We've suffered some of the same treacherous ownership that the Expos had. I sympathize, and the New New Nats should embrace the Montreal history. Not that I think that this team is the extension of the Expos, or that Washington's baseball history began in 2005.
So: the last Washington RoY was Bob Allison, 1959, slugging CF. I remember Andre Dawson, but had not attachment to him.
Randomly on team records: the expansion Senators were treated as having been founded in 1901; records transferred over. We fans did not feel that way, having suffered through the sell-off and reconstruction of the Nats in the '50s. The Griffith family had no outside money, did not build a farm system, looked back to the 1950 census to convince themselves that Washington was the smallest city in the AL. Just as Killebrew returned from the minors, as Allison emerged, as they acquired Earl Battey, as Pascual, Ramos, Jim Kaat, Don Mincher, and Zorro Versalles lifted the team, Griffith went off to Minneapolis.
We remember that Bob Wolff introduced the team as "your Washington Nationals" for every broadcast...people (and Topps baseball cards) called them the Senators or Nationals, but we also called them the Nats.
Washington has had a professional baseball team called the Nationals since about 1870. Several incarnations of the NL Nats came and went, but they were still the Washington Nationals.
Walter Johnson is our player, our member of the first HoF class. Sam Rice and Bucky Harris, Joe Judge and Goose Goslin are our players. So was Cecil Travis and Roy Sievers and Mickey Vernon.
There are people on WNFF who saw the expansion Senators, who cheered Frank Howard and Mike Epstein, and who went to the 20th anniversary of the 1969 team, the Nasty Nats. Some of us grew up watching Mickey Vernon and Pete Runnels, Roy Sievers and Eddie Yost. Washington baseball.
The New New Nats started off just like a typical Washing5ton team, with lots of soul-cutting losses. The town wasn't meant for instant winners. For all the pain, for all the contempt outsiders poured on our Nats, it is so much better now that they are winning.
