A time for satisfaction and sadness

So it has happened.

Finally.

Baseball in Washington … and how are we to react?

There is satisfaction, of course, but also sadness. For those of us old enough to remember when Bob Short’s Senators skedaddled off to Texas 33 years ago today, we mourn the loss of all those summers without a ballclub to call our own. We’ll never get those back. Never.

Some of us who were young then have entered our golden years. Some have defected to the Baltimore Orioles, or perhaps to the team that introduced them to the game as children. Some have boycotted baseball.

Some have died.

For decades, I wondered why I didn’t rend my garments and gnash my teeth when the Senators fled. Much later, I remembered: The team had been so bad and carpet-bagging owner Bob Short so venal that I just didn’t care anymore. Let them go — good riddance. We’ll have another team in a year or two anyway.

Won’t we?

Starting in 1949, when I hid a portable radio under my pillow so my parents wouldn’t hear me listening to games from the “West” (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis) that started at 9 our time, the Senators were my mini-heroes.

I knew they weren’t going to win a pennant — they had a better chance of flapping their collective wings and flying to the moon. But maybe, just maybe, they could approach the .500 mark and/or what was then called the First Division.

(Don’t hold your breath, kid.)

The first taste of horsehide reality came early. After starting the ‘49 season 2-11, the Senators went wild in the West. While world affairs waited respectfully, the Nats — the team nicknames were pretty much interchangeable — won nine in a row.

Nine in a row!

They came home to a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue — honest! — at which giddy fans carried signs proclaiming, “We’ll win plenty with Sam Dente,” “We’ll go far with Al Kozar” and “Eddie Yost is the most.”

Inexplicably (at least to me), those Senators finished last with a 50-104 record. Upon being invited to seek other employment at season’s end, manager Joe Kuhel lost his cool and proclaimed for the sporting ages, “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken feathers.” At least, that’s what the papers said he said.

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