On May 10, 2008, at Nationals Park, a scoring quirk let Nationals’ reliever Joel Hanrahan do what no other pitcher in the history of the American and National leagues has ever done: He was charged with allowing four inherited runners to score. It’s a record that might some day be equaled, but it can’t be broken. Canadian baseball writer Gary Belleville, who uncovered this unheralded record, wrote a detailed account of Hanrahan’s dubious but historic performance for SABR’s Games Project in December 2023. Amazingly, Belleville found no contemporary published account of the game that mentioned th ..read more

Mark Zuckerman has been covering the Nationals since the team came into existence in 2005, first for the Washington Times, then when that paper dropped sports, briefly on his own expense – an amazing and costly level of dedication — before being hired by CSN and then MASN, where he remains and has become a 10-year voting member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. He co-hosts a podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/na Perhaps Zuckerman, now 75 and who remains a day-in, day-out, beat reporter at heart, would not view himself in same league with the Washington Post legends S ..read more

Al Lopez, the longtime catcher and Hall of Fame manager, got his first chance to handle major league pitchers with Clark Griffith’s Washington Senators in 1925. Lopez was just 16 when the defending World Series champs hired him as a batting-practice catcher during spring training in Tampa, where Lopez was born and raised. My 1963 Topps Al Lopez “The Washington Senators were training here and they needed a catcher to catch batting practice,” he told Bill Madden of the New York Daily News in 2004 (reprinted the August 2004 Baseball Digest). “They didn’t want to use (only) their regular catchers ..read more

In the first year in Washington, the Nationals surprisingly were leading the National League East half way through the season. After winning 24 one-run games before the All-Star break, thanks in large part to the work of their All-Star closer, Chad Cordero, the Nats had suddenly experienced a reversal of fortune. In Milwaukee on July 15, the Nats other All-Star, starter Livan Hernandez, carried a 3-2  lead over the Brewers into the eighth before yielding a two-out homer to Carlos Lee, tying it at 3. In the bottom of the10th. Luis Ayala gave up a lead-off double to Chris Magruder, who was ..read more

Veteran slugger Mark Reynolds platooned with Matt Adams at first base for the 2018 Nationals when Ryan Zimmerman was hurt, appearing in 86 games overall and hitting .248 with 13 home runs. On Friday night, July 6, in Washington, Reynolds hit a pinch-hit, walk-off homer, to beat the Miami Marlins, 3-2. The next night, however, he had the game of his career. As the Nats routed the Marlins at Nationals Park, 18-4, Reynolds went 5-for-5 with two homers, a double and a team-record-tying 10 runs batted in. Reynolds put the Nats ahead with a two-run homer in the second inning.  With the score t ..read more

In its first issue of 2024, the venerable Baseball Digest chose Stephen Strasburg’s 2010 debut, at Nationals Park against Pittsburgh, as the greatest first-game performance in MLB history. Clearly, because of the hype surrounding Strasburg’s selection as the first player chosen in the 2009 draft, and his short but dominant two stops in the minors, his debut was easily the most anticipated. For a Nationals team about to suffer through finishing last in the division for the third straight season, it was a sign of better days to come. My 2009 Arelix Top Prospect card of Strasburg pitching for San ..read more

Two men, one an heir and the other an unscrupulous financier, were responsible for Washington losing its two American League baseball teams, 11 years apart. The first was Calvin Griffith. He did what his uncle, Clark Griffith, never considered: moving the original Washington A.L. team to Minnesota. The District then was stuck with an expansion team doomed to failure, finishing no better than eighth out of 10 teams for six straight seasons. Once the predatory Robert E. Short bought the team with borrowed money on a shoe-string after the 1968 season, he spent three seasons bad-mouthing D.C. base ..read more

Anthony Rendon began the afternoon of April 30, 2017, with five runs batted in for the month and had yet to homer in 22 games. He was hitting .226. To call it a slow start would be an understatement for the Nationals’ third baseman, who already had a Silver-Slugger season for Washington in 2014. Noah Syndergaard, the New York Mets’ hard-throwing right-hander, was on the mound that Sunday. After giving up five runs in the first – two driven in by Rendon’s single – Syndergaard sustained a season-ending back injury with one out in the top of the second. He wasn’t around for the worst of the day’s ..read more

Lefty Darold Knowles holds a record that can’t be broken, having appeared in all seven games of the 1973 World Series with the Athletics, but his best years came as the premier reliever for the expansion Senators from 1967 to 1970. Knowles was acquired from the Phillies on November 30, 1966, for fading outfielder Don Lock, 29, in one of Nats’ GM George Selkirk’s best trades. A minor leaguer acquired from the Yankees, Lock had two-and-a-half good seasons for Washington, hitting 27 and then 28 homers in 1963 and ’64, but tailed off badly after that. The pre-Selkirk Senators gave up veteran Dale ..read more

Britain’s King Charles III turned 75 in November 2023, after waiting nearly 74 of those years to take the thrown.  He and I have a couple of things in common. We each saw the Washington Senators play at D.C.’s Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, and we were born days apart on the same island nation. Unlike me, Prince Charles sat in a field level, front-row, box seat when visited RFK on July 20, 1970, the first and only time he attended a major league game. He did so in his first visit to America at the behest of David Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower’s son. who was interning with the Senator ..read more