Too many ghosts on RFK grounds

A word or three to the wise about Mayor Anthony Williams’ plan that the D.C. government fully fund a $340million baseball park on the grounds of RFK Stadium:

It won’t happen.

And even if it should — by dint of Hizzoner pulling off the greatest political feat hereabouts since Marion Barry was a rookie — it wouldn’t matter.

How often is it necessary to reiterate what all of us should know by now? Major League Baseball, in all its faded glory, has no intention of restoring the horsehide rights stolen from us by Bob Short, drat his memory, 33 agonizing years ago.

It doesn’t matter if the mayor somehow gets a stadium built in the shadow of the D.C. Armory and the D.C. Jail. Heck, it probably wouldn’t matter if he tore down the Capitol or the White House and erected a ballpark on the premises.

MLB — shouldn’t those letters stand for Major League Bozos? — still would thumb its corporate nose in our direction and summon up the names of more Norfolks, Portlands, Monterreys and San Juans for “consideration.”

There is no need to repeat how unfair, stupid and shortsighted this approach is — we’ve been there and done that. But the point here is to suggest that RFK and environs would be a terrible location to offer up as our (apologies to Regis Philbin) final answer.

I was there at its birth — when the lettering outside read “District of Columbia Stadium” and the Redskins played the New York Giants on Sept.30, 1961. How long ago was that? Well, Roger Maris hit his 61st home run of the season the same day at Yankee Stadium, and at the time we thought that was about the biggest thing ever in sports.

The following April, a journeyman pitcher named Bennie Daniels beat the Detroit Tigers in the first baseball game on East Capitol Street, inaugurating a baseball history at the place most remembered for a lot of long home runs by Frank Howard, a lot more losses, a one-year serving of managerial magic by Ted Williams and a forfeited final game in September 1971 that sent the expansion Senators skedaddling off to Texas and began the sad saga of a nation’s capital without the national pastime.

Never in the expansion club’s 11 seasons did more than 918,106 paying customers turn up at DC/RFK Stadium, a relatively low high-water mark achieved in 1969 as Teddy Ballgame coaxed nearly every position player on his team to bat 20 or 30 points higher and the Senators illogically improved from 65-96 to 86-76. (In fact, the original Senators topped 1million only once in 60 seasons, attracting 1,027,216 with a fourth-place outfit in 1946 during the postwar baseball boom.)

From the moment D.C. Stadium opened its turnstiles and the Redskins blew a 21-7 first-quarter lead against the Giants, its location was wrong. Maybe it was safe enough on a Sunday afternoon with 55,000 in the stands for a football game, but the idea of watching a night baseball game with 5,000 or 6,000 on hand was daunting to many. Then and now, the place is fairly isolated and not in the sort of neighborhood reassuring to suburbanites.

The other proposed sites for a D.C. ballpark — M Street SE, Benjamin Banneker Park SW and New York Avenue NE — would seem more likely to encourage the kind of neighborhood rebirth prompted by new downtown stadiums in many cities, such as Baltimore. We’ve seen the same happen around MCI Center in Northwest. But RFK’s location makes it very unlikely that restaurants, hotels and shops would arise near what probably would be known as Williams Stadium, at least until some company thrust a million or billion dollars into the city’s hands for naming rights.

Problem is, the other proposed sites would involve so many thorny issues involving land acquisition, transportation infrastructure and other costs that any baseball ownership group would have to bear much of the burden. The land near RFK is pretty much there for the taking since the city leases it from the National Park Service and there are few other structures that would need to be torn down.

Yet the idea of another facility there does not warm the cockles of anyone’s heart, except perhaps that of Tony Williams.

And looking at the situation from a fairly objective view, does the District really need a baseball park when you consider what else the city government’s $340million could buy? Sure, it’s pathetic that we don’t have a team of our own — but is that more important than the schools, libraries, housing and medical clinics that the money might bring to the city’s needier citizens?

After all, baseball — and any other sport — is only a game. When news of the mayor’s stadium plan broke last week in The Washington Times, the general reaction among uninformed members of the city council seemed to be, in a word, huh?

Even if we ascribe only the purest (read: nonpolitical) motives to Mayor Williams, his idea seems a bit screwy. We’d advise him to rethink his proposal — except that probably wouldn’t matter either. Any reasonable notion of baseball hereabouts surely is going, going, gone.