hander, only hit 71 home runs in his career). This is larger than any park around today. Camden Yards measures in at 333-400-318. Safeco Field is 331-405-326. When the Senators won the World Series in 1924 (Gramps hit .385 for the seven games) the team hit one home run at Griffith, and it was inside the park.

In every other sport, whether it be football, basketball or hockey, the game has remained exciting because both offenses and defenses have evolved together; football players on both sides of the line are stronger. In baseball, diets and workout regimens have improved?and the amount of boozing has dropped dramatically?but a main form of defense, the outfield fences, has stayed the same or even shrunk. In 1953 Senators owner Clark Griffith actually installed a fence in left field to cut the distance to a four-bagger down 50 feet. That's like basketball owners lowering the basket.

So, a modest proposal: if the Senators do return, build the biggest ballpark in history. Maybe 500 feet to every fence. Virtually every ball in play. That means doubles, triples, close plays at the plate. Fans would be on their feet instead of reading the paper. This would also help reverse a trend that started as far back as 1920, when player Ray Chapman was killed when a pitch hit him in the side of the head. Overnight "dirty" balls and "freak" pitches were banned; the advantage immediately went to the batter. They eventually lowered the pitcher's mound, and there were also suspicions that a new kind of ball with more spring was used. As a result, hitting skyrocketed: in 1915 there were nine .300 hitters; in 1927 there were 35. Batting averages for 1920 were 30 points higher than in 1915. When Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs in 1919, people were shocked. When he hit 54 in 1920 it was almost beyond imagining. Ruth's 60 is now fourth, behind Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Roger Maris. Ruth's power soon increased attendance, even as it strangled the old game.

The science of bunting and getting base hits slowly died, as did base-stealing. Between 1921 and 1930 there were 13,784 bases stolen?half the number that had been stolen in the previous decade. Writer Ring Lardner expressed his disappointment with the new game. To him the new ball meant ballplayers that "used to specialize in hump back liners to the pitcher is [sic] now among our leading sluggers."

Sure, the fans, who have been dumbed down by decades of spectacle, might revolt. Yankee attendance doubled from 1919 to 1920 as Ruth's rocket blasts doubled. In a sad sense, Ruth was indicative of the loud and vulgar side of American popular culture. "The route to the common man's heart is paved with ribaldry and excess," baseball historian Harold Seymour wrote in reference to Ruth. "What English King was more famous than Henry VIII?" Ruth had kingly appetites, and was, as one reporter wrote, "just a great, big, overgrown boy."

Ruth was the catalyst for baseball as we know it today?a Las Vegas slumber party, with epochs of lifelessness punctuated by the occasional blast from a slugger. What the game needs is what Joe Judge offered: hits, stolen bases, fielding, movement. Gramps tied the American League in fielding seven times (his .993 fielding average was a record for first basemen for 30 years, and he's still tied with Don Mattingly for the American League average), hit safely 2352 times and stole 213 bases. Until 1955 he held the American League record for assists by a first baseman. His lifetime batting average was .298. He was also the model for the character Joe Hardy in Damn Yankees?the book's author Douglass Wallop dated his daughter, my Aunt Dorothy.

Gramps should be in the Hall of Fame, but his dislike of the celebrity era that Ruth ushered in caused him to be blackballed?or at least that's the way I see it. In 1959 he wrote an article for Sports Illustrated titled "Verdict Against the Hall of Fame.'' In it he claims that "the Hall has lost some of its meaning and much of its glory in recent years.'' He slammed players like Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance, who were immortalized for the poetic ring of their double-play combination (Tinker to Evers to Chance), and wrote that "Ballads...do not make base hits.'' (Tinker's lifetime average is .264, Evers' .270.) He pointed to other lousy Hall of Famers' records (catcher Ray Schalk, lifetime .253, and shortstop Rabbit Maranville, who never hit over .300 in a complete season), and blasted players whose behavior superseded their talent: "To be a credit to the game of baseball, a man need not have got off a record number of wisecracks or assembled a record number of feature stories. There are a lot of colorful palookas.''

He went on: "In my day, by the time the infield was finished spitting tobacco juice and licorice and rubbing the ball down with mud, especially on a dark afternoon, that ball would come at you looking like a lump of coal. A great hitter would lay the wood on it regardless of the side it was thrown from or of the stuff on it.

"That same man could steal the base that made the difference. He was fast enough so that the hit-and-run and bunt-and-run were always possible. And when he got back to his position he would come up with the great catch, the great save, the great throw that meant winning instead of losing.

"Today many of the so-called sluggers couldn't steal a base if they were alone in the park. They are not expected to throw too well or run too fast as long as they can belt the ball out of the park when their one moment of usefulness arrives.

"The idea of being a team member sometimes is lost completely, and what we have is an association of specialist businessmen all investing their specific talents and carefully watching their own special interests, upon which they hope to declare a dividend the following year."

This should be posted in the locker room of the new Senators stadium, which they should name after Walter Johnson, my grandfather's teammate and the best pitcher who ever played the game. So bring the Washington Senators back. This city has a long and rich baseball history and we will support them. But also bring back baseball. Five hundred feet to the fences should be our demand. Make the players earn those paychecks by actually playing baseball.