Was Zimmerman’s home run really worth celebrating?
Nationals’ history still has a Montreal connection, but there’s the Senators, too
On Monday, Washington Nationals player Ryan Zimmerman hit a solo home run in the first inning in Cincinnati that was the 235th of his career.
Depending on your vantage point, it was historic or trivial, momentous or meaningless. That blast gave Zimmerman one more home run than Vladimir Guerrero hit over his career with the Montreal Expos.
Wait. Montreal? Again? Man, baseball’s been back in Washington for a dozen years. Can’t the Nationals sever themselves from their history — for once and forever?
Let’s ignore that debate for a moment. We know Frank Howard hit 382 homers over the course of his career and 237 of them came with the Washington Senators. So, then, can we celebrate with Zimmerman when he cranks three more and becomes the District’s dinger leader?
“I don’t pay much attention to that,” Howard said by phone.
But what are baseball fans in Washington supposed to pay attention to?
“I like when history is messy,” said John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian. “It’s fun.”
This isn’t the first time the team has wrestled with these issues. In 2006, Alfonso Soriano smashed 46 homers in his lone season as a National, two more than Guerrero ever hit in a single season as an Expo, meaning Soriano took over the single-season record for the franchise.
Yet what did that matter, when Howard, the massive 6-foot-7 “Capital Punisher,” hit 48 homers for the Senators in 1969?
“You know something?” Howard said. “That ball club has created its own identity and it should. The older players have had their day.”
This coming from one of three players whose statues line the walkway leading up to the home plate gate at Nationals Park — three players from three different franchises: Walter Johnson from the old Senators, Howard from the expansion version, and Josh Gibson from the Homestead Grays. Talk about messy. A quick refresher: Since the dawn of the 20th century, Washington has been home to three separate major league franchises: the Senators (also called the Nats), who played in the American League from 1901 to 1960 before moving to Minnesota; the expansion Senators, who replaced them immediately in 1960 and lasted until 1971 before they moved to Texas; and the Nationals, who were born as the Expos in Montreal in 1969 before relocating here for the 2005 season.
And don’t forget the Grays, of course, the Negro League team Washington shared with Pittsburgh throughout the 1940s.
Now that the Nationals have been around for a bit — this is their 13th season — players such as Zimmerman are finally in the mix for career achievements. So what’s the right way to handle this? Zimmerman should be celebrated for overtaking Guerrero, who never played in Washington? Or Zimmerman should be celebrated for overtaking Howard, who never played for this franchise?
“Clubs will do peculiar things,” Thorn said. “I think MLB’s stance is: Wouldn’t it be great if everybody was on the same page? But you don’t want to have a Politburo situation where the ruling comes down from Park Avenue. We can allow a little wiggle room on this.”
The situation applies to many franchises — the Baltimore Orioles were once the St. Louis Browns, the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta — and Thorn can even cite examples dating from the 19th century. The Cincinnati Reds sometimes celebrate ties to the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, generally regarded as the first all-professional baseball team. But the link isn’t linear, because those Red Stockings didn’t directly become the franchise that exists as the Reds now.
“Somebody like me, who knows that it’s not quite true, I don’t exactly hold my nose,” Thorn said, “but I do withhold some judgment here because I think history ought to be fun.”
To be fun, it has to be malleable. Take the Minnesota Twins, the first version of the ex-Senators. In their media guide, they recognize Harmon Killebrew as their all-time leader in home runs. “Which is correct,” Thorn said. But they list him with 475, the number he hit for Minnesota, and ignore the 84 he hit with the same franchise when it happened to be in Washington, known as the Senators. “Which is incorrect,” Thorn said. By the book, at least. Likewise, take the Texas Rangers. The team that bolted Washington in 1971 lists in its media guide a section called, “The Rangers Before Texas,” where it acknowledges Howard’s 237 home runs in Washington, but not the nine he hit for the Rangers in 1972. Juan Gonzalez, according to the Rangers, is the franchise’s career home run leader with 372, followed by Rafael Palmeiro with 321, followed by Ivan Rodriguez with 217 — with no mention of the 246 Howard tallied for the franchise, albeit split between Washington and Texas.
Wait, did we mention Rodriguez? The great catcher is going into the Hall of Fame later this month and while nobody’s suggesting he should be inducted as a National, he will be the first player to wear a Nationals jersey to be enshrined in Cooperstown. One of Rodriguez’s classmates will be outfielder Tim Raines, the old Montreal Expo — which brings us to maybe the most contentious part of this whole morass.
At Nationals Park, the home team established a “Ring of Honor,” which marks baseball history in the District. There are old Senators (Johnson, Killebrew, Howard, Sam Rice, Goose Goslin, Joe Cronin, etc.), old Grays (Gibson, Cumberland Posey, Cool Papa Bell, etc.), old Nationals (Frank Robinson, the team’s first manager) and … old Expos?
Yes, even as the Twins blow off Walter Johnson and the Rangers blow off Frank Howard, the Nationals honour Andre Dawson and Gary Carter, two Hall of Fame Expos. Logic would follow that Raines has to go in at some point — even as the Nationals’ own history is deepening, and even as Washington puts Montreal further in its rearview.
“Washington can’t exactly bury their direct relationship to the Expos, because MLB and all of the encyclopedias will record a club history, a franchise history, and all the individual records, including the Expos,” Thorn said.
Look, I hope baseball comes back to Montreal. I really do. I have enormous respect for the tradition there — Jackie Robinson and Rusty Staub and Pedro Martinez and all the rest.
But this is a civic thing, isn’t it? Washingtonians care about what happened in Washington and for Washington. The 1924 World Series title, which none of us saw, somehow means more than the extraordinary 1994 Expos team, robbed of a chance at glory because of the strike. Sports are about attachment and emotion. Bringing Montreal’s records to Washington seems like some measure of bookkeeping.
So forgive us for dismissing Zimmerman’s home run that topped Guerrero.
Now, on to Howard. Most home runs in a city’s history sounds like an important stat. Of all the members of the expansion Senators, who posted a winning record just once in their 11 seasons, Howard has to be the most beloved. Those seats painted white in the upper deck of RFK Stadium, they were to mark Howard blasts.
Until Zimmerman came along. He was the one who became “Mr. Walk-off” in the old yard. He is the only current Nat to have played here in the year baseball returned. If we’re going to have a history here — not a Montreal history, but a Washington history — he is the perfect person to make it.
Give it the weekend, or into next week or through August. Ryan Zimmerman will get that home run record. And then we’ll have a tiny bit of clarity in a foggy situation, because one man will have more homers than anyone in franchise, or city, history.